Thursday, October 9, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 CLICK HERE TO RSVP _**RSVP is recommended but not required. Entry and seating are first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry to a full event.**_ **A bold retelling of the 1960s civil rights struggle through its work against police violence--and a prehistory of both the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements that emerged half a century later** _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 city streets to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of 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 cities and towns across the US--North, South, East, and West--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 critical insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest. **Joshua Clark Davis** is associate professor of history at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods and the coeditor of Baltimore Revisited, and he has written for The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Atlantic. **Elizabeth Hinton** is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States and her writing has been published in _Science, Nature, The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, The Journal of Urban History, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Boston Review, The Nation_, and _Time_. She is the author of acclaimed and award-winning books _From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America_ (Harvard University Press) and _America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s_ (Liveright). With the late historian Manning Marable, she coedited _The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction_ (Palgrave Macmillan).