Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Oct 28, 2025

Joshua Clark Davis, an Associate Professor of U.S. history, explores the overlooked resistance of civil rights activists to police violence in his new book. He reveals how groups like CORE and SNCC fought back against surveillance and repression, illustrating their struggles through personal stories. Davis expands the concept of police violence to include economic and legal tactics that aimed to undermine movements. He also sheds light on local police strategies, such as red squads, and the impact of infiltrators on the civil rights struggle.

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INSIGHT

Movement Actively Fought Police Violence

The civil rights movement actively fought police violence, contradicting media claims that it merely endured brutality.
CORE and SNCC led organized protests against police malpractice beyond physical abuse, reshaping movement strategy.

INSIGHT

Police Harm Was Broader And Slower

Activists characterized police harm as more than beatings, coining terms like "police malpractice."
The idea of "slow violence" captures surveillance, infiltration, and legal attacks that eroded movements over time.

INSIGHT

Local Red Squads Were Central Actors

Local police red squads often outnumbered and outpaced FBI political intelligence efforts.
Municipal units executed close, sustained surveillance and infiltration that federal accounts alone obscure.

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Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: thast the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing outside department headquarters, and blocking city streets to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of police surveillance, infiltration by undercover officers, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at discrediting and derailing their movement.

The history of the civil rights era abounds with accounts of physical brutality by county sheriffs and tales of political intrigue and constitutional violations by FBI agents. Turning our attention to municipal officials in cities and towns across the US—North, South, East, and West—Davis reveals how local police bombarded civil rights organizers with an array of insidious weapons. More than just physical violence, these economic, legal, and reputational attacks were designed to project the illusion of color-blind law enforcement.

The civil rights struggle against police abuses is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression. By placing activism against state violence at the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement offers critical insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest.

Guest: Joshua Clark Davis Blackmer (he/him) is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Baltimore. Davis is also the author of an earlier book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, which examines organic food stores, feminist enterprises, Black bookstores and other businesses that emerged from movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. His research has earned awards from the Fulbright Program, the Silvers Foundation, and the NEH Public Scholars Program, and he has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Washington Post, and that work has been featured in The New York Times and CNN among other venues.

Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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