Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back

Politics and Society in Modern America

De: Joshua Clark Davis

Narrado por: Victor Warren

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.

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.

©2025 Joshua Clark Davis (P)2025 Tantor Media

Informative

The conclusion to assemble a truth and reconciliation commission regarding the role of police organizations in obstructing democracy is striking.

Necessary Reading

With this book, we can now understand that government resistant to civil rights movements, leaders, and activists is not random, sporadic or happenstance. It’s carved into the very fabric of America.