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Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Hello, everybody.
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Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Stout, and today I'll. I'm here with Joshua Clark Davis to talk about his new book, Police against the Movement, the Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists who Fought Back, which was just published by Princeton University Press. Joshua Clark Davis is an associate professor of US History at the University of Baltimore. Davis is also the author of an earlier book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, which examines organic food stores, feminist enterprises, black bookstores, and other businesses that emerge from the movements of the 60s and 70s. His research has earned awards from the Fulbright Program, the Silvers foundation, and the NEH Public Scholars Program. And he has written for the Atlantic, the Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and the Washington Post. And that work has been featured in the New York Times and cnn, among other venues. Josh, welcome to the show.
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Hey, Michael. Thanks for having me.
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Happy to have you. I wanted to start by asking you about how you came to write this. This particular book. It's a big book. And you mentioned in your acknowledgments that it took a long time to write and research. So what motivated you to pursue this topic?
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Very true. Good question. And yeah, we always have to ask, why in the world did you end up spending 5, 6, 7. In my case, 87 and some change years writing a book. So in 2017, I had finished my first book. And one of the things that was going on at that time was that the Black Lives Matter movement was accelerating. It had kind of come into the world in 2013 in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin. And then in 2014, it really kind of exploded into the national consciousness with Ferguson. I moved to Baltimore in early 2015, and about three months later, four months later, Freddie Gray was killed in the back of a police van. And the city exploded. There was this uprising, and there were these, you know, massive protests for about a week. And that was quite the introduction to a place you've just moved to. And, you know, I attended a few of those rallies and had been to some in 2014, also in Durham, North Carolina, where I'd previously lived. And I think the question that began to percolate in my mind, this was not how BLM was talking about themselves, but this is how the media was talking about blm. They were frequently saying, this movement is the second civil rights movement. This movement is picking up where the civil rights movement ended. This movement is continuing the unfinished work of the civil rights movement. And I was beginning to wonder and ask myself, okay, well, what did the civil rights movement do in response to police violence? We know these very iconic instances. I mean, they're really some of the most iconic moments of the civil rights movement. Birmingham police led by Bull Connor, unleashing German shepherds on black children, attacking them with fire hoses, or marchers. Black marchers about to work in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and being attacked by police. I mean, these are some of the biggest icons of the movement, these images. And so it got me thinking, okay, we know that they endured police and violent police violence, but what did they do about it? I wonder if it's true, if they really didn't address it, because that was implied in these media accounts over and over again of blm. Again, this is not what BLM was saying, but media were saying, hey, civil rights movement couldn't address this. Good thing there's a movement that can do that now. So that was kind of where the question of this book started. And the more I started researching it, the more I found. Well, actually, there's a pretty extensive record of some parts of the civil rights movement pushing back against police violence. And this is even, you know, before the Black Panther Party. It's not all parts of the civil rights movement, but one. A lot of the civil rights movement did protest police brutality. Two, they expanded their notion of what police violence was to something much bigger than that. And three, they were met by a whole series of retaliations from local police that in some ways anticipated what the FBI and cointelpro did several years later. But in some ways, this is defederalizing the story. So that's kind of where that whole impetus to start this book started.
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Okay, great. No, I think that's really helpful. And it also. One of the big contributions that you make from my telling. I mean, you. This is what you say in the book, is that you're retelling the civil rights movement through the lens of its activism around issues not just of police brutality, but a much more expansive way of thinking about the police. So I wanted to ask you now if you would say a bit more about some of the decisions that you made about the writing and also the organizing of the book, because it strikes me in some ways as like an idiosyncratic academic book. It has lots of rather short chapters that are driven heavily by historical figures, and those are, in many cases, they're people with important stories to tell. But at the same time, it covers a really large geographic range and a number of years. So why did you include certain things? Why do you tell the story in this way? Yeah, could you just expand a little bit on that?
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C
Yeah, that's a good question. And if I just to kind of restate it, if I understood it correctly, you were saying that especially for an academic book, it is an idiosyncratic approach to an academic book. And I think that's true in a lot of ways. I think, you know, so first of all, from the start, I wanted this to be a national story. I wanted this to be a national book. I wanted this to be about the south and the north, the east and the west, cities all over the country. So that already kind of committed me to making this a pretty big book. Second, you know, I really did want to zoom in on human stories. I think I'm zooming in and I'm zooming out. I think it's possible to tell the story of state repression and police violence from, you know, the bird's eye view. And there's something to be said for that. But that wasn't the total approach I wanted to do. I mean, that sometimes does end up being the approach in some parts of the book. But I really wanted to focus on, so how did surveillance affect this individual's life? Or how did this person's life change when a police officer infiltrated their activist circle and then that person was not only indicted on felony charges, but sent to prison. Or maybe in many cases, not sent to prison, but had a felony indictment hanging over their head for years. What did that mean to them? Another thing that happened with this book is I think I originally envisioned it, and this is not an unusual approach. It's kind of like, all right, well, I'm going to have a chapter or two on New York, and then I'm going to have a chapter or two on la, and then I'm going to have a chapter or two on Houston. I'm going to be kind of jumping around the country. That's a totally decent way to organize a book. My first book I'd kind of organized topically based on different types of activist businesses. I was writing this book for several years before I realized, oh, I think I have to write this book chronologically because it's just a very long story. And, yes, I can still move around geographically, but this is going to be a story of the long civil rights movement. And a big part of the story is what happened with, for example, communists and socialists who were confronting police violence in the 30s and 40s. And also what I didn't realize is a big part of the story would be how activists coming out of the civil rights movement in the 70s kind of post movement were also attacking police violence. And so that was kind of like. I didn't start with the chronological focus. I worked my way into it. I think part of what I was also trying to do, and I have no idea if this is successful, but with the short titles, I think it's maybe something that is more common in narrative nonfiction. And I mean, the line between what historians do in narrative nonfiction is pretty blurry. But I think I was trying to borrow some of those techniques, in a sense, and it was a bit of a challenge to myself. You know, what single word or two words could actually encapsulate not only the topic of a chapter, but the argument, in a sense. And so once I started doing that, I just kind of went with it. But, yeah, the chapters are shorter. I think that was also something that my editor wanted. The chapters were much longer earlier. And so it's. What is it, 15, 16 chapters, as opposed to what you'll see in a lot of academic books, Maybe longer, shorter chapters. So that's kind of the different things I'm trying to do that I think led to this somewhat unusual kind of organization in some ways.
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Yeah. I'm glad that you mentioned narrative nonfiction, because I struggled with that at times. I Had to, like, fight my writerly impulses and ultimately settled on a chrono. A pretty strict chronological narrative. Uh, that being said, you know, you can start with, like, some powerful anecdotes and work back to explain them and all those kinds of things. But I think that the narrative nonfiction thing is something that is always adjacent to us as historians, and. And I think we're always kind of deciding to what extent to. To work within that frame. I also wanted to mention that I meant idiosyncratic as a compliment.
