The Violence of Political Policing

Michael Principe

Police Against the Movement:
The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back
By Joshua Clark Davis
Princeton, 2025, 412 pages, hardcover: $27.95.

POLICE AGAINST THE Movement succeeds in several ways. For a book written by an academic historian, published by Princeton University Press, and including 45 pages of densely packed endnotes, it turns out to be quite a page turner. Like an accomplished novelist, Joshua Clark Davis regularly ends one chapter in a way that inclines the reader to begin the next.

The story itself, as the subtitle indicates, is two-pronged. First, in contrast to better known accounts of Federal suppression of the civil rights movement through COINTELPRO and other FBI operations, Davis focuses on the less well-known efforts of local police.

Second, he effectively documents the corresponding fightback against these efforts. The book represents a powerful history of the civil rights struggle where the lens employed is the fight against police violence.

Without ignoring acts of overt violence by the police, Davis focuses on what he calls the “slow violence” of “political policing” which targets politically active groups and individuals, including “retaliatory felony prosecutions; the infiltration of activist groups by undercover officers; widespread surveillance… and a campaign of vilification aimed at destroying activists’ reputations and halting their organizations’ gains.” (2)

Davis highlights efforts advanced by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), contrasted with the targeted legal work of the NAACP and the voting rights and desegregation work of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Regarding the latter, Davis argues that the SCLC was at times content to deemphasize the fightback: “SCLC organizers reasoned that it was far preferable for liberal whites to view protesters as powerless victims instead of violent aggressors or any number of other racist stereotypes Black people in the movement routinely confronted.” (82)

In addition, Davis writes that placing “activism against police violence at the center of our larger narrative… is to bring communists and socialists back into the history of the movement,” (12) further suggesting that the latter groups influenced civil rights activists to view police violence as essentially systematic, rather than something to be addressed merely through piecemeal reforms.

The “Red Squads”

The roots of “political policing” are found in early 20th century “red squads,” which Davis shows began to shift their focus in the 1950s to the civil rights movement. Through the sweeping history sketched by Davis up to the present, he conveys an ideological connectivity by referring to these special units as red squads throughout the book’s timeline.

While covering vast amounts of information, Davis ably highlights the stories of individuals and campaigns, making for emotionally compelling reading. The book’s first chapter sets the tone, beginning as follows:

“Four thousand people gathered for Glover Davis’s funeral at the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Atlanta on Labor Day 1933.” (18)

A blind man, Glover Davis had been shot by police five days earlier. Seventy uniformed police carrying machine guns and teargas patrolled the area, harassing the racially mixed attendees.

One of the speakers was 29-year-old Atlanta native Benjamin Davis (no relation to Glover), who spoke out directly about the police: “The funeral of Glover Davis whose body lies down there is the funeral of every Negro in this city unless the murderous brutality of the Atlanta police is stopped!” (19)

Benjamin Davis was one of the few Black lawyers in town and an official of International Labor Defense which was affiliated with the Communist Party. Within days, the offices of International Labor Defense were raided and virtually all literature confiscated. Davis protested the lack of a warrant but was met with the reply that his disbarment was in the works.

Fearing that his life was in danger, friends and allies urged Davis to leave town. Relocating to New York City, he took with him the knowledge that “more than any other form of political organizing, protesting police brutality was likely to draw a swift and severe reaction from law enforcement.” (19)

Brutality and Protest

After a brief detour into the history of red squads as intelligence and surveillance units, beginning in 1904 when New York City established the first such unit, Benjamin Davis reenters the narrative.

 In October of 1947 police brutally beat Harlem store owner Samuel Symonette, accusing him of running an illegal lottery. The Communist Party’s newspaper the Daily Worker published photos of the badly beaten Symonette. Its editor was Benjamin Davis, who had also become a NYC Councilman.

While the Communist Party organized protests, Davis’s office published a pamphlet, Police Brutality: Lynching, Northern Style, with Davis also offering a resolution in city council to investigate cases of police brutality.

Unsurprisingly, July 1948 saw the arrest of Davis and 10 other members of the Communist Party’s national board. In a lengthy show trial, all were found guilty of violating the Smith Act, i.e. promoting the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Benjamin Davis lost his council seat and was imprisoned from late 1951 to April 1955.

