America, U.S.A. : How Race Shadows The Nation’s Anniversaries
by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
Crown, 2026
[Publication date: May 26, 2026]
by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
Crown, 2026
[Publication date: May 26, 2026]
The New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again confronts America’s unfinished story in this blistering reassessment of race, freedom, and the myths that bind us.
“A thoughtful, insightful, beautifully written book that is timely and welcomed in these perilous times.”—Bryan Stevenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy
“Eddie S. Glaude Jr. opens a necessary conversation as we reflect on the meaning of our country’s 250th anniversary.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.
America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.
Centered around the major celebrations of America’s milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.
REVIEWS:
“A thoughtful, insightful, beautifully written book that is timely and welcomed in these perilous times.”—Bryan Stevenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy
“Eddie S. Glaude Jr. opens a necessary conversation as we reflect on the meaning of our country’s 250th anniversary.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.
America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.
Centered around the major celebrations of America’s milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.
REVIEWS:
“No one understands the excruciating interiors of our ‘original sin’ better than Eddie Glaude. His scholarship extends into the darkest corners of our past. His insight offers fragments of a map leading to higher ground.”—Ken Burns
“Intriguing . . . Perfectly timed [and] refreshingly honest . . . Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that ‘the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.’ So, too, does this book.”—The New York Times
“America, U.S.A. is a bracing and elegant analysis of the contradiction at the heart of the American experiment: a country that claims to be committed to equality also adheres to white supremacy. Glaude opens a necessary conversation as we reflect on the meaning of our country’s 250th anniversary.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
“Eddie Glaude reckons with the power of our stated values—liberty, freedom, equality, and independence—in the dim light of our actual unwillingness to share, sacrifice, yield, and prosper for the national good. Glaude is honest, bracing, and devastatingly brilliant.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a National Book Award Finalist
“This is a thoughtful, insightful, beautifully written book that is timely and welcomed in these perilous times.”—Bryan Stevenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy
“With exquisite prose, stunning moral clarity, abundant heart and soul, and utter genius, yet again Eddie Glaude proves why he is so often referred to as the conscience of the nation. It makes the stakes of America’s complex, anguished, and beautiful story clear as a bell.”—Imani Perry, Harvard University, National Book Award–winning author of South to America
“Glaude at once anticipates and rues the tumult of 2026, in a divided America whose reckoning with race and history remains woefully unfinished.”—Jill Lepore, Harvard University, New York Times bestselling author of This America
“Glaude provides a diagnosis of our current national shame, of our most bitter contradictions between promises and disappointments, and a vision of how real hope is born in a deep, transcendent sense of tragedy.”—David W. Blight, Yale University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“As we approach the semi-quincentennial of American independence, Glaude has gifted us with a guide to understanding the history of our current moment and offers us ideas on how we can, in truth, forge a more perfect union.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Church
“Glaude offers a forceful counternarrative to the official commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary by surveying the horrors attendant to some of the nation’s previous anniversaries.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A charged renunciation of American unfreedom that could not be timelier.”—Kirkus Reviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of New York Times bestselling Begin Again and Democracy in Black.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Freedom Is the White Man’s Gift
On the back of his copy of the manumission papers for Moses Gordon, issued in 1776, John Parrish, a Quaker abolitionist in Philadelphia, scribbled a sentence about Gordon’s death two decades later. Gordon chose, Parrish wrote, to “drown himself rather than being Sold from his connections.” An offhand note. A reminder of the all-too-human stakes of the fight against slavery.
Moses had been captured as a fugitive under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. For a little over ten years, he had lived in Philadelphia as a free man, attended church (perhaps at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas on the corner of what was then Fifth and Adelphi Streets, pastored by Absalom Jones, the first African American to be ordained an Episcopalian priest), met and married the love of his life, and, with her, raised four children. He worked hard to secure his family’s needs and found himself a part of a vibrant community of Black people, some of whom, like himself, had escaped slavery.
