Police Against the Movement

“A vital retelling of the history of the Civil Rights Movement… . Police Against the Movement is a clarifying, necessary account of how long the police have fought the movement, and why equality and freedom are not possible until they are defeated.”—Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us
“Police Against the Movement deftly shows how police departments neutralize movement demands and make even mandated changes work in their favor.”—Piper French, The New Republic
”[Davis] broadly examines local law enforcement efforts against civil rights activists across the country during the 1960s… . Recommended.” * Choice *
“It’s a vital corrective to the idea that anti-racist activists, then or now, are fighting in a vacuum.” * Publishers Weekly *
“Police Against the Movement is a stark and horrifying look at the range of police abuses and the ways dissent continues to be suppressed. It’s an important book.”—Eleanor J. Bader, The Progressive
“Great… for understanding the rise of policing and the communities that have spent decades resisting police violence. In mainstream media, movements to reform or defund the police are cast as new age responses to contemporary issues, but… Davis… dispel[s] that myth, demonstrating that there has been a tense debate around policing since Reconstruction.”—Bry Reed, Baltimore Beat
“By bringing together scattered records and long-silenced histories, Davis positions systematic police repression as not merely a byproduct of racism but as a core political technology of anti-Black state power in the twentieth century. … Police Against the Movement accomplishes something profound: it restores to view the full architecture of repression that sought to crush the Civil Rights Movement and silence those who dared to expose the police. It also challenges any portrayal of police as unwitting victims just ‘following orders’ of corrupt governments… . In resurrecting the obscured histories of those who fought back, Davis compels us to confront the continuity between past and present, between the red squads of the 1950s and the biometric data-hungry policing of today, between the state’s destruction of archives and the current censorship of public history. His book also challenges us to decide how, and whether, these truths will be remembered.”—Bethany Jo Murray, Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work

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.

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