Police Against the Movement
The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back
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- USD 19.99
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- USD 19.99
Descripción editorial
A bold retelling of the 1960s civil rights struggle through its work against police violence—and a prehistory of both the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements that emerged half a century later
Police Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that 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.
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This kaleidoscopic account from historian Davis (From Head Shops to Whole Foods) looks at how local "police provocateurs" and federal intelligence agencies manipulated and harassed the civil rights movements of the 1960s and '70s from both within and without. Drawing on testimonies uncovered during the 1975 congressional Church Committee hearings, at which many covert ops against the "Black freedom and antiwar movements" were "unmasked" to the American public, Davis considers how local acts of sabotage (like the NYPD's use of undercover spies) and open violence (like Birmingham's "red squads") worked in lockstep with more cohesive federal efforts to discredit groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and hasten the end of the civil rights movement. The result is a convincing, shrewdly structured case that there isn't as much sunlight between the undercover FBI agent and the brutalizing riot cop as many Americans would like to think. Particularly deft is how Davis traces the ethos of "political policing" that motivated J. Edgar Hoover's infamous COINTELPRO program back to anti-anarchist efforts in the 1900s. Davis also pays keen attention to how activists fought back, astutely arguing that civil rights groups' responses to political policing laid a foundation for today's Black Lives Matter movement. It's a vital corrective to the idea that anti-racist activists, then or now, are fighting in a vacuum.