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Yeah, no, I took it that way. I just wanted to kind of. I think in some ways you were saying, especially for an academic book. This is an atypical approach to an academic book, right?
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Yes, yes, yes. The shorter chapters, I almost. I. But. But it works. It works very well. And I also wanted to say that it. It has the effect of moving very smoothly between these scales that you just mentioned. Personal stories that are very specific on the one hand, and national framings and interpretations that put those in, like, a broader context. So I thought that that was very. So that being said, I wanted to continue to expand about this, the intellectual framework now. And I'm thinking of the analytical work that the terms of political violence. I'm sorry, political policing and slow violence do for you and your argument. Because I think what I'm not trying to say is that by organizing in this way, it's less argument driven and more narrative driven because there is a lot of argument that you're making. So could you talk a little bit about those terms and how they add up to the overall analytical and argumentative work that you're. That you're doing?
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Sure. So neither term is one that I created. They're ones that scholars have been using in different fields. Slow violence appealed to me in particular because after working on this book for a while, originally I thought this was going to be a book about the civil rights movements organizing against physical brutality, which is a big part of the book. But over time, I realized that a lot of the civil rights movement's work against state violence was about a whole variety of political violence and political repression. And so it was surveillance, it was infiltration, it was trumped up felony indictments. And it was important for me to discover that a group like the Congress of Racial Equality Core. As early as 1963, they coined a term, police malpractice. And their argument for that was, hey, yes, our movement and our allies and people of color are dealing with physical violence from police, but the violence that police enact and carry out against People is much more than physical. It is a form of malpractice. And I was taken by that. And I think that kind of got me thinking more about, well, what concepts are out there Also to think about the range of state violence and the concept of state violence and particularly slow violence spoke to me because so much of the harm that local police did to the movement was very slow, literally, in its effect, in its execution. And that's the problem I'm trying to identify here, is that in general, the American public, particularly white liberals, were justifiably shocked and outraged by the footage of brutal, brutal physical attacks captured on film. And in the same way, that was a dynamic that, you know, happened again with the beating of Rodney King in 1991, and that happened again during BLM. But the argument I was making was that if we really want to reckon with the tremendous harm that local police did to the civil rights movement, we have to look at things that they carried out slowly over time and whose harm to the movement was felt slowly over time. And so that concept of slow violence really appealed to me. Political policing is a different concept. You know, the first caveat is that, of course, all policing is, to varying degrees, political. It's not to suggest that there is policing that is unpolitical or apolitical. Policing, of course, is a system built on political ideologies. However, there is a strong argument to be made that there is a particular type of policing that explicitly targets political organizers and political activists. And there is a literature out there about that. And, you know, political policing goes back centuries. It by no means was invented by the United States. And I think that was important to kind of put my finger on, because it's easy to fall into this trap of, well, of course, the police would target these movements that lines up with everything else they are doing all the time. Anyways, to my mind, it's really critical to point out that local police departments very consciously created local political intelligence units, these red squads who had very vaguely defined portfolios. But in general, it was to track subversives who they thought were politically dangerous actors. And so that was the second concept I really wanted to bring in in this book, Political policing.
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A
Yeah, that's really helpful. And I wanted to return. You mentioned at the start that CORE was. You started to notice it. And that core's own analysis of what you call police malpractice helped shape your own understanding of this. So one thing I found myself curious about as I read your. Your book was the History of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE which was so important as a precursor of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or sncc, both of which were deeply committed to the fight against political policing. And is this, is this quietly a core book? Could you talk a little bit about the influence of CORE and also SNCC as like guiding the, the, the. Not exactly the periodization, but it felt to me like CORE was really important at an early moment of the book. And then Snick takes over and I wondered about like the archival journey in a way that, that, that reflected and, and how both of those organizations shaped your approach to this book.
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C
Yeah, that's exactly right. It's a really nice question. And yes, this is quietly a core book in a sense. I would say it's quietly like you said, kind of the first half is more core, the second half is more sncc. So most of your listeners may know there were kind of four leading civil rights organizations of the 1960s. The NAACP most famously was, you know, dated back to, I believe, 1909, and was kind of the granddaddy, so to speak, of the organizations by the 60s. Yes, it was a national membership organization, but it was probably the one of the four that was the least engaged in grassroots direct action protest. But it was very important, especially for legal work. Then there's a Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, people will know that was Dr. King's organization. That was mostly a staff organization and also one that consisted mainly of members who were black Baptist ministers. Then there's SNCC and core. Sncc, as you said, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was really the leading and maybe the only youth led civil rights organization. They thought of themselves as the shock troops of the movement. They were very, very bold and daring and going into some of the most dangerous parts of the South. Then there is the Congress of Racial Equality. Core and core, to my mind, is the organization that is the least remembered today. Historians have written the least about it. There's been a few books that have touched on it, more in the last few years. But core, if it's remembered for anything, it's remembered as, oh, those are the people who started the Freedom Rides. Okay, so that's kind of interested me for a while. Like, why is there not more written on core? And there's different reasons for that. But what really stood out to me as I started doing this research was how much of the protests against police violence, especially in the years 62 to 65, were organized by CORE people. And I should say this about core. Unlike sncc, SNCC was really a staff organization. You weren't a member of sncc. You worked for sncc or you didn't. There were some support organizations like the Friends of sncc, but really you were. You were SNCC staff or you really weren't a part of sncc. CORE was kind of like naacp, a national chapter organization where you could become a member, but it was more radical than the NAACP. And by 63 or 64, they had something like 50 chapters across the country. So they're very. They're really kind of the only on the ground national chapter membership group in the civil rights movement that's doing a lot of direct action protests. They have a chapter in Seattle, they have a chapter in Baltimore, they have a chapter in la, they have a chapter in San Francisco and Chicago. They have, I think it gets up to eight chapters in New York City in all five boroughs. And that's. That's important. But what I discovered is that in the wake of the Birmingham attacks on the protesters in the spring of 1963, Core was the first national organization, the civil Rights movement, that said, hey, it's not just that police brutality is one of the bad things that happens to us when we protest. Actually, police violence and police malpractice is kind of at the center of the work that we're doing and that it is constitutive of the racism in this country. And CORE's national leadership directed chapters all over the country. In 1963, you should start protesting local police departments when people are beaten and arrested unfairly. You should picket precinct stations, you should have sit ins inside the stations. You should go to the police chief's homes. This starts happening all over the country and in New York, it's probably the most concerted and the most aggressive. And so to me, it was like that was a major contribution of CORE that I don't think has really been acknowledged. Again, it's like the civil rights movement looks differently if we say, hey, they actually not only suffered police violence, they not only endured it, they not only got the hell beat out of them, but they did protest police violence. And again, they protested a whole variety of police violence. Not just physical, but also legal, also surveillance. I think what happened in the book also is that in the mid-60s, I start focusing more on SNCC, because SNCC takes kind of, I think, SNCC knowingly or not, they have people in the organization who are taking the arguments of CORE and pushing them farther. And so you have someone like Jim Foreman Jr. Or excuse me. Jim Foreman Sr. James Foreman Jr. Is the law professor at Yale. But Jim Foreman is someone who starts taking these arguments about state repression and about how not only federal officials but also local police are undertaking concerted efforts to break SNCC in different cities. And he starts writing a pretty extensive theory about this and also drawing on what's happening to their organizers. And, you know, 65 through 68, there are dozens of SNCC organizers who are faced with felony indictments by various local DAs and police departments across the country, virtually all of which end up collapsing. But I think that level of police and political repression that, Again, this predates FBI's COINTELPRO project against Black extremists. Yes, there was an ongoing COINTELPRO against, like, the Socialist Workers Party. But again, red squads were doing things just as early, if not earlier, than the federal officials. And in some ways, they are pioneering some of these approaches. And in some ways, they are willing to do things that the FBI is not even willing to do.
