Sanitizing the Civil Rights Movement
Americans have fallen short in remembering the full power and promise of the civil rights movement in the 21st century, as politicians and commentators — especially those on the right — substitute nostalgia and color-blind nostrums for honest appraisal of the organized struggle to dismantle white supremacy. Misappropriation of the movement’s legacy is a recurring problem, but at least one that is widely recognized by professional historians. The sheer volume and growing sophistication of new public historical work on the movement in the last decade and a half — from signage, to documentaries, to exhibits and new museums — has helped to stem such creeping amnesia.
But even as Americans have made strides in how they remember and commemorate the civil rights struggle, police have succeeded in shifting attention away from their sophisticated repression of the movement. Not only have they concealed their record of political policing and slow violence, but they have done their utmost to obscure how activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) put the fight against police repression at the heart of the civil rights movement’s work.
A chief example of this revisionist approach can be seen in the National Law Enforcement Museum (NLEM) in Washington, DC. Authorized by Congress and opened in 2018, the NLEM is overseen by a board filled with representatives from police unions and advocacy organizations. Although it is privately funded, its congressional mandate and location mere blocks from the National Mall bestow it with an unofficial status as our country’s national museum of policing.
Dishonesty pervades the NLEM’s narration of the police role in the civil rights movement. “As Americans took to the streets to voice their opinions and demand their rights, and police sought to maintain order and enforce the law, some clashes turned violent,” an exhibit on the 1960s tells us, avoiding the question of whether police attacked peaceful protesters. Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor appears as a rogue police chief who was “widely condemned by law enforcement” for attacking protesters with dogs and fire hoses, a dubious claim considering how many law enforcement officials refused to speak out against the Birmingham police. As the museum reassures us, “Thankfully, with the 1970s came efforts to repair the rift, as many police departments renewed their commitment to diversity and community engagement.” As far as the National Law Enforcement Museum is concerned, police may have retaliated against protesters in the past — but not anymore.
Leading college textbooks reveal how police attempt to sanitize their relationship to the civil rights movement as well. One such title is An Introduction to Policing, a widely assigned text published by Cengage currently in its ninth edition. The book’s primary author, John Dempsey, completed a 24-year career with NYPD that began in 1964, the same year that undercover police spy Ray Wood infiltrated CORE and other civil rights groups in New York. In his textbook’s second edition, published in 1999, Dempsey wrote of the “adversaries on the street” whom he encountered early in his career as he “policed antiwar marches, civil rights demonstrations, and urban riots.” Like the National Law Enforcement Museum, Dempsey and his coauthors minimize and conceal the active role police played in sabotaging the movement. A recurring strategy is to collapse any difference between peaceful protest and urban rebellions, describing how “the struggle for racial equality reached its peak, accompanied by marches, demonstrations, and riots that burned down whole neighborhoods in U.S. urban centers” in the 1960s.
Another strategy is to cast police as unwitting political victims forced to carry out the orders of corrupt officials against protesters. “The police were caught between those fighting for their civil rights and the government officials (the employers of the police) who wanted to maintain the status quo, between demonstrating students and college and city administrators,” Dempsey and his coauthors tell readers. “The police received much criticism during these years. Some of it was deserved, but much of it was for circumstances beyond their control.” Police, in other words, were not active combatants against the civil rights movement but, rather, mere spectators conscripted into action by paymasters who did not have their backs. Such far-fetched claims of political neutrality are contradicted by the long record of police attacks on civil rights activists.
In clear acts of projection, Dempsey’s textbook and the NLEM decry the surveillance and invasions of privacy perpetrated by federal law enforcement against activists. Just as Dempsey condemns the “ugly political underside to Hoover’s expanded role for the FBI,” the museum disavows COINTELPRO as “inconsistent with American principles.” Both omit the fact that countless police departments across the country not only committed similar abuses but assisted with the Bureau’s counterintelligence efforts. Lest anyone doubt the NLEM’s embrace of political policing, the museum’s “covert ops” exhibit features a cheery graphic titled “How to Set Up a Wire Tap,” while its research center is endowed by the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation and named for the FBI director.
To their credit, Dempsey and his coauthors admit at least one truth about this history in their most recent edition published in 2019. “Although the civil rights movement was necessary in the evolution of our nation,” they concede, “the use of the police by government officials to thwart the movement left a wound in community relations that still has not healed.” For once, police and their backers have admitted their profession’s sabotage of the movement.
When U.S. congressman and former SNCC chairperson John Lewis died on July 17, 2019, Americans commemorated his passing with an outpouring of celebrations of his life and the civil rights movement. That summer, as the COVID pandemic raged, an estimated 15 to 26 million people protested for Black lives across the United States in the wake of the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville and too many other acts of police violence to name. It would prove to be the largest wave of sustained political protest in American history, drawing frequent comparisons with the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.
