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

by Joshua Clark Davis

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 1960 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 traffic to bring attention to officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of pervasive 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 both the North and South, 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 violence is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression against the movement. By returning activism against police abuses to the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement undoes decades of historical erasure surrounding the struggle against state violence that continues to this day.

Genres: History, Politics, Race, Nonfiction

432 pages, Hardcover

Published October 7, 2025

Reviews

[Walter Victor · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the Red Scare the civil movements started to prevail in the 50s. This meant law enforcement had a new sect of activists to target and actively suppress. As the sits in, freedom rides, and protests for equality continued, the police did everything in their power to slow down the civil rights movement. What’s more concerning was their covert operations into organizations such as SNCC, CORE, SCLC etc by using black men as informers. These men became friends of organizers just to spy and get as much information as they could to use it against the organizations in tandem with the police. The informers got so close that there was one on scene attempting to resuscitate MLK after he’d been shot in Memphis. Another informer had become Malcolm X’s body guard and was on site front row when he was shot down at the Audubon Ballroom. It’s chilling to know how close someone could get and be disingenuous with their intentions. It also goes to show how far the police would go in terms of covert sabotage, and in some cases taking responsibility for their actions and in other cases not. Too many times did I have to pause while reading and take a beat after reading an activist was beaten unconscious, or worse murdered in cold blood. Their targets knew no bounds whether it was a young man, woman, the elderly or a woman who was pregnant. Harassment of black people hasn’t really stopped being commonplace so it’s obvious it was worse than we can even assume in the 60s. The protests against segregation, job discrimination and police brutality were warranted but the police liked to act as if these were false accusations of a nation that had no issues. The brutality increased, which led to the creation of organizations such The Deacons of Defense from Louisiana and The Black Panthers from Oakland. Their reason for carrying arms wasn’t used for offensive warfare but more so for defensive protection. This had to be the case since law enforcement perpetuated violence against activists, black and white, time and time again. As the years have gone on the surveillance state we live in constantly has only increased. And the prospect of being arrested and harassed as well as relentlessly stalked can curb one’s activism. But as surveillance of the average civilian increases, so does surveillance of law enforcement. And as the backwards virality of death caught on cam continues to surge the question of ‘How much worse can it get?’ remains.

[Jon Tillotson · Rating 5 out of 5]

6 Stars for this book.

I don't know where to start in recommending this book and how much shocking history that at least I was unaware of and that seems to be elided from the dominanant narrative of the Civil Rights Movement. Police departments all over the United States - Birgminham, Philadeplphia, Houston, NYC, Los Angeles, and many more - viewed themselves as "mini-FBIs' charged with infiltrating, spying on, and in many cases entrapping organizers and protestors against police violence and repression.

Some items I wasn't aware of and this is just the tip of the iceberg for interesting history in this book:

- The person kneeling over MLK, Jr. in the famous Joseph Louw photograph of the moment after the assassination was a Memphis Police Department spy, Marrell "Mac" McCollough, who infiltrated the Invaders, the SCLC and the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike that brought King to Memphis.
- The Houston Police Department stormed the campus of TCU in March 1967 with over 1000 officers and arrested 500 students after a large shootout that left one police officer dead (likely by other police fire). They then tried to pin the death of the officer on 3 organizers using the felony murder rule, but would not reveal the results of the ballistics test.
- NYC spied on civil rights organizers and protesters with their Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) and in one case their spy Raymond Wood infiltrated the local chapter of the SLCC and entrapped members with a plot fo blow of up various monuments (Statue of Liberty, etc.) with dynamite.
- A 21-year old John Lewis was told to remove remarks about police violence and repression from his speech at the March on Washington, for fear they would prove too incendiary.

So many heroes in this history but how was I unware of Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, AL, who co-founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), was a key organizer of the Freedom Rides, and even after his home was bombed continued to speak out against police violence.

I could go on and on. Highly recommend this book and it should serve as a warning as states and localities in the US seek to criminilize protests and free speech again.

[Lexzander Ernst · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a heavy read, but an important one.

Police Against the Movement effectively combats the misconception that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting back against it and brings to light the involvement of local police departments in the sabotage of the civil rights struggle. In this book, Davis brings attention to the direct action tactics utilized by activists involved with CORE and SNCC in response to repressive political policing, as well as the overwhelming violence these activists faced at the hands of law enforcement.

[Jarrel Oliveira · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is what we mean when we (collective body of ethical citizens) say abolish the police!