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A
Right. Well, I'm really glad that you brought CORE back in. I think we needed a new core book. And one benefit of this focus that you place on CORE is that it brings the emphasis back, as you say, to local police departments, local precinct stations, and the local level. And one of the most important contributions for me of your book is the way that you undermine what we might call a myth of federal exceptionalism in political policing. And. And in your account, you note that the FBI has received most of the blame for abusive policing practices, but that this interpretive emphasis has actually allowed local police departments to largely escape responsibility for the kind of violence, slow and otherwise, that they enacted on the movement and that you describe so well in the book. So could you talk a little bit more about the role that these local municipal police departments played? Just kind of expand on on that and this relationship to federal violence.
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C
Yeah, so these red squads were so, so important, and they're very important for my book. Local police intelligence units. Most major city departments across the country have them. People have written about them. Most famously, an ACLU attorney named Frank Donner wrote a book called Protectors of Privilege, which, you know, 35 years later is still the standard work, in a sense, on the long history of these local political police intelligence units. New York and Chicago's red squads actually predate the FBI. It's by a few years, but I still think that's significant. By the late 1960s, our best estimates suggest that the FBI, I think it had, what was it, around 3,000 agents devoted to political intelligence but our best estimates for that era also suggest that police departments had something closer to 5,000, maybe 4,700 political intelligence officers. And there are some 500 red squads in the country by the late 60s. I think what was so important to me about them is that they are doing the work, surveillance, infiltration, disruption, and they are closer to the ground. This is in no ways to diminish or to underestimate the severity of what the FBI did. But FBI documents ended up being very important for my research for this book frequently because they copy memos from local police red squads. And you just see over and over again that a lot of the federal action against civil rights activists is really prompted by local police departments and by red squads, and that they are the ones who know the organizers on the ground. They are the ones who are doing really a lot of the kind of hand to hand combat, for lack of a better term. They are the ones who have penetrated these groups more deeply in some cases. One thing is that the FBI really insisted on working with informants, you know, people who they contracted to infiltrate groups. And there's no recorded instance of the FBI having its own agents infiltrate civil rights or black power groups. In every instance, it's someone they hired from the outside. And that may seem like a facile distinction, but I think Hoover was really paranoid that if an FBI agent was caught, it would really embarrass the agency. And you know, there's a few instances of white FBI agents likely infiltrating the anti war movement. But the reality is that the FBI had basically no black agents. Like even in the late 60s, it was like one half of 1%. Whereas you had local police departments in places like Detroit and Chicago where they had between 5 and 10% of their officers who are African American. But I think the fact that you have police departments who are willing to train their own officers and send in a police officer who is being, you know, salaried by the state to go pretend to be an activist for months or even years and to use that as a means to disrupt that organization. In a sense, that's an even deeper form of infiltration than say, an FBI agent hires an informant to go do that work, and the informant is kind of playing the go between and in some ways doing more translation in between the two. So that's really something important for this book. And again, the timeline of this book, a lot of it's the early and mid-60s. And COINTELPRO, at least a cointelpro against black extremists really isn't initiated until, I believe it's 67. I want to make sure that's right. And then it's a group like the Black Panthers, who notoriously are the biggest targets of cointelpro. But that doesn't really take off against the Panthers until 68. And so in many ways, these years of 63 through 66 are so important because so many cities across the country, in some instances, they have old red squads that they rename and they call them things. Like in Philadelphia, it's like the Civil Disturbances Unit. I think it's so close to civil rights. In other cities, they create brand new units. Like in Baltimore, they create a brand new unit in 66. But you can see this whole flurry of units being reimagined. New York's unit, the Bureau of Special Services, it has existed for decades, but in late 63, 64, their leadership says we have to intensify our disruption and our infiltration. And that's when they start basically penetrating civil rights groups as opposed to going to rallies, taking down names, collecting clippings, all the things they continue to do. But you can just see with the timeline and city after city, how the Red Squad's work is expanded, intensified, and reimagined in this mid-60s period.
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A
Right, right. Yeah. You know, one of the overall impressions that you get from the book is that police were everywhere in the movement. You remind us that undercover officers were on the Freedom Rides. They were present at the assassinations of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. And you've done an amazing job of compiling the scope of their infiltration and movements for social justice from various sources, which, as you say, a lot of that is in FBI records, which has a tendency to pull historians back toward the FBI in a way, as an explanatory device, whereas it's the local police that are. That are doing a lot of that work. So can you discuss. To take it back to that archival question, can you discuss what it was like from the research perspective to trace the ubiquity of police in these different movements? Did it surprise you in any way? Was it. Was it. You know, was it. Were you surprised? Was it unexpected? Yeah, right.
