This event is in partnership with Free DC.
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 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 by county sheriffs and tales of political intrigue and constitutional violations by FBI agents. Turning our attention to municipal officials in both the North and South, 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 insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest.
Josh Davis is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Baltimore. He's the author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods, an exploration of Black booksellers, natural food stores, feminist enterprises, and other businesses that emerged from movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. He's also the co-editor along with Nicole King and Kate Drabinski of Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Resistance and Inequality in a U.S. City. His research has earned awards from the Fulbright Program, the Silvers Foundation, and the NEH Public Scholars Program. Josh has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Washington Post.
Davis will be in conversation with Judy Richardson. Richardson served on SNCC's staff in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama (1963–66). Her experiences in SNCC continue to ground both her film and education work. In 1968, she co-founded Drum & Spear Bookstore in Washington, D.C., once the country’s largest African American Bookstore. Later, she was on the production team for all 14 hours of the seminal PBS series, Eyes on the Prize, as its series associate producer, then its education director. With Northern Light Productions she continued to produce documentaries: for PBS, the History Channel, and museums. Along with Betty Robinson and a series of women veterans of SNCC, Judy also co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, a compilation of the testimonies of 53 SNCC women. She is a member of the SNCC Legacy Project board, was a Visiting Professor at Brown University, and has an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College (PA). She recently finished the Frederick Douglass visitor center film for the National Park Service’s site at Cedar Hill in Washington, DC, and she is currently working on four museum films, including those for the civil rights museums in Memphis and Atlanta.
This event is on Saturday, Oct. 18 at 3:00 PM. The event will be held in person at Politics and Prose at 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, and is free with first come, first served seating.
To learn more, visit the event page here.