From confidential Washington sources, the following excerpt is drawn from an account of the aftermath of the March 17 seizure and closing of the U. S. Institute of Peace, by armed agents of the DOGE administration. The account has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Brief Encounter at 2301
Mid-March, 2025, on the edge of the National Mall, not far from the Vietnam War Memorials.
It was almost break time, the leftover dinner pizza was hours cold, and Hennigan thought he heard something.
Standing up from the desk chair, he closed the Security Inc. employee handbook, which was making him drowsy anyway, and peered across the open atrium: first left, then right, following the protocol.
Everything seemed in order: several tiers of closed offices rose or each side. Lights were dim. Nothing moving.
2025 is becoming a crucible year for trans people and those who would be their allies: the Pete Hegseth-Trump Defense Department is after them; Iowa’s legislature just deleted them from its anti-discrimination statutes; other states may follow. And don’t even get me started on the Supreme Court.
But this post is not aiming for a comprehensive summary of ongoing transphobic crusades. Instead, I want to retrace my search for what’s at the root of the support for them. I have some idea of the politics, and a few of the major personalities; but what’s the nub, the “bottom line”?
It isn’t the “science” cited on behalf of anti-trans laws — much of it a curdled combination of cant and charlatanry. Or the panic over predators stalking “little girls” in public restrooms, which is almost all trumped up, and such assaults have long been illegal anyway.
Then there’s the huge public panic over a vanishingly few trans women competing (and not always) winning in girls’ sports. From all this and more we already know the cultural right has big issues over a gender binary (and male dominance), and that riling up its base about sex reliably works to boost its voter turnout.
Marchers re-enacting in 2005 the first crossing of the Pettus Bridge 40 years earlier.
Below is a black & white news photo from late February, 1965. It turned up a few years back (hat tip to the sharp-eyed Lewis Lewis): it was taken on the steps of Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama when John Lewis (center-left, with a tie) announced the plan to march from Selma to Montgomery.
The goal of the march was winning voting rights for southern Blacks, after three generations of formal disfranchisement; but the plan was sparked by the police killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson. I’m at the far right, behind Andrew Young (who is also in a tie).
I had been in Selma since the beginning of the year, and the active phase of the campaign, as a rookie member of Dr. King’s staff. I had marched often, served some days in jail, and was learning a lot very fast.
That was then.
Forty-three years later, one sunny day in April 2018, I woke up again in Selma Alabama, once more prepared to go to jail.
This past First Day (Quaker talk for Sunday) I Zoomed into worship in my Friends meeting, the one out in the farmland of Flyover County, North By-God Carolina, where I missed one of my favorite annual scenes there: the appearance in the back 40 of a big unruly spread of wild daffodils. But I did hear a stirring message.
In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thought.
There is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.
But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”
“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.
“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”
Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.
“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.
He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”
Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.
“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’
“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”
In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.
“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”
Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.
“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.
“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”
State troopers break up a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, on 7 March 1965. John Lewis, chairman of the SNCC, is seen in the foreground, being beaten.Photograph: unknown/AP
In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.
“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”
Ricks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.
“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”
In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.
The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.
Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.
Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.
To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”
But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’
Dr Martin Luther King Jr speaks in Selma in February 1965, after his release from jail, supported by his aides including the Rev Fred Shuttlesworth, left.Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”
Waging a Good Waralso considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’
“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”
“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.
“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.
“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thought.
