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

Feb 10, 2026

Joshua Clark Davis, associate professor of history who studies postwar U.S. social movements and policing, discusses how local police actively sabotaged civil rights activism. He highlights nonphysical tactics like surveillance, infiltration, legal and economic harassment. The conversation draws parallels to modern protest repression and the erasure of police misconduct from public memory.

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INSIGHT

Local Police Were Key Repressors

Local police, not just the FBI, conducted extensive surveillance and repression against activists.
Joshua Clark Davis argues this local focus reshapes the civil rights repression narrative.

INSIGHT

Slow Violence Undermines Movements

Slow violence includes surveillance, defamation, bogus indictments, and economic harms that weaken movements over time.
Davis stresses these forms are often invisible but as damaging as physical brutality.

INSIGHT

Red Squads Operated Nationwide

By the 1940s many cities had Red Squads focused on political intelligence and anti-radical work.
These local units outnumbered FBI political agents and operated closer to communities.

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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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