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C
I mean, one surprise for me, and I don't believe I was familiar with this before I started writing the book, although it had been documented before. But it was the case of Morrell McCullough, who you referenced, who was a Memphis undercover police department officer in their Red Squad who was surveilling. The group is called the Invaders. It was kind of a Black Panther Style group in Memphis at the time. And he was also surveilling the labor organizing going on by or being done by the sanitation workers in Memphis in the spring of 68. And I don't believe, prior to writing this book, that I realized that the, you know, gut wrenching, gut wrenching pictures of Dr. King right after he's been shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, that when you see a man crouching over his body, that that man is Morell McCullough, because he was on assignment and he's standing in the parking lot as those shots are fired. Morel McCullough's daughter recently wrote a book that is, you know, in some ways, it's a very brave book for his daughter to come forward and say, like, I grew up hearing little bits and pieces about this, and it really confused me and angered me for a long time. It's a longer story. Morel McCullough most likely did not have something to. Was not culpable for Martin Luther King's death, but he was pulled into the House investigation on assassinations in 1978 to testify about it, which he really didn't want to do because by that time around, McCullough was a CIA agent and he really didn't want to go public about this stuff. So the book by his daughter, in a lot of ways, kind of, I think, shows why it's quite unlikely that he was involved in the actual murder. But if you just put that to the side, it still is very, very disturbing and eye opening to think about the fact that there was this undercover police officer who was right there on the scene. I mean, he had been to Dr. King's hotel room for meetings. Like, he. He was so close to King, it wasn't like they were good friends. It's just like he very quickly penetrated that circle. And so that was an example to me where it's like, wow, he had been on assignment for like, a couple of months in Memphis. It's not like he had spent years trying to earn people's trust. But your bigger question was about archival work. And I think in some ways this made the book harder, and in some ways it made it easier. I really wanted to focus on cities where I could actually find some of the police surveillance files regarding civil rights activists. That criterion alone narrowed down where I could research by a lot, because in so many Cities in the 70s, police departments bragged about, oh, we actually just destroyed a million police intelligence files. Oh, we actually just destroyed 2.5 million of those files. So don't worry about them because they don't have the power to embarrass anyone anymore. They're gone. And that was true in so many cities. There's only a few cities where large numbers of files were preserved. New York, I would say, is the most important. Chicago is also important. But I ended up not writing about Chicago a lot. One, because there's lots of good stuff written about Chicago already. But two, because those records, you literally have to get an affidavit signed by the person who is the subject of every record in order to write about it. And I didn't want to. It's just impossible to do. So I've wanted police records. I also wanted records from political organizers, and it also helped to have newspaper records. So those are kind of like the big three batches. And so the cities that I write about the Most, New York, L.A. houston, Philly, even some of these other cities I write about a little bit less, like Nashville or Danville, Virginia, also Birmingham a lot. They actually did have collections of police intelligence records. They also had activist records that I could tap into. It's covered in the press, what's going on? And then I think what I really discovered in the process of this that I hadn't known about was how important things like mayoral papers would be. I found some unexpected records in the HUAC collection, the House on American Activities Committee, that were LAPD surveillance files, and then, most importantly, federal court records. And so there were a number of big federal court cases where I went to the regional National Archives branch. You know, you have to order the boxes weeks in advance. They're mailed to the center often. And then they put these two big boxes on your desk. And I wouldn't describe them as really processed. I mean, they're often like, part of it will be like a big court transcript, but it'll be all these other things added into the record, almost none of which is available on a database like LexisNexis. So when the NYPD brings a case against three black activists coming out of the civil rights movement that say, hey, you tried to blow up the Statue of Liberty, I wanted to see that whole case file. And, you know, it was like, I don't know, 1200 plus pages of trial testimony. So I was looking for instances of movement, police interactions, especially police surveillance, and indictments of the movement, where there is a very long paper trail. And, yes, also lots and lots and lots of FBI requests which were hit or miss, but when they hit, they were very good. And there were some really important archival finds of police Intelligence files that I found buried in some of these FBI requests.
- [36:20]
A
It seems like you were able to use a lot of that to tell really powerful stories about many of the folks that are involved in this stuff, both the activists and the officers. I want to follow up on that stuff, but before we do, you mentioned Danville, and I wanted to ask a little bit about more about Danville, because you. You describe Danville as almost, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but almost like a turning point in this political policing approach that local departments use. So could you talk a little bit about the significance of Danville and the emergence of political policing?
- [36:54]
C
Yeah. So Danville, Virginia, is a town in south central Virginia. It maybe has something like, I don't know, at the time, a little less than a hundred thousand people in it. In the spring of 1963, in Birmingham, it's like the whole world's attention was captured by these terrible, terrible police attack dog and fire hydrant brutalizations of black protesters, especially children. And that was really the George Floyd movement of 1963. And that same year, just a few months later, in another part of the south, in Danville, Virginia, I think local officials paid attention to what happened in Birmingham, and they weren't as much saying, oh, that's so terrible what the Birmingham authorities did. It seemed that their response was more along the lines of, that was really stupid how the police responded. Couldn't they have done. Done things not to get caught on camera? Couldn't they have been more effective and more deliberate in trying to disable that local movement? They weren't the first people to ever kind of have thoughts like that, I think. In Albany, Georgia, in 61, 62, there was this guy, Laurie Pritchett, who also had a mindset of physical brutality is not going to work. And in fact, even after the Birmingham attacks, he goes to Birmingham and kind of offers consulting services to Bull Connor and says, hey, I can kind of show you how to actually really hurt these movements without using such brazen physical methods. And Bull Connor's not interested. But in Danville, Virginia, they have this local movement. It's the SCLC involved. And then SNCC gets involved, and there's local organizers, and there is some really bad physical brutality early on. But very quickly, the police department's there, or the police department shifts to a strategy of shutting down marches, shutting down rallies. Yes, jailing people and jailing people was important, but much more important, they issue 15 felony indictments of 15 different SNCC organizers. And so it's not just being Jailed for a night or two. They say you have violated state insurrection laws, which actually dated back to in the wake of, I believe, the John Brown insurrection. They were from, you know, slavery era. And basically all 15 of us, Nick. Organizers just had a flea because they weren't going to try mostly to fight it. Some of them got subpoenaed and had to show up for cases, but a lot of them got away. Yes, there was a local movement, but this loss of SNCC really kind of hurt that local movement. And it was much more effective than brutalizing the organizers on live tv. And I think the media was much less interested in Danville. And that was part of the way that police also won. That's part of the slow violence, is that the Danville story was national news, but only for a few weeks. It was kind of a blip on the radar in 63, even though it was a very important campaign for SNCC. I think the other thing that really drew me to Danville is that their chief of detectives ends up writing a textbook on how police can handle civil disturbances in the South. And the textbook is issued, I believe, in 64, a year later by a leading publisher of police instructional manuals. And, you know, it's not like it went on to be a bestseller, but it was kind of the book in the policing profession for, hey, if you want to quote, unquote, handle civil disturbances, this is how you do it. And he made a big advocacy of surveillance. And the book is filled with surveillance photos from the work they did against organizers in Danville with little black lines across their eyes. But that was important to me. It was like this chief of detectives was literally in the process of writing a book on how police departments can quote, unquote, more responsibly and perhaps more honestly more efficiently defeat movements in the south and across the country. I mean, he was very clear about this. He's like, this is a manual for all police. I'm from Danville, Virginia, but, hey, if you're in Chicago or if you're in la, you should read this book.
- [41:27]
A
Wow. Yeah. Okay. That's incredible. I think that's a really powerful story now, and I want to. Not just getting back to the people. I'm not sure how other people read books, but I love to start with the acknowledgments. They really lay bare the sort of intimate networks of people involved in the creation of a book. The social support, the mentors, the archivists, everything involved in a project that's as long as this kind we end up running up lengthy lists of people that we owe debts to. And in your acknowledgments, I was really struck by the mention of Sean Hann, who you. Whom you interviewed and who you say entrusted you with his father's papers. I had a similar experience while I was writing my book of, like, unarchived personal papers. And later in the book, we find out that his father, Mike Hannon, was a police officer with the LAPD that joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality and earned the epithet of a socialist cop. So could you talk a little bit about the process of becoming acquainted with Sean Hannon and then getting access to his father's papers?
