POLICE AGAINST THE MOVEMENT:
THE SABOTAGE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE
AND THE ACTIVISTS WHO FOUGHT BACK

NYPD surveillance photograph of a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) protest against police brutality, 1964
(courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives)

Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (under contract with Princeton University Press) retells the civil rights movement through its overlooked work against police violence—and the police who attacked the movement with surveillance, defamation, and retaliatory prosecutions. Dominant narratives of the civil rights struggle and law enforcement fixate on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and unrepentant segregationists like Birmingham’s Bull Connor. But we have to scrutinize more sophisticated attempts by local police in the purportedly progressive cities of the North and urban New South to undermine the movement in the 1960s, as they declared a “color blind” pursuit of “law and order,” if we wish to truly grasp the roots of law enforcement’s hostility for racial justice movements today.

Three questions lie at the heart of Police Against the Movement. First, how did local police across the United States treat and mistreat the civil rights movement? Second, how did civil rights activists use pickets, marches, and defense campaigns to combat police repression? Third, how did police efforts to discredit these activists as dangerous extremists and weaponize racist backlash help forestall the emergence of a nationwide movement against police violence until the 2010s? If we want to understand why and how racial discrimination and an obsession with draconian punishment continue to define our criminal justice system, there is hardly a better place to look than the conflict between police and the civil rights movement of the ‘60s.

Police Against the Movement will be published by Princeton University Press in 2025.