Conventional wisdom holds that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and early 60s neglected the question of police violence, only to be remedied by the Black Panther Party and decades later by the Movement for Black Lives. But historian Joshua Clark Davis argues that that assumption is inaccurate. He also discusses the extensive involvement of local police departments, above and beyond the FBI’s COINTELPRO, in disrupting and repressing the Civil Rights movement.

Joshua Clark Davis, Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back Princeton University Press, 2025

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