- [42:32]
C
Yeah. And this is an interesting story. I discovered the case of Michael Hannon, of Mike Hannon, just kind of by happenstance, doing a lot of searching in the ProQuest historical LA Times. And it was the story of a white police officer who, not as an infiltrator, not as an undercover officer, but someone who had genuinely joined the Socialist Party in LA in around 62, and in 63, he had sincerely joined Core, and he had started attending civil rights protests, like, in his free time. But that he became more and more Persona non grata in his police department because, for example, he went to a few rallies and police department or police officials, police officers who he worked with would see him and recognize him, and they became very upset with him. And over time, basically, the LAPD charged him with insubordination and with basically not being an officer, not doing the work that he was supposed to do. They said he was a traitor to the department. And they. They said, you're done. You're done. We're kicking you out or we're going to punish you. We're going to have a little brief trial for you. Actually, they said, we're not even going to have a trial. We're just going to punish you. And he said for the first time, he was like, well, I'm actually owed a trial on this. And they had an administrative trial. It was the first officer, and this is under Chief William Parker. And so they had this very lengthy administrative trial. He's the first LAPD officer who is charged with misconduct who insists on the trial. It's a very lengthy trial, and I couldn't get the records from the lapd, But I got very lucky because I found that one of his attorneys, Mike Hannon's attorneys, was this guy, Hugh Mainus, who is a radical attorney who litigated against police violence. He had saved the transcript for the trial, and it was at ucla, so I got to look at that whole transcript. But I still, you know, the transcript only told so much of the story in addition to like newspapers. And by the way, this story was like all over the country. It wasn't just the LA Times. It was kind of like a short lived cause on the left. Here is a cop who is a socialist, he's a civil rights activist, he's being punished for his views. Look at William Parker. I'm trying to make an example out of him. And part of what was so intriguing about Mike Cannon was that he was a white police officer who. He's almost unique. I don't. I haven't been able to find about any other officer like this, but he really explicitly condemned the culture of white supremacy and racism while he was a police officer. He did it in writing. He did it within the department. He was going up against a lot of his colleagues who were affiliated with the John Birch Society. And you know, he was confronting this racism head on as a white police officer. And he understood, like as a white police officer, he had this view of how the system worked and none of his colleagues were willing to talk about it. But I wanted to understand him more. I found out he was deceased. I couldn't find anyone to interview about him. It just took so long. I was sending letters to old family members, houses. And then I think I sent a letter to someone who referred the letter to maybe one of Mike Hannon's sisters or daughters. And then the daughter sent it to Sean Hannon, a son who lived in Connecticut. And I reached out to him and to be honest, at first he wasn't too excited to talk about it. I think part of it was that his relationship with his father was complicated. But we basically finally talked where he said, okay, you can come up to my home and interview me and maybe I have a few papers that you would be interested in looking at. And this was the summer of 2019. And I went up there and interviewed him. And then he pulled out a box or two. And it wasn't like a huge amount of stuff. But what was so powerful about the materials that he pulled out, some of them were like, how would I like professional evaluations of Mike Cannon I had never seen, including ones where his supervisors were criticizing him for being involved in the civil rights movement. Some of them were handwritten notes, some of them, there was a good amount of hate mail in there. People all over the country writing to him like, you're a dirty red. How dare you. Really, really Virulent stuff. There were, you know, personal recollections of his time as a police officer and the very, very negative treatment he got from his co workers, stuff that he wasn't even able to talk about in this trial. And so surprisingly, his son, Sean Hannon, said, you know, you can just borrow this stuff. And I ended up borrowing it. And then the pandemic happened and I just kind of had it for a while, for a year. But it was, you know, probably about 150 pages worth of stuff that was just a gold mine because it was so difficult to learn about who Mike Hannon was from just that trial transcript and from the newspapers. So the combination of getting to know his son, his son entrusted me with those papers, seeing the hate mail, seeing the professional evaluations, it just kind of brought into focus kind of what this officer's, for lack of a better term, crusade had been like. And he's ultimately suspended, not fired, but they basically just make it unbearable for him to be a cop. And he is at the same time attending law school. And he, after a couple of years, leaves the force and becomes an attorney who often defends victims of police violence.
- [48:17]
A
Such a great story and also an example of the sort of dogged pursuit of a topic by a. By a researcher with, With a pretty amazing payo. So thank you for telling me that. Another of the people that makes up this story makes it such a great kind of granular, detailed discussion of all these different folks that are involved is Ray Wood. And he's maybe a little bit more infamous than Hannon was, a person that was kind of known in the movement. So can you tell us about Ray Wood?
- [48:48]
C
In April 1964, the NYPD's Red Squad, the Bureau of Special Services, starts to escalate its attacks on black political activists. And on a single day in April 1964, they. They hire two African American officers and dispatch them into activist groups. One is Gene Roberts. And Gene Roberts is dispatched to infiltrate Malcolm X's inner circle. In fact, when Malcolm X is murdered, there are pictures in Life magazine of a man crouching over his body. And that's Gene Roberts, who was his bodyguard, most likely not responsible for the murder, but his appearance there is just phrases, all kinds of questions. On the same day that Gene Roberts is hired, the exact same day this guy Ray Wood is hired. And Ray Wood is a black officer. He's brand new. Both of those guys have not been police officers before. Like, they're basically. They skip the police academy and are just kind of sent into the Red Squad because they don't want anyone to know them, even within the department. Ray Wood's assignment is to infiltrate the Congress of Racial Equality, specifically the Bronx chapter, where a guy named Herb Callender is kind of the most outspoken organizer in the city against police violence. So much so that the NYPD commissioner had condemned him in an Easter Sunday speech as one of the three worst rabble rousers in the city. So Ray Wood very quickly infiltrates the Bronx chapter, makes himself available. He volunteers. They like him, he's got a winning personality. Nobody knew him before. He just came to the office and said, I want to be involved. And he goes to rallies, he goes to marches, he gets an officer position in the chapter, and he starts pushing the chapter to do more and more outlandish schemes. The thing that he really encourages them to do is this idea of carrying out a citizen's arrest of the mayor of New York, Robert Wagner. And the idea is, oh, Robert Wagner is violating state housing anti discrimination laws through some of the projects