Police violence continued in NYC, and other groups fought back. The NAACP under the leadership of Ella Baker, in what Joshua Clark Davis considers an uncharacteristically bold move, launched a campaign against police abuse while demanding the resignation of the police commissioner.

In the end, their efforts resulted in the establishment of a weak civilian review board and the exhaustion of NAACP resources. The NAACP “would not return to organizing community campaigns against police abuses for many years.” (33)

Freedom Now!

The author’s discussion of the 1960 conference that resulted in the formation of SNCC illustrates his historical framing. While noting the organization’s commitment to nonviolence, he asserts that its “most revealing recommendation” was endorsing “the practice of going to jail rather than accepting bail.”

Davis extrapolates, stating that SNCC had announced “a vision for change that required frequent interactions with law enforcement. In so doing, it had determined that the road to freedom and equality ran straight through the police station and the jailhouse.” (54)

Aware that violent confrontations by the police themselves would lead to bad press, political policing increasingly dominated police tactics. Davis catalogues cases of police collusion, one of the earliest forms of political policing: When white supremacists attacked activists, police either looked on or arrived immediately after the violent offenders had left the scene.

One hot spot was Albany, Georgia, where the desegregation campaign of SNCC and local protest organization, The Albany Movement, provoked the ire of local police leading to over 700 arrests, including the SCLC’s Martin Luther King and Ralph David Abernathy.

Looking to serve their 45-day sentences and stir publicity, the two were mysteriously bailed out. It was later revealed that the police chief had conspired with the segregationist editor of the local paper and former classmate of John F. Kennedy to pay the bail and undermine this plan. Kennedy, Davis reports, had given his blessing to the scheme.

The author deftly charts the differing approaches of disparate sectors of the civil rights movement. His discussion of John Lewis’s speech at the historic 1963 March on Washington is representative.

The night before the speech, a meeting of older movement organizers demanded changes to it, including the removal of what would have been the fourth sentence. Regarding pending civil rights legislation, Lewis had written, “there’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality.” (113)

Joshua Clark Davis writes that while “older leaders such as King, Randolph, and the NAACP’s Wilkins maintained a single-minded focus on the passage of federal legislation, the young radicals of the movement had found common cause under a more ambitious rallying cry, and one that demanded an end to police violence: ‘Freedom Now!’” (115)

Policing the Movement

While the massive crowd in Washington was surrounded by more than 2800 uniformed officers, local police departments from across the country also had undercover agents present to monitor and report.

Davis goes on to document various infiltration and undercover operations conducted by local police. He does this in a way that contextualizes better known events like the assassination of Martin Luther King and rebellions in Watts (Los Angeles), Detroit and elsewhere.

Regarding these rebellions, critics of the movement in what became a growing theme were quick to blame any ensuing “violence” on the fightback against the police. Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty stated, “For some time there has existed a world-wide subversive campaign to stigmatize all police as brutal. The cry of police brutality has been shouted all over the world by Communists, dupes and demagogues irrespective of the facts.” (204)

In New York City, as CORE ramped up its protests against police violence in 1964, including an unprecedented sit-in inside police headquarters, police immediately assigned new recruit Raymond Wood, a Black officer in a force that was 95 percent white, to the red squad.

Fearing that training at the police academy might inadvertently encourage him to look or act like a cop, Wood went directly into undercover work. After joining CORE, he quickly earned the group’s trust, becoming housing committee chairman, leading the group’s voter registration drive, and representing the New York chapters at CORE’S national convention — all while reporting to his real bosses.

Davis describes several illegal actions inside and outside of CORE that Wood instigated or encouraged. The largest of these was a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty and perhaps the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument. When the plot was revealed, Wood was celebrated as a hero.

After lengthy court proceedings, the defendants in the case were acquitted, though the movement was increasingly branded as terroristic by the police and media. Davis concludes that “New York police had devised a politically savvy blueprint for repression that other police departments would soon replicate.” (179)

Other cases of spies and provocateurs discussed in detail by Davis include Black Memphis cop Marrell McCollough (later of the CIA), embedded with the Memphis community group The Invaders, who worked closely with the SCLC and was the first to reach Dr. King as he lay bleeding on the Loraine Motel balcony, as well as that of Billy Williams, a spy for the Houston police ordered to monitor, in his words, “left wings and radical people.” (277)

The targets included SNCC activist Lee Otis Johnson, who at one point offered Williams a marijuana cigarette, resulting in conviction on felony marijuana distribution charges and a sentence of thirty years in the state penitentiary. His case was later taken up by Angela Davis, as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He served four years before being released on appeal.