His life in Philadelphia, of course, was haunted by the specter of the peculiar institution. Not only by the fact of slavery in the South—that some Black people suffered as the property of others—but by the hard reality that even if you escaped slavery, even if you managed to build a life uniquely your own, you would be forever condemned to look over your shoulder for the four horsemen who wanted to drag you back to hell. This was by design. The Constitution made it so that people like Moses Gordon could not feel secure in their freedom, even in a so-called free state. Forty-eight years after Moses was captured, Frederick Douglass described that world in his 1845 autobiography:
Let him be a fugitive in a strange land—a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders—whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers—where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellow men . . . I say, let him place himself in my situation . . . among fellow men, yet feeling in the midst of wild beasts.
In Philadelphia, no matter the life he lived, Moses remained stolen property. He was a thief in “the contorted sense” that he had stolen himself. He could only be made free by white men, and his life proved that just as easily as white men can make you free, they can take it away. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution guaranteed to slave owners the right to reclaim escaped slaves, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 gave license to the hunt.
Moses’s life in Philadelphia was not his first experience of freedom. Caleb Trueblood, a slaveholding North Carolina Quaker, had come to believe that slavery was a sin against God, and in November 1776, just three months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he released Moses from bondage. It was a radical act. Colonial North Carolina had passed a law that strictly forbade “masters from liberating their slaves . . . except for meritorious service.” The law was necessary, some argued, because Quakers like Trueblood threatened the foundations of the institution; increasing the size of the free Black population unsettled the assumptions underlying slavery itself. What is a Black slave to think when she sees free Black people living among her? Slaveholders, no matter how hard they tried, could not escape the paranoia that came with holding others in bondage, even as they argued that slaves were loyal and content with their status. The existence of fugitives and the free suggested otherwise. Both sounded a note of dread in the hearts of slaveholders.
Four months after Caleb Trueblood freed Moses Gordon, the North Carolina legislature passed another law. The preamble to the statute made clear the crime manumission represented: “divers evil-minded persons, intending to disturb the peace, did liberate and set free their slaves.” No matter the ardor surrounding the ideas of liberty and freedom so central to the American Revolution, North Carolina legislators—and they were not alone—continued to defend and expand slavery. The law ordered those manumitted illegally to be captured and “sold to the highest bidder.” Moses had been free for two and half years when he was arrested by the sheriff and sold in July 1779 to William Skinner, a brigadier general in the North Carolina militia. Skinner served as a judge until 1789 and owned forty-seven people. Imagine the broken heart and the rage that accompanied Moses as he was placed in chains and handed over to another white man. To taste freedom and to lose it, against the backdrop of declarations of liberty and freedom, must have been a bitter pill to swallow.
For the next six years Moses Gordon harbored freedom dreams. He eventually escaped Skinner’s grasp under the cover of morning darkness in October 1785. Soon he was hundreds of miles away. But Skinner never relented. Moses had stolen his property. Skinner offered a reward for Moses’s return.
Ten Silver Dollars Reward
Will be paid for apprehending and delivering to me, my negro man, named Moses, who, after being detected of some villainy, ran away this morning about four o’clock; or, I will give five times the sum to any person that make due proof of his being killed, and never ask a question to know by whom it was done.
Wanted dead or alive, ultimately, for a villainy of wanting to be free. Skinner’s reward had no expiration date. It announced, no matter what needed to be done or how long it took, that Moses Gordon belonged to him.
Moses was captured finally and jailed in 1797, over ten years after his escape, and many years after having created a new life with a family and in a beloved community. When faced with the propsect of living once again as a slave, he chose death by his own hand.
Skinner had the power of the law behind him. The Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 empowered slave owners to seek “rendition of [their] property in federal or state court. The law also imposed a fine on anyone who ‘knowingly and willingly’ obstructed the return of a runaway.” These were the results of the maddening compromises that paved the way for the founding of the nation. Just five years after the ratification of the Constitution, lawmakers felt no need to end slavery or the slave trade; instead they decided to secure the rights of those who owned slaves. As the historian Ira Berlin puts it, “The Declaration of Independence made equality normative, leaving only one logical rationale for denying freedom to any people: namely, that they were not human.” That lie made it possible for Black people who dared to steal their freedom to be hunted down like dogs.