Just one day after completing a round of chemotherapy, an emaciated Lewis made his last public appearance with a visit to the massive Black Lives Matter mural painted directly on Sixteenth Street in Washington, DC, on June 7. Days earlier, crowds of protesters had been teargassed there by U.S. Park Police and Secret Service so that they could clear a path for Donald Trump to display an upside-down Bible at a press conference in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
Six weeks later, Lewis’ passing prompted countless commentators to place Lewis’ experience as a victim of police violence at the center of his story. Television coverage of his death almost invariably featured footage of law enforcement officers assaulting Lewis and his fellow protesters in Selma at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Indeed, the very first sentence of the New York Times obituary identified him as “a son of sharecroppers and an apostle of nonviolence who was bloodied at Selma and across the Jim Crow South in the historic struggle for racial equality.” Likewise, the opening line of the Washington Post obituary described Lewis as “a civil rights leader who preached nonviolence while enduring beatings and jailings during seminal front-line confrontations of the 1960s.”
The implication was that suffering through police violence — and not resisting it — defined Lewis and the movement. In his time as SNCC chairman, Lewis was among the movement’s most prominent critics of police violence. Curiously, when he passed almost no one remembered him that way. Though recollections of Lewis made liberal reference to ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, their message was clear: the departed civil rights leader had passed the torch to a new generation of activists who, unlike those in the 1960s, could finally confront that brutality head-on.
Fixated on the televised assault at Selma, Lewis’ obituaries overlooked the full array of slow violence Lewis had endured at the hands of police. Although some obituaries referenced the white mobs that set upon the Freedom Riders in Montgomery with baseball bats and metal pipes, knocking Lewis unconscious, virtually none mentioned that the attacks had been coordinated by members of the Montgomery police or that a federal court had ruled that officers had “acted in concert with the Klan groups herein named to commit acts of violence.” Lewis’ obituaries also failed to note the pervasive surveillance that SNCC endured during his chairmanship — not only by the FBI but also by local police in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Danville, Virginia. Indeed, the biggest speech of Lewis’ life, at the March on Washington, was surveilled by multiple police departments.
Some obituaries noted that movement leaders had forced Lewis to censor his own speech at the March because they feared that his criticisms of Kennedy’s civil rights bill threatened the legislation’s passage. But obituaries mentioned neither that the SNCC chairman’s address repeatedly denounced police violence — from physical brutality to retaliatory prosecutions— nor that those charges elicited loud cheers from the crowd of some 250,000 attendees. Lewis had brought his message condemning police violence to the largest audience that had ever gathered as part of the movement.
Indeed, it was during Lewis’ chairmanship that SNCC made combating state-sponsored violence a focal point of its work. Chief among these efforts was SNCC’s campaign against police in Americus, Georgia, in 1963, where police chief Ross Chambliss jailed a quartet of SNCC and CORE organizers on felony insurrection charges carrying the death penalty. “Legal terror is an old problem in the Black Belt communities of southwest Georgia,” Lewis remarked at a press conference publicizing affidavits from Americus residents who had been beaten by police and crammed with as many as 34 other protesters into tiny jail cells without beds. “The police state atmosphere that prevails in Americus today makes that city a little South Africa for Negroes,” Lewis protested further in a telegram to the U.S. Justice Department that August. Lewis did not reserve his criticisms for Southern police, either. “The use of police and military power to try to solve problems that Negroes are confronted with in the ghettoes and slums of our cities is an unspeakable mistake,” he warned in August 1965 as the LAPD and National Guard imposed martial law on Black Angelenos during the Watts uprising.
By ignoring this work, the coverage of Lewis’ life perpetuated two dangerous myths: one, that civil rights organizers with saint-like perseverance suffered through police violence without fighting back and, two, that physical attacks such as those at Selma were the dominant form of violence perpetuated by police against the movement. In fact, many police understood the political risks of naked physical brutality and attacked the movement in ways more acceptable to the political mainstream. Retaliatory prosecutions, invasive surveillance, and covert collaborations with vigilante mobs were all more effective means of undermining the movement while minimizing political damage to police.
The public’s virtual amnesia about the slow violence by police that SNCC both experienced and resisted stands in marked contrast to the widespread fascination with the FBI’s actions against Martin Luther King. If historians in recent years have succeeded in dislodging King as the overwhelming focus of movement histories, we have failed to decenter him in our accounts of repression of the Black freedom struggle. Again and again, that story is told as a battle between two men, King and J. Edgar Hoover. In these stories, Hoover is the ultimate law enforcement villain against whom all others are measured. Meanwhile, Lewis and his comrades are remembered as victims who endured police brutality— not organizers in a broader fight against state repression.
Excerpted from Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back. © 2025 by Joshua Clark Davis. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