he's funding. So let's do a citizen's arrest of him, which was legal in New York State. If you followed certain laws and you give someone a notice in advance, and this core chapter does it. And it's really, this is really prodded by Ray Wood. Ray Wood, Herb Callender and another activist announce they're going to do this. They meet the mayor at City hall, they rush in after him. He gets away, and they're very quickly arrested, those three quote, unquote activists. Ray Wood is very quickly kind of, you know, bypasses arrest when they quietly say to the judge, you know, he should not be arrested. Herb Callender lands in a psychiatric ward in Bellevue for trying to arrest the mayor. It's there for about a week, but after maybe a month or two more, even less. The nypd, it seems that they think Ray Wood should move on to more aggressive and more radical activists. It's kind of like, it seems like they can't get core to do anything worse than trying to do a citizen's arrest. So then Ray Wood starts to hang out with these guys. One of them is involved with a small, very tiny group called the Black Liberation Front. And in short, there's this guy in the Black Liberation Front who, I don't know, he, he had been to Cuba. He has radical friends. He has a bit of a background in the civil rights movement, but they're kind of pushing into what would maybe become black power. Ray Wood starts hanging out with him. He starts hanging out with these other Activists who he's friends with like Walter Bowe, Khalil Syed. And basically Ray Wood says, you know what would be really great? We should. One of the guys makes a joke about, hey, we could blow up the Statue of Liberty. That would send a great message about the hypocrisy of America. And Ray Wood in these closed door meetings says, we should do that 100%. Shortly after that, Ray Wood gets an explosives manual for the guys. Not long after that, he says, hey, let's go up to Montreal, let's go up to Canada. Someone has a contact up there. We can buy dynamite from them. He provides things like gasoline cans, things for explosives. He goes with this activist up to New York or from New York to Montreal, crossing federal borders. They don't get the explosives, but they come back. And by this time, the NYPD's Red Squad is tipped off the FBI. And within weeks, all three of those men are arrested. Ray Wood, his name appears on the front page of newspapers across the country. His face is shielded to conceal his identity. But he's now been outed as the guy who caught these three men who supposedly were trying to blow up the Statue of Liberty, even though all along the way he is pushing and encouraging the plan. And they have a big federal trial and all three of them go to prison. Fortunately, each one, it's for fewer than five years. But it really is, you know, devastating for those men and their families and especially for the two supporting men, Beau and Syed. It's very questionable, just rereading the transcript, how much, if at all, they were involved. And it also just comes up again and again. Ray Wood admitting, well, yeah, I brought him the explosives manual. And yeah, they didn't have a car, so I got the NYPD to rent me a car. And yeah, we took the car to Canada to try to get the dynamite. And yeah, I did all of these things, but they would have done it anyway. And, you know, it's, it's just the story of this infiltrator who just wreaks havoc on the civil rights movement. And even though those guys called themselves the Black Liberation Front, we would say, hey, that's more of a black power thing. Walter Bowe had a background in civil rights. Khalil Syed had a background in sncc. Bob Collier was kind of the ringleader. Even he had some background in civil rights work. And Bray Wood seemed to really help get all three of them landed in federal prison.
- [55:21]
A
Yeah, yeah. Can I ask how you reconstructed this story? So maybe you can. Is this something that you're building chiefly through secondary accounts that other folks have written, or did it come from primary sources, or how did that come together?
- [55:36]
C
Great question. And a few people had written about this in short detail before. I mean, again, this was national news. In February 1965, the most important thing for me was finding. Getting the case file, the entire case file, out of the National Archives in New York and just reading the very extensive transcript, not only of the Federal District Court trial, but then the appeal. And so, you know, that took a very, very long time. I think I referred to it. It was over a thousand pages. And, you know, there's differing accounts within that testimony. But what was so important to me is to read sworn testimony from Ray Wood where he admits a lot of these things, you know, that he did. So that was very important to me, but something I got very lucky with. I started to pursue this question. Well, Bob Collier, Walter Bowe, Khalil Syed, this literally happened in 1965. Whatever happened to those guys? Bob Collier is deceased. But his name came up because he was later involved in the infamous Panther 21 trial, where the NYPD accused a whole score of New York Black Panthers of supposedly trying to blow up police stations. And they were famously acquitted. Among those, 21 was Atheni Shakur, Tupac's mother. But what I discovered was that Khalil Syed and Walter Bowe were still both living. And I got very, very lucky, and I was able to locate Khalil Syed. And I happened to be in Texas right, when I was able to locate him and see where he was living. And we met up and did an interview. And so we talked about these events from 1965. This was in 2019, when I did that. And he was still friends and in contact with Walter Bo. And it took some convincing, but he talked Walter BO and his wife into doing an interview with me, which I did very shortly before the pandemic. So that was very important, too. Right. It's to get the perspective of the state, which includes the testimony of the political organizers and the police infiltrator. Yes. Media accounts. But also to get the accounts of these two defendants who ended up serving prison time for these charges. And also, critically, I found FBI files that extensively outlined the FBI's conversation with the NPD and specifically with Ray Wood, and how Ray Wood and the nypd, at the very end, kind of gave this case to the feds. And that was very important. I don't believe any historian had written using those sources. And just seeing, like, this plot sounded so outlandish. At first, even the FBI didn't quite believe it. And over time they said, actually, Ray Wood, he's well spoken and he seems clean cut, and we. We trust this guy now. But seeing that process where this long Red Squad infiltration scheme dating from April 64, turned into arrests by the feds in February 1965 and eventually convictions, tracing that was important through those various documents and through those interviews.
- [58:59]
A
Yeah, I'm sure it must have been an incredible moment to make contact with those folks and then finally sit down with them and be able to talk to them.
- [59:08]
C
It really was. It really was. I mean, Walter, Bo was 91 when I interviewed him, and a lot of the case he didn't want to talk about, but just to be able to be there with him and to get his accounts even of a lot of stuff around, it was just. It was powerful.
- [59:23]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. I have one more question about this, then I'd like to move on to some of the folks who were the victims of this kind of police infiltration and slow violence. That question had to do with the. The hiring of black police officers. And I. This had been on demand of the police reform movements for a long time, and I don't think that this is how they envisioned it. So could you talk a little bit about the way that the movement made sense of black officers and the issues associated with that?
