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

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 laterPolice Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: 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 protest 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 b