The “resolution” of the problem of believing in equality and holding people as slaves, if one can call it that, required holding in the balance two contradictory positions: that ours was a country committed to both freedom and unfreedom—that slavery could sit, however uneasily, alongside the developing myth of America as a city on a hill or as the “Redeemer Nation.” Everyone touched by the peculiar institution was complicit. This was America, U.S.A. The fact that Black people were held in bondage or relegated to second-class status mattered little in the nation’s redemptive mission of spreading freedom and democracy around the world. The American future was, and would be, unburdened by its failures. America, slaveholding or not, was a divinely sanctioned project, and that consensus myth secured our national virtue despite the divisions that threatened to crack the country wide open.
The divided soul of the country was not simply a failure to live up to stated ideals, nor was it an abstraction—it had concrete effects, felt in the lives of those who bore the brunt of it. America, U.S.A., was split between its commitments to liberty and equality and to the idea of white superiority. In one moment, the country could embrace the idea of liberty and freedom for all—that could include Black people, and it did, for some and for a brief time during the Revolution. And then, as quickly as storm clouds can hide the sun, the mood darkened and that freedom could be snatched away. The act was especially cruel—a repetition of the evil and hubris at the heart of slavery and the slave trade itself: these traffickers of human beings would arrogate to themselves, as if they were gods, who could be free or not, and could easily change their minds. Black people were swept up as profit and prejudice collided with justice and virtue. People like Moses Gordon knew this intimately. What might freedom mean here, in this place, where so many languished in chains and so many claimed freedom as their possession? What might it mean for the nation when the measure of freedom is found in white men?
When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class
by Chris Smalls
Pantheon, 2026
[Publication date: June 2, 2026]
From one of the most electric and consequential figures to emerge from the contemporary American labor movement, the remarkable story of his battle to create the first Amazon union in the U.S. and a powerful call to arms on behalf of the working class
“With candor and fierce moral clarity, Chris Smalls takes readers behind the scenes of the most consequential labor uprising in modern history—and it’s one hell of a ride.” —Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland
In the early days of the COVID pandemic, warehouse worker Chris Smalls and his colleagues continued showing up as the rest of the world was shutting down. A dedicated and experienced Amazon employee, increasingly frustrated by the inner workings of the retail giant, Smalls had already felt himself reaching a breaking point. So when coworkers around him began falling ill, and with no transparency or assurances of safety coming from those in charge, he made the only choice left available to him. He staged a walkout with friend Derrick Palmer, eventually finding himself on the picket line without a job. But what began as a demand to keep essential employees safe in a crisis would grow into a movement devoted to achieving dignity and security for the American wageworker, sparking a groundswell of organizers at the most notable companies across the nation—including Starbucks, Trader Joe's, and Apple—and leading to lasting change for labor.
When the Revolution Comes is the riveting inside story of how a young Black man from Hackensack, New Jersey with few to no resources, led a scrappy band of Staten Island warehouse workers in an improbable fight against Amazon, the second largest private employer in the United States, and won. This epic David and Goliath tale follows Smalls from a childhood spent navigating his dad’s stints in and out of prison, to his years of sacrifice and economic uncertainty as a father of three, to his ascension as the leader of a new generation’s labor movement.
A deeply personal and eye-opening account of the creation of the Amazon Labor Union, When the Revolution Comes offers both a searing exposé of what it’s like to be working class in America and inspiring evidence of what is possible when the overworked, underpaid, and disempowered join together, a movement born in community.
