Joshua Clark Davis, an associate professor of history at the University of Baltimore, wrote Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back to contest two pervasive myths. The first is that the civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s continually turned the other cheek and rarely, if ever, fought back against police violence or the arbitrary exertion of state power. The second is that law enforcement’s use of brutal violence against peaceful protesters—using fire hoses, billy clubs, and dogs—was commonplace.
Both, he writes, are fallacies, and Police Against the Movement tracks the ways local police agencies as well as the FBI have instead long utilized covert surveillance, undercover infiltration, and retaliatory prosecutions.
“Police retaliated against Black communities who criticized them,” Davis writes, “especially when they did so in alliance with multiracial leftwing groups.” The conflation of radicalism and criminality by police agencies and rightwing legislators led to the Smith Act of 1940, a broad ban on “subversive activity” that cost many progressives their careers.
Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back
By Joshua Clark Davis
Princeton University Press, 432 pages
Publication date: October 7, 2025
But while some people cowered in response, others resisted—writing articles in opposition to the act, organizing street protests, and filing lawsuits.
Davis considers the public denunciation of ongoing police misconduct particularly effective.
Specifically, he highlights “We Charge Genocide,” a report published by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a legal defense group formed in 1946, that captured widespread attention for documenting the onslaught of trumped-up charges against Black activists. Davis calls the exposé “a meticulous, and gruesome, accounting of hundreds and hundreds of acts of state violence against Black Americans.”
The U.S. government was incensed by the publication, and a campaign of selective harassment against the CRC quickly unfolded. Group leader William Patterson had his passport revoked; he later served a three-month jail sentence for refusing to tell Congress who was bankrolling the organization’s work.
By 1956, backlash from pro-police organizations and lawmakers was so intense that the CRC was forced to disband.
The groundwork had been laid for continued resistance to government repression, and as the civil rights movement picked up speed in the 1960s, law-and-order proponents ramped up their surveillance.
As is now well known, informants did more than report on what was happening, and Davis notes that staff of both the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and local police agencies often entrapped activists into participating in violent or illegal activities. They also tapped phones and set people up for retaliatory prosecutions.
Princeton University Press
Davis’s exhaustive research also provides evidence of widespread collusion between law enforcement and white supremacist groups, a shameful reality that led some civil rights activists to arm themselves. Groups like Deacons for Defense and Justice, formed in 1964, advocated for “self-defense against white violence, state-sponsored or otherwise,” Davis writes. The Deacons influenced Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP) in 1966. The BPP demands were Black power and an end to police brutality.
Predictably, as the BPP ascended, police infiltration of the movement became even more widespread. Davis notes that increased Black militance triggered “the ire of police and federal law enforcement.” Repression escalated.
For the most part, this has continued ever since. Davis reports that “since 2017, at least twenty-one states have criminalized various aspects of peaceful protest. Florida and North Carolina now consider some nonviolent blocking of streets as rioting, and South Dakota and Arkansas have increased civil liability for protesters and organizers. Oklahoma has gone as far as enacting anti-racketeering statutes against acts of so-called unlawful assembly.”
These new policies challenge another pervasive myth—that of equal justice for all. Police Against the Movement is a stark and horrifying look at a range of police abuses and the ways dissent continues to be suppressed. It’s an important book.