- [59:55]
C
Yes. And so I think probably a lot of your listeners will know the book by James Foreman, Jr. Locking up our Own. There have been other works about the history of black police officers, and I think there's a few more in the pipeline. Yes, this had been a civil rights demand going back to, I mean, decades and decades, and it continued to be a demand of the movement in the 60s. But I think over the course of the 60s, especially, the more radical groups like SNCC developed a more critical and even jaundiced view of how white police departments were utilizing and weaponizing black officers and kind of tokenizing them. I mean, just like today, how. You know, the police car that's emblazoned with the Juneteenth Kente logo, SNCC was beginning to kind of put their finger on that in the 60s. But I think. I think what SNCC saw and denounced in several instances, and so did other black radicals, was that red squads could not really infiltrate black activist groups without black officers. And I tried to take this question very, very seriously, especially as a white historian, not just reflexively condemning black officers who became police spies and infiltrators. But trying to understand, why did they do this? Who are the people who do this? Like, what can I actually know about these shadowy figures that makes some sense of this? I mean, one thing that became clear is that many of these black officers were often assigned to do this work without really knowing what they were getting into. They knew a bit, but they very frequently were officers who again, bypassed the police academy and were just kind of plugged instantly into intelligence units and told, okay, we've got some dangerous people. We need you to do undercover work. Other kind of continuities. I saw many of the infiltrators who were usually black, the ones working for police departments. They often came from small towns in the south and had, you know, moved to the big city kind of great migration style. They often were people who had had kind of, you know, maybe a military background. They often had a pretty kind of. What's the word? Kind of peripatetic kind of professional journey. Like, I'm trying this job. It didn't work. I'm trying school here for a little bit. It didn't work. What am I going to do with my life? And one fact is that police work was opening up in major cities, as here is a government job that's beginning to open up to some black people and it is a real path into the middle class. Right. I just think it's important to kind of stress that material attraction because these were positions of prestige, not just the political intelligence ones, but police officers in general. And I think the more radical black activists over the course of the 60s begin to say, these officers who are doing this, they're traitors. Even if they don't know what they're getting into, they have to stop doing it and get out of it once they realize what it is. To me, what was really eye opening was to see a national meeting of black police officers. I believe it was in either 71 or 72, and it was in the wake of the Panther 21 trial. And this is not noble. Noble is the national organization of black law enforcement officers, I believe. But it was a predecessor. It was a national organization set up by black officers to represent black officers interests. And at their national convention in 1971, they pass a resolution that says, we demand that police departments across the country no longer order our officers to spy on our black communities and especially to spy on black activist groups. And I don't think a lot came of that resolution. But for me, that was a really eye opening moment to read a story about that and see how that had become such an issue and so common that this national black officer group felt the need to denounce the practice. And yeah, I think most black officers had very, very mixed feelings about this verging on strong opposition, but that these white led intelligence units, they got to black officers early, and then when they found someone who was willing to do it, they elevated them as heroes. They got them press coverage after they were, you know, unmasked. They had them testifying, in some cases to congress. They're tokenizing them, but they're also elevating them. And, you know, the. The thing I'll say there also is just that, you know, there's a misconception that all black people supported the civil rights movement. Every community throughout history has been divided over questions of how you advance your community. Every community throughout history has had the traitors and the people who betray others. And so I think sometimes there is this myth of, like this, the single black community that had a single approach to the civil rights movement, and that's just not the case. Even if we're talking about very small numbers of black officers who did this work, they're part of a longer history of people betraying each other.
- [65:42]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that that's a really great way of thinking. You've done an amazing job of handling the complexity involved with that issue. But moving on, I want to talk a little bit about at least one more of the people that's. That's experiences the other side of this violence. And that person is Leotis Johnson. I think that his story, and I would like to hear your response to this is he ends up being one of the most tragic victims of political policing. And then also the case is emblematic of what you describe as slow violence, taking him out of the movement for many years, undermining the work that he was involved in at the time. So could you talk about his activism and the resulting persecution that he faced at the hands of the Houston police?
- [66:31]
C
Yes. So Houston was very attractive to me. One, it's a very large city. It is the largest city in the south. And yes, I mean, people can debate how much it's in the south, but it identifies as being part of the south, especially in the 1960s. It has the largest black community in the south. And it had a very, very aggressive and very kind of openly racist police department, but it also has a local myth of having a very small, quiet civil rights movement. The movement there was much. And it was smaller in a lot of ways than the movement in Atlanta, than Birmingham, then Nashville, then New Orleans than so many Southern cities. In 1966, on the campus of Texas Southern University and HBCU, they start a Friends of SNCC chapter, and National Sikh leadership comes and visits, and the local police department has a new red squad. And they start spying on them virtually immediately. I got very lucky because I found a lot of these memos in the Houston mayor's papers. Louis Welch at the public library there, all these memos about sncc. And what the local police department there gets very irritated about, among other things, is that this SNCC chapter on campus starts protesting police violence in the spring of 1967. And they start holding protests off campus, and they start holding protests in different parts of town. One of their leaders is this guy, Leotis Johnson. This is kind of a two part story. But in response to growing protests, the Houston police accuse these SNCC activists of trying to start riots. And they launch a massive raid one night on dorms on the campus with about 50 officers firing about a thousand rounds of ammunition into a dorm. And miraculously, no students are killed. But a police officer is killed, most likely from a ricocheting bullet and most likely from a bullet that came from a police officer's gun. But there's never any ballistics done. The police ring. Five felony indictments. Working with the DA against student activists. They say, hey, we don't even know if you shot that bullet, but you created the conditions for a riot and that riot essentially killed our officer. That's felony murder. They indict these guys. Their allies just go into a tailspin, but they're not able to indict Leotis Johnson. He's not on campus that night. I think, in fact, he may have been in jail that night. So Leotis Johnson is this guy who's very outspoken against police violence. And the next year, in 1968, and he's being spied on, they assign an officer to infiltrate his group. The officer befriends him. In 1968, Martin Luther King is killed. There's a rally shortly after that in which Leotis Johnson criticizes the mayor. The mayor shows up and Leotis Johnson's very critical of him. Like, why are you here? Embarrasses the mayor. About a few days later, a warrant is served on Leotis Johnson. Felony distribution of marijuana. And it describes events from a month earlier which are outlined by this guy who has infiltrated his circle. He didn't know he was undercover. Leotis Johnson handed a single joint to this officer one night when they're smoking and they treat the handing of the joint as intent to distribute, which at that time in Texas is felony and carries prison term up to 30 years. The DA brings a quick case against Leotis Johnson. There's all this negative press, and Leotis Johnson is very quickly convicted. He gets a quote, unquote easy sentence. He's sentenced to 20 years in prison. So he goes to prison and within a year or so, local ACLU activists and SNCC activists start building this case. Oh, he's a political prisoner. He wasn't given a fair trial. He requested a change of venue because of all the terrible media going on. They wouldn't give it to him. He's sitting in prison. It begins to kind of become a big cause in Texas among a whole range of activists. And then it becomes a national cause. And people like Amnesty International are writing about it. National acu, aclu, sncc, national office, International press. And John Lennon and Yoko Ono write a song about John Sinclair, the Michigan activist who, you know in Detroit. And there are lyrics in the song about Leotis. I mean, he's really. It becomes a big name. He sits in prison for about three years and finally his attorneys are able to convince a federal judge to revisit the case. And after very careful deliberation, the federal judge decides, you know what, Mr. Johnson's due process was violated. He should have gotten a change of venue request. He should have gotten a trial that was structured in different ways. I'm going to remand it back to the state. They can try him if they want to again or not. And they decide not to. And after three years, almost four years, he's released from prison. But it's a very sad case because, you know, he was not an angel. He had various things going on in his life and his life after that is just a bunch of different series of things going on. That he dies at a pretty early age. He's arrested for different things. But really it's like that Stan prison really appears to have broken him. Even though. Not even though. But you know, he could have served 20 years. He got out after four, but it just threw everything into upheaval. It was just really, really hard.