REVIEWS:
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year
“An electrifying story of how one of the least visible—and most important—people in global commerce turned the pandemic into an opportunity for change.”—Our Culture
“With candor and fierce moral clarity, Chris Smalls takes readers behind the scenes of the most consequential labor uprising in modern history—and it’s one hell of a ride. What begins as a gripping personal narrative grows into a blueprint for worker-led resistance, full of stubborn hope and a timely reminder of what ordinary people can achieve, if only we come together.” —Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
“Reading this wonderful book, I can hear Chris Smalls's powerful voice as he exposes the abominable exploitation of young workers in the online retail sector. This book provides inspiration and hope for so many who have been ground down by corruption and poverty.”—Jeremy Corbyn
“When The Revolution Comes is an honest, courageous, painful, and wildly inspiring story of one man's journey to make what seemed impossible, possible. Smalls leaves us with one of the most important lessons of social change—when we refuse to accept injustice, every day, and everywhere, for ourselves and for others, remarkable and transformative change is not only possible, it is inevitable.” —Alicia Garza, author of The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart
“Chris Smalls is the everyman: a hard-working American who discovers that his ambition, his Blackness—and even his hope—threaten the multi-billion dollar corporations calling the shots in the U.S. An intimate and heartbreaking account.” —Rachel Slade, author of Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
“Smalls is a tireless advocate for everyday workers, unafraid to speak truth to power: whether it’s standing up to corporate giants or calling out political leaders who fail to make good on their word. His clarity of vision and tenacity of approach are apparent on every page of this galvanizing story, which is nothing short of a clarion call for what we can achieve when we band together.”— Ericka Hart, author of Nasty Work: Resist Systems, Explore Desire, Liberate Yourself
“Chris Smalls has given us one of the best autobiographies in American labor history, revealing with truth and humility the emerging consciousness of a young progressive, then elucidating with care the myriad challenges of a grassroots battle for workers' rights, one that has made him an inspiration to that struggle around the world.”—Philip Dray, author of There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America
“When the Revolution Comes is, like its author, vibrant and captivating. This highly readable account braids the story of Smalls' rough but lively youth with fresh insights about being working class and Black in America. The party promoter-turned warehouse worker-turned activist’s twisty memoir culminates with his recent labor organizing, which gave him a new sense of meaning. That feeling—of solidarity and power—is then transmitted to the reader. Smalls’ book is a rare combination—a unionist how-to and a rollicking yarn about finding your true self in unexpected places.”—Alissa Quart, author of Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America
“In an age of cloud serfdom, Chris Smalls is Prometheus unbound. His book is our instruction manual for cutting Amazon’s knot and reclaiming hope and dignity.”—Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
“Riveting. . . . Smalls tells his David-and-Goliath tale with earnest conviction . . . provid[ing] prospective union leaders with a step-by-step, easy-to-follow handbook on forming a union.”
“With candor and fierce moral clarity, Chris Smalls takes readers behind the scenes of the most consequential labor uprising in modern history—and it’s one hell of a ride.” —Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland
In the early days of the COVID pandemic, warehouse worker Chris Smalls and his colleagues continued showing up as the rest of the world was shutting down. A dedicated and experienced Amazon employee, increasingly frustrated by the inner workings of the retail giant, Smalls had already felt himself reaching a breaking point. So when coworkers around him began falling ill, and with no transparency or assurances of safety coming from those in charge, he made the only choice left available to him. He staged a walkout with friend Derrick Palmer, eventually finding himself on the picket line without a job. But what began as a demand to keep essential employees safe in a crisis would grow into a movement devoted to achieving dignity and security for the American wageworker, sparking a groundswell of organizers at the most notable companies across the nation—including Starbucks, Trader Joe's, and Apple—and leading to lasting change for labor.
When the Revolution Comes is the riveting inside story of how a young Black man from Hackensack, New Jersey with few to no resources, led a scrappy band of Staten Island warehouse workers in an improbable fight against Amazon, the second largest private employer in the United States, and won. This epic David and Goliath tale follows Smalls from a childhood spent navigating his dad’s stints in and out of prison, to his years of sacrifice and economic uncertainty as a father of three, to his ascension as the leader of a new generation’s labor movement.
A deeply personal and eye-opening account of the creation of the Amazon Labor Union, When the Revolution Comes offers both a searing exposé of what it’s like to be working class in America and inspiring evidence of what is possible when the overworked, underpaid, and disempowered join together, a movement born in community.
