Police Against the Movement: How Local Cops Sabotage Freedom Struggles
On this episode of Hard Knock Radio, host Davey D sits down with Joshua Davis, a history professor at the University of Baltimore and author of Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back. The conversation digs into a part of civil rights history that is usually blurred out of the frame: how local police departments, not just the FBI, designed and refined a playbook to crush Black freedom movements and the organizers who led them.
Davis explains that he started the book around 2017, when mainstream media kept branding Black Lives Matter as “the new civil rights movement,” as if the movements of the fifties and sixties never seriously challenged police violence. His research shows the opposite. Groups like SNCC and CORE were not just fighting for buses, counters and ballots. They were picketing stations, doing sit ins in precincts, shutting down bridges, and calling out false arrests, frame ups and constant surveillance.
A key part of the story is the rise of “political police” and the so called red squads. These secret intelligence units existed in big city departments from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. They built massive files on activists, infiltrated groups, pushed entrapment schemes, and used humiliation and job loss as weapons. Davis highlights figures like communist councilman Ben Davis, who exposed police brutality in Harlem, and Ella Baker, who led a New York NAACP campaign against NYPD abuse years before Montgomery.
The conversation also draws sharp lines from that era to the present. Davey points out how the label “communist” then functions like “Antifa,” “terrorist,” or “gang” now. Davis walks through how felony charges, racketeering laws and national security language are used to criminalize protest, from the civil rights era to Stop Cop City and Palestine solidarity work.
Davis and Davey dig into examples of open collusion between police and white supremacist forces, from mobs attacking Freedom Riders while officers stood aside, to undercover cops sitting on those buses only to gather intelligence on activists. They also uplift resistance that has been buried, especially the courage of Birmingham leader Fred Shuttlesworth and the young people who confronted police in the streets.
By the end of the show, one point is clear. The civil rights movement did not ignore police violence. It met it head on, in courtrooms, on sidewalks, and inside jails. Remembering that history changes how we see both state repression and the radical work of those who came before Black Lives Matter.