- [72:18]
A
Well, I think part of that is actually it supports your argument about slow violence because in some ways, if he's in prison for four years and when he comes out, the movement is just not the same as it was before. If in some way he's. The movement is providing something useful and valuable to him, then the four year prison stay makes it much more difficult to reconnect with a movement that is. Has changed by 1971 or 1972.
- [72:50]
C
That's such a good point. I mean, yeah, it's like his imprisonment takes Leotis Johnson away from the movement, but it also takes the movement away from him. And the movement is kind of his gateway to like. I mean, he had been in prison before, even before that stuff, but the movement gives his life shape and direction that he did not have before. And without it, that shape and direction kind of is lost again.
- [73:16]
A
Right, right. I think that makes a lot of sense. Now. The last person I wanted to ask you about is John Rains, whose name was, until relatively recently, about as obscure as some of the other characters who you've given historical attention to with this, with this manuscript. So who was John Rains? What did he do? And how did his experiences with political policing in the 1960s motivate him to later contribute to what you call the unmasking of this political policing? Right.
- [73:47]
C
So I suspect a lot of the listeners are familiar with in March 1971, how a group of anti war activists in Philadelphia, in the suburbs of Philadelphia in Media, Pennsylvania, during the Ali Frazier fight, broke into a very small FBI office and liberated, just took all the papers they could find, ran off with them, took them to a safe house, handled them with gloves, made copies, sent them to reporters. And one reporter, Betty Metzger for the Washington Post, reported on it. And these were just very, very detailed and lurid explanations of secret political surveillance and infiltration work that the FBI was doing that had been rumored about for years, but the documents of which had never been released. This includes also the first ever public revelation of cointelpro. Although even after the release of these documents, it took several years before people even figured out what is cointelpro. So those people, you know, the FBI just spent a tremendous amount of agent hours to try to track them down. And they came very, very close to capturing at least one or two of them. They certainly interviewed some of the people, but they never found them and the case was closed. And then after decades, the statutes of limitations passed. And in 2014, several of those activists who were by that time in their 70s came forward and there was a documentary made called 1971. It's. It's very, very good documentary. One of those people who had stolen those documents with the stated mission of exposing the work of the FBI's attacks on movements was a guy named John Raines. And his wife also was involved, Bonnie Rains. And this took me a long time to kind of piece this together, but John Rains had Been an activist going back to the early 60s. And his entree into activism really was the civil rights movement and specifically the Freedom Rides. He did a freedom ride starting in Missouri that went through Arkansas. But years later, after he outed himself as one of the people who did the media PA robbery or burglary, he said very explicitly, I would have never done that had I not started with the civil rights movement and not just started with the civil rights movement. But he said the civil rights movement is what allowed me to understand the terrible power of political policing. He was arrested for the Freedom Rides. He had police snipers pointing rifles at him. He was chased out of towns he saw there, and also, I believe in southwest Georgia, terrible things that police were doing to activists behind closed doors. And he said that was the roots of his whole rethinking of the power of police and that that was the very long tail of the trajectory that led him to helping to break into that FBI office in Media PA in 71. And so for me, even though those were quote unquote, anti war activists who did that, based on his explanation of that stuff, I really came to the conclusion that that action had a long term political basis in the civil rights movement and in the civil rights movement's rethinking of police power. And that was important for me to kind of identify him not just as this, you know, Temple University religion professor who had been flirting with the anti war movement, but with someone who was coming out of the civil movement and how that movement's conception of police power and political action really shaped him. That was just so important to me to put him there and to show the picture of him being arrested as a freedom rider in Arkansas and how that's kind of step one in his political evolution. That was important to me to do that.
- [77:55]
A
Yeah, that picture was really amazing. I was stunned. I was just teaching this week about the media Pennsylvania break in. And then I came across that image and I just floored me. The Rain story is really emblematic of the power of the book, which is to is, as you suggest, to re situate the civil rights movement in the context of its activism against police. And so by way of a conclusion, I wanted to ask one last thing. And you can take this whichever way you want. It's like, what would you do differently next time? Which is maybe an odd question, or perhaps alternately, what are you up to now and next?
- [78:29]
C
So I don't know what I'm up to now and next, other than talking about this book and trying to capture my catch My breath a little bit and just kind of savor the moment. I really do think it's important for authors to enjoy it.
- [78:43]
A
Yeah.
- [78:43]
C
Help spread the word. And we want to be read. I think that is the healthy instinct of an author. We want to be read. But things I would have done differently. That's a good question. I think there's. I wish I could have written a somewhat shorter book, to be honest. I don't think it's terribly long, but I would have loved to have it be even a little tighter. I think one thing, I got very wrapped up in FBI files, and I use them a lot, but I also think that sucked up a lot of my time. I would have loved to figure out a way to find some other police surveillance files, which I think are still out there. The question of Chicago is a tricky one. There are historians who have used the Chicago police surveillance files that are at the Chicago History Museum. But if you interpret the court order correctly, that governs those files. You're not supposed to write about, quote, about, talk about the subjects of those surveillance files without the permission of those people. So I literally got two of the officers in the SNCC Legacy Project, which is a successor organization of sncc, to sign the affidavits so that I can now say publicly the Chicago Police Department did monitor and surveil the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Like, just getting that alone took a ton of time. So, you know, I still feel like I would have loved to have found some other police surveillance files. There are some out there. There's some, you know, Michigan State Police, where you are. There's some important ones I've heard of, ones in Denver, I think. Yeah, that would have been good to be able to do. I think. The other thing that I don't know if I would have done differently, but it took me a while to realize is just like, you know, sadly, the movement, the moment of the Black Lives Matter movement. I originally was writing this book thinking, like, the BOM will be the entry point for most people. Like, that will be the way they understand that book. I didn't know how long it would take to write the book. I didn't think movements last forever. But I also didn't foresee how fierce the backlash against BLM would be. But I also didn't foresee how BLM would, like, explode in 2020, you know, that huge rise. And what I didn't foresee was that we would be in this moment now of just really sustained, elevated attacks on political organizers of all kinds on the left and that, you know, the attacks on activists against ICE and activists for Palestinian solidarity, these federal orders condemning and criminalizing so called domestic terrorists, I didn't really wasn't able to foresee that was coming in such a sustained way and that that would probably be the main way now in 2025 that people see the current relevance of this. I think BLM is still very important. I just think that sadly it's been pushed back in certain ways. And so I don't know if I could have done that differently, but if I had had a crystal ball, it would have been kind of thinking about these different political possibilities that will shape this book. I mean, it's just impossible. 2020 was just unprecedented and it already feels like an eternity ago.
- [82:18]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, these, these regrets not notwithstanding, you've written a fantastic book and it's been a pleasure speaking with you. For our listeners, Police against the Movement, the Sabotage of Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists who Fought Back is out now from Princeton University Press and is available wherever fine books are sold. Josh, I thank you again for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book.
- [82:40]
C
Thank you, Michael.