Princeton UP Ideas Podcast · New Books Network

Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)

·58 min·5 clips

Ray Wood, an NYPD undercover officer, pushed CORE activists toward dynamite and prison.

1. New Books Network speaks with Joshua Clark Davis about Princeton University Press's Police Against the Movement and local police sabotage of the civil rights struggle. 2. An unnamed New Books Network host interviews University of Baltimore historian Joshua Clark Davis, whose earlier book is From Headshops to Whole Foods and whose writing has appeared in The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Atlantic. 3. The episode asks what changes when the civil rights movement is studied through city police departments rather than only J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. 4. Davis uses slow violence to describe erroneous indictments, character assassination, leaked stories, warrantless surveillance, and other harms that did not always appear on camera. 5. He says slow violence matters because physical beatings at Birmingham or elsewhere can hide the quieter coercion that intimidated activists out of political speech. 6. Davis traces local political policing back to early-1900s anti-anarchist squads in cities like New York and Chicago, long before the FBI became central. 7. He says every major U.S. police department had a red squad by roughly the 1940s, and that those units grew again as anti-communist politics intensified after World War II. 8. Davis gives a national estimate of more than 100 red squads and roughly 4,700 detectives and officers, compared with about 3,000 FBI political-intelligence agents. 9. He argues that the civil rights movement became a new target because red squads had lost much of their anti-communist workload by the late 1950s and needed a new mission. 10. He stresses that the movement was national, not only southern, and that police in New York, Philadelphia, California, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all took part in repression. 11. The conversation turns to agent provocateurs, where Davis says J. Edgar Hoover preferred outside contractors, but city red squads were more willing to infiltrate groups in person. 12. He cites Ray Wood of the NYPD, who entered CORE in New York in 1964 and pushed activists toward reckless schemes, including a plan involving the mayor and another involving dynamite. 13. Davis also mentions Morel McCullough, a Memphis police officer who was near Martin Luther King after King was shot and had been spying on connected activists before the killing. 14. He says protests against police violence drew unusually harsh retaliation because they were direct criticisms of state power and police legitimacy. 15. He adds that police and allies often framed those protests as communist plots, a tactic that made many liberals and moderates back away. 16. Davis links that anti-radical framing to a longer history in which the Communist Party of the United States of America, socialists, and anarchists were treated as enemies of the state. 17. He says liberal cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles often presented themselves as progressive while maintaining some of the largest red squads in the country. 18. He argues that police institutions still practice unremembering through textbooks, museum exhibits, and Martin Luther King Day messaging that praise King while ignoring local repression. 19. The interview is a detailed, high-density author conversation that moves from 1904 anti-subversive squads to contemporary protests and police responses in Minneapolis, ICE demonstrations, and Australia. 20. People interested in New Books Network history interviews, civil rights history, and police repression will get the most from it, while listeners wanting a light Princeton University Press promo or minimal historical detail will likely skip it.

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