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

This kaleidoscopic account from historian Davis (From Head Shops to Whole Foods) looks at how local “police provocateurs” and federal intelligence agencies manipulated and harassed the civil rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s from both within and without. Drawing on testimonies uncovered during the 1975 congressional Church Committee hearings, at which many covert ops against the “Black freedom and antiwar movements” were “unmasked” to the American public, Davis considers how local acts of sabotage (like the NYPD’s use of undercover spies) and open violence (like Birmingham’s “red squads”) worked in lockstep with more cohesive federal efforts to discredit groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and hasten the end of the civil rights movement. The result is a convincing, shrewdly structured case that there isn’t as much sunlight between the undercover FBI agent and the brutalizing riot cop as many Americans would like to think. Particularly deft is how Davis traces the ethos of “political policing” that motivated J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO program back to anti-anarchist efforts in the 1900s. Davis also pays keen attention to how activists fought back, astutely arguing that civil rights groups’ responses to political policing laid a foundation for today’s Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a vital corrective to the idea that anti-racist activists, then or now, are fighting in a vacuum. (Oct.)