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

Feb 11, 2026

Joshua Clark Davis, an associate professor who studies postwar U.S. history and social movements, describes how local police actively sabotaged civil rights organizing. He explores red squads, undercover infiltration, legal and economic attacks, and the deliberate erasure of records. The conversation links these historical tactics to modern surveillance and repression of protesters.

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INSIGHT

Slow Violence Matters

Slow violence frames nonphysical harms like surveillance, false prosecutions, and job loss as forms of state violence.
Joshua Clark Davis argues these harms quietly intimidated and disabled civil rights activism over time.

INSIGHT

Local Red Squads Were Central

Local Red Squads outnumbered FBI political-intelligence agents and operated closer to communities.
Davis shows local police often led surveillance, infiltration, and repression more than federal agencies.

INSIGHT

Civil Rights Was Nationwide

The civil rights movement was national, not solely Southern, and Northern cities deployed large Red Squads too.
Davis argues treating the movement as regional obscures widespread municipal repression.

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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: 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.

Joshua Clark Davis is associate professor of history at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods and the coeditor of Baltimore Revisited, and he has written for The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Atlantic.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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