Book Talk: Joshua Clark Davis — Police Against the Movement - with Judy Richardson

Watch author Joshua Clark Davis' book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

This event will be in partnership with Free DC and the SNCC Legacy Project.

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 a;sp 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.

Free DC is a movement led by the people of the District of Columbia to win dignity for our communities and exert our right to self-determination, retain home rule, and ultimately, achieve statehood.

The SNCC Legacy Project (SLP), founded in 2010, continues SNCC's social justice work through inter-generational projects that bring SNCC veterans together with younger organizers.

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Politics and Prose is a beloved and award-winning staple for book lovers around the nation's capital and the world. In addition to our incredible selection of titles, Politics and Prose offers public book talks with today's leading authors and journalists.

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