Joshua Clark Davis in conversation with Daphne Muse

Joshua Clark Davis in conversation with Daphne Muse

City Lights and Princeton University Press celebrate the publication of

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

By Joshua Clark Davis

Published by Princeton University Press

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 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 city streets to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of 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 cities and towns across the US—North, South, East, and West—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 abuses is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression. By placing activism against state violence at the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement offers critical insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest.

Joshua Clark Davis is associate professor of history at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods and the coeditor of Baltimore Revisited, and he has written for The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Atlantic.

Daphne Muse is a veteran activist who has organized with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Drum and Spear Bookstore, and the 504 sit-in for disability rights. She was the Secretary for the Legal Defense Team for Angela Davis, and she is a cultural broker who has worked closely with Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rose Parks, among others. Daphne has also served as the Elder-in-Residence in Abolitionist Democracy in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Author of four books, her social commentaries and articles have been published in The Atlantic, The Black Scholar, Mothering Magazine, and aired on public radio. In 2023, she launched Old School + New School = Mo’Betta School, an intergenerational initiative to bridge generations. Daphne's home is the Oasis in the Diaspora in Brentwood, California.

This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.