Continuity of Resistance

As fightback against police repression increased, so did the machinery of repression. SNCC executive secretary James Foreman in his pamphlet 1967: High Tide of Black Resistance argued that SNCC’s embrace of Black Power had triggered significant backlash, including efforts at the federal level to paint SNCC as a violent organization, as well as violent attacks by the police themselves illustrated, for example, by the police bombing of SNCC headquarters in Philadelphia.

The fightback of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense may be better known than some of the other efforts documented by Davis. Rather than characterizing the Panther fightback as a break with the early civil rights movement, the author usefully illustrates continuity, including the brief 1968 merger of SNCC with the Panthers.

Even before the founding of the Panthers, the well-known practice of patrolling the police in Los Angeles had begun with support from SNCC and CORE. SNCC staffers were also involved in the founding of most early Panther chapters.

But by the end of 1968 the Panthers themselves, Davis concludes, had become the most significant Black activist organization, attracting members and public attention for their work against police violence.

From here, Davis charts the ups and downs of the growing awareness of police tactics. In the penultimate chapter, “Unmasking,” Davis focuses on the way many of the dirty deeds of the cops were revealed in the late 1960s and 1970s. This includes, probably most spectacularly, the 1974 break-in of an FBI office outside Philadelphia by activists which revealed the extent of FBI surveillance.

Court cases were also an occasion for unmasking. Davis writes, “No case in these years did more to raise the prospect of legal defense exposing police intelligence abuses than the People of the State of New York v. Lumumba Shakur or, as it became more widely known, the Panther 21 trial.” (310-11).

Prosecutors had charged the group with plotting a series of violent acts. The state’s star witness was Gene Roberts, who had been undercover for five years.

Under cross-examination for several days, Roberts revealed much more than was previously known about police undercover operations, while at the same time seeming to identify with the Panthers. All defendants were acquitted.

Successful civil suits against the police followed, forcing the police to retrench. The National Council of Police Societies, representing 25,000 Black cops, passed a resolution against undercover work in Black activist organizations, with the New York president stating that he was now “advising my Black officers to inform people that they are assigned to inform on that ‘I’m a police officer assigned to inform on you.’” (315)

Revelations and Coverups

At the federal level the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence activities, chaired by Frank Church, resulted in a host of revelations regarding the domestic spying operations of the FBI and CIA.

Davis notes that while the committee’s mandate included local police, its investigations unfortunately remained on the federal level, including dropping an investigation of Chicago police who collaborated with FBI informants to monitor and kill Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark as they slept.

The final chapter, “The Unremembering,” documents the vast number of intelligence records destroyed in such cities as Memphis, Chicago and Los Angeles, sometimes hours before courts were to take possession of them, denying the public its ability to know.

Purposeful neglect of the real history of policing continues, as Davis illustrates, at the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington, as well as in popular college textbooks on policing.

Telling too, Davis notes, are the obituaries following the death of John Lewis. Foregrounding his stance on nonviolence and his own police beatings, they regularly omitted that he was “among the movement’s most prominent critics of police violence.” (336)

Concluding with a brief survey of ongoing police violence, Davis writes:

“As Americans cling to the idea that the civil rights movement set the country on the path toward democracy, achieving racial justice is impossible without exposing the historical truth of police attacks on antiracist activists.” (342)

For Davis, nothing short of a national truth commission on the order of those found in South Africa, Chile and Argentina could begin to do this.

Though Davis rightly notes that in the current climate this is unlikely to take place at the official level, he argues that:

“A commission organized by some combination of the Movement for Black Lives, the National Lawyers Guild, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the American Civil Liberties Union would come closer to the truth than one compromised by legislative niceties.” (346)

Police Against the Movement includes much more, with each chapter filled with compelling detail. Joshua Clark Davis is far from an invisible or neutral narrator. He is present in the text, his voice is strong and his political perspective clear.

Any reader will find the book chilling not just for the historical accounts, but for the way that so much of it resonates with the present moment, including the complicity of the media, liberal politicians and university administrators, with ongoing state repression. Encouraging such awareness is a consequence of the kind of historical work done by Davis. Confronting the past facilitates making the oppressive present visible.

July-August 2026, ATC 243