REVIEWS:
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year
“An electrifying story of how one of the least visible—and most important—people in global commerce turned the pandemic into an opportunity for change.”—Our Culture
“With candor and fierce moral clarity, Chris Smalls takes readers behind the scenes of the most consequential labor uprising in modern history—and it’s one hell of a ride. What begins as a gripping personal narrative grows into a blueprint for worker-led resistance, full of stubborn hope and a timely reminder of what ordinary people can achieve, if only we come together.” —Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
“Reading this wonderful book, I can hear Chris Smalls's powerful voice as he exposes the abominable exploitation of young workers in the online retail sector. This book provides inspiration and hope for so many who have been ground down by corruption and poverty.”—Jeremy Corbyn
“When The Revolution Comes is an honest, courageous, painful, and wildly inspiring story of one man's journey to make what seemed impossible, possible. Smalls leaves us with one of the most important lessons of social change—when we refuse to accept injustice, every day, and everywhere, for ourselves and for others, remarkable and transformative change is not only possible, it is inevitable.” —Alicia Garza, author of The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart
“Chris Smalls is the everyman: a hard-working American who discovers that his ambition, his Blackness—and even his hope—threaten the multi-billion dollar corporations calling the shots in the U.S. An intimate and heartbreaking account.” —Rachel Slade, author of Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
“Smalls is a tireless advocate for everyday workers, unafraid to speak truth to power: whether it’s standing up to corporate giants or calling out political leaders who fail to make good on their word. His clarity of vision and tenacity of approach are apparent on every page of this galvanizing story, which is nothing short of a clarion call for what we can achieve when we band together.”— Ericka Hart, author of Nasty Work: Resist Systems, Explore Desire, Liberate Yourself
“Chris Smalls has given us one of the best autobiographies in American labor history, revealing with truth and humility the emerging consciousness of a young progressive, then elucidating with care the myriad challenges of a grassroots battle for workers' rights, one that has made him an inspiration to that struggle around the world.”—Philip Dray, author of There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America
“When the Revolution Comes is, like its author, vibrant and captivating. This highly readable account braids the story of Smalls' rough but lively youth with fresh insights about being working class and Black in America. The party promoter-turned warehouse worker-turned activist’s twisty memoir culminates with his recent labor organizing, which gave him a new sense of meaning. That feeling—of solidarity and power—is then transmitted to the reader. Smalls’ book is a rare combination—a unionist how-to and a rollicking yarn about finding your true self in unexpected places.”—Alissa Quart, author of Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America
“In an age of cloud serfdom, Chris Smalls is Prometheus unbound. His book is our instruction manual for cutting Amazon’s knot and reclaiming hope and dignity.”—Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
“Riveting. . . . Smalls tells his David-and-Goliath tale with earnest conviction . . . provid[ing] prospective union leaders with a step-by-step, easy-to-follow handbook on forming a union.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“Delivers a powerful message, highlighting the injustices faced by many workers in large corporations. Smalls’ evolution—from organizing social gatherings to leading a coalition of workers—is both inspiring and significant, making this an important read for anyone interested in labor politics and history and the harsh realities of the workplace.”—Booklist
“Smalls’s plainspoken narrative . . . offers a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of American labor organizing. It’s an inspiring self-portrait.”—Publishers Weekly
“An absorbing account of work—and unlikely organizing victories—at one of the world’s most powerful companies.” —Kirkus
“Smalls is a true inspiration.”—Lit Hub
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Smalls is the co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union. Under his leadership, the ALU successfully unionized an Amazon warehouse: a historic victory for workers' rights in America. A Fortune “40 Under 40” honoree, he was named to the Time 100 list of the most influential people of 2022, alongside his fellow union organizer Derrick Palmer. When the Revolution Comes is his first book.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
Jobs
Have you ever been inside a grocery warehouse? I don’t mean a Grocery Outlet or Costco or Sam’s Club. I mean a real grocery warehouse. One of those buildings that’s close to a million square feet, where driving a car from one end to the other would take a few minutes, where the ceiling is so high you would need glasses to see what’s up there and the temperature can vary as much as sixty degrees from one section to the next. A building where tens of thousands of boxes of barbecue sauce, grapes, coconut water, chicken thighs, turbinado sugar, oat milk, cupcakes, soy sauce, jalapeño peppers, fusilli noodles, paper towels, microwave burritos, and everything else you could possibly want from a grocery store is piled on shelves that seem to reach the sky and go on farther than the eye can see? You ever been in one of those? Most people haven’t. Everyone knows that food comes from farms and is carried to stores on trucks. But very few people think about this step of the supply chain, which happens in a room as big as a city block, filled from floor to ceiling with boxes.
