Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools. 29 pages.
Through examining FBI documents, students learn the scope of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to spy on, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt all corners of the Black Freedom Movement.

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students explore three documents produced in the wake of three major episodes of racial violence (1919, 1967, 2014) to understand the long trajectory of police violence in Black communities.

Book — Non-Fiction. By Elizabeth Hinton. 2021. 224 pages.
The rebellion and movement for Black lives of 2020 had clear precursors, this book explains, and any attempt to understand that crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.

Book — Non-fiction. By Paul Butler. 2018. 320 pages.
A former federal prosecutor explains how the criminal justice system works against the people and how we can disrupt its abuse.

Following years of organizing against police brutality, four marches from different points in the city of Washington, D.C. converged at 10th and U Streets NW.

Two African American brothers — Charles and Alphonso Ferguson — were shot and killed by a white police officer in the segregated Freeport neighborhood of Long Island, New York.

Police used firehoses to attack South Carolina college students engaged in a peaceful protest against segregation. The judge sends their NAACP lawyer to jail for “pursuing his case vigorously.”

Following months of protests to end segregation, Black residents of Tuscaloosa, Alabama were brutally attacked by police and the Klan inside the First African Baptist Church.

Five-year-old Anthony Quin and his mother and siblings protested against the election of five Mississippi Congressmen from districts where Black people were not allowed to vote. Refused admittance, they sat on the steps and police-instigated mayhem ensued.

In the face of white supremacists’ threats, a Black Detroit judge upheld the law and acted for equal justice for Black churchgoers detained unlawfully after a deadly police shoot-out.