I only know about it because I worked in a grocery warehouse once. It was one of many jobs I have had in enormous warehouses and fulfillment centers. This was not the line of work I planned to go into, of course. It’s not really the line of work anyone plans to go into. For a while, I thought I was going to be an athlete. Maybe football or track. I was good at both. Then I was going to be a rapper or a music executive. Now that seemed like the perfect job for me. I was always good at talking, at leading people and connecting. I always had a vision for how things could be bigger, better than they are now. I always loved interacting with people, hearing their stories, cracking jokes, and making friends.
And I was always the kind of person people paid attention to, whether I wanted them to or not. It’s like I would walk into a room and suddenly eyes would be on me. Some people don’t like that about me. But early on I recognized it as a gift that I needed to make the best of. I didn’t necessarily always like it, but I embraced it.
What else can you do? You have to embrace what’s true. I never saw any need to dim my light just for other people to feel better.
But one thing about life is that things don’t always go the way you want. In the end, sports didn’t work out. Rap superstardom didn’t work out. And eventually, I had a wife and kids at home—a family depending on my paycheck. So, like most people in that situation, I went out and worked any job I could get.
I worked in big-box stores and stadiums and factories and distribution centers and warehouses, and at temp jobs you could get only if you showed up at the agency at five in the morning and waited hours, just hoping and praying that someone would send you out to earn a paycheck that day. And if they didn’t, you just went home and looked your wife and kids in the eye. You told them you didn’t make a single dollar that day and hoped and prayed tomorrow would be different. You hoped it would because it had to be.
It was during this time, somewhere in my mid-twenties, that I got a job as an order selector at a food warehouse. When the orders came in from grocery stores and bodegas, the warehouse supervisor gave them to the selector, whose job it was to go around the big-ass warehouse and gather the food to fulfill them. Grocery stores would place an order with the distributor: fifteen boxes of cat food, ten gallons of milk, thirty-five half gallons, three packs of black beans, twenty-four each, four of red, and so on. It went on and on until there was enough stuff to stock the store.
There are anywhere between sixty and a hundred aisles in these warehouses, and order selectors typically have either a motorized jack or a small forklift, sometimes called a hi-lo, to get around. They ride the lift to whichever aisle has the product they need, hop off, grab the box or boxes—which can be anywhere between ten and sixty pounds—stack them on the pallet, and hop back onto the hi-lo before moving on to the next aisle.
Once the pallet is stacked to a little over six feet tall, you walk around the whole thing, wrapping it up with this big roll of plastic tape, almost like industrial-strength Saran wrap. Then you deliver it to the loading dock, where other workers put it on a truck to be delivered to the customer. That’s the job.
Seems easy enough, right?
But the twist is you have to do it at top speed for the entire eight-hour shift. Your job depends on it. You are responsible for a certain number of orders per hour, and shift supervisors track your productivity down to the minute. Running from aisle to aisle takes time, but what most newbies mess up is that they don’t know how to pack the pallet right the first time. They might throw a box of napkins and a few boxes of chips onto the pallet because those are the closest. Then, fifteen minutes later, they realize that there are two twenty-four-pack boxes of ketchup bottles on the manifest that are way heavier. They can’t put those on top of the napkins, so they have to rearrange the pallet. This rearranging costs time, and believe me when I say that every second counts. You are being watched. Meanwhile, you are trying to move as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible, and stack your pallets as perfectly as possible, because the fuller the pallet gets, the more unstable it becomes, making it likely that it will tip over as you turn corners to the next aisle. In some warehouses, you can fix this by wrapping as you go, but in the one where I worked, there was a limit to how much wrapping tape you were given. You had to make it last the entire shift, so you couldn’t wrap as you went. You had to stack perfectly. And if you didn’t, if you dropped all or part of an order, that was a problem. Each pallet contained thousands of dollars’ worth of items, and if you broke anything, you paid for it.
That was your day: run through the aisles, grab the boxes, stack them over your head, do it perfectly, and do it fast, over and over again. If your productivity was below 90 percent, you weren’t eligible for union benefits. And if you weren’t eligible for union benefits, you weren’t eligible for things like paid sick leave and health care for you and your family.
It’s an athletic job. I don’t say that lightly. I played basketball, a little football, and I was the captain of my high school track team. So, believe me when I tell you that picking was real athletic work. Physical. Repetitive. Dangerous. And because there are supervisors watching your every move and a giant clock in your head tracking every moment, it’s also stressful.
I was one of the youngest dudes in there when I started that job. Maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. Most people were in their thirties or forties. I got stuck on the graveyard shift as most rookies do. I would get off at 7:00 a.m. or 8:30 a.m., if I was assigned mandatory overtime. Then I would go home and take the kids to school. I had another job working with my brother at a tile factory during the day. So, after dropping off the kids, I would go to that job, come back home for a short nap, eat dinner, and then head to my night shift at the grocery warehouse. Rinse and repeat. It was a brutal schedule, but we didn’t have any other way to make ends meet.
The environment of the graveyard shift was like nothing I had ever seen, and it wasn’t because I hadn’t been around. I’d been working since I was sixteen. I had been in places that were tough, and places where dudes just couldn’t take it, just quit in the middle of a shift in tears because the work was so hard. That part was wild, but it was not new. I had seen that at FedEx. What was wild at this place was the intensity among the workers and on the floor.
Race, Racism, and International Law
Edited by Devon W. Carbado, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Justin Desautels-Stein, Chantal Thomas
Stanford University Press, 2025
[Publication date: August 19, 2025]
What would it look like to place race at the center of international legal scholarship?
From its inception in the 70s and 80s, critical race theory's target was the field of law, revealing it to be a repository for racial power. This particular critique of law was explosive because of law's putatively apolitical status, making it a unique site for an intellectual sit-in that has forever changed the way that race and racism are understood in American society.
Several decades later, as indicators of populism and white nationalism spread across North America and Europe, critical race theory remains markedly absent from discourses in global affairs and international law. This volume opens the door for CRT to enter the international sphere. Featuring contributions from 30 of today's leading scholars from around the world, Race, Racism, and International Law explains how the concept of racial difference sits at the foundation of the legal, political, and social structures of hierarchy that shape the contemporary global order. Helmed by four pioneering experts, two in CRT and two in international law, the volume's approach targets regimes of power and violence that implicate racism, capitalism, and colonialism. This volume lays the groundwork for urgent and provocative new modes of critique and analysis.
REVIEWS:
"This volume showcases an impressive array of scholars; and they have produced an unprecedented collection of essays that pose a serious challenge to the traditional conceptions of what constitutes legitimate scholarship in the field of international law. Their ideas are provocative and insightful. Not only do they advance a compelling discourse that theorizes and historicizes issues of race and racism, they also astutely advance discussions about racialized borders and concerns related to the materiality of race and rights. Simply put, it is a groundbreaking contribution." ―Luke Charles Harris, Vassar College
"This volume is significant and makes a notable contribution to the literature on international law and racism. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and its resonance globally, a volume of this kind is of particular interest both in the USA and abroad. The editors and contributors are leaders in critical race theory or international law." ―Penelope Andrews, New York Law School
"This volume is long overdue in the field. International lawyers have been complacent about their ethnocentric critical attitude for too long. If there is a chance to salvage international law as a tool to resist the current sinister turns in global governance, colorblindness and the so-called 'perpetrator perspective' must be, as this book invites us to do, fought at all costs." ―Jean d'Aspremont, Sciences Po Law School and University of Manchester
"Carbado, Crenshaw, DeSautels-Stein, and Thomas have undertaken an extraordinarily valuable exercise in using this volume not only to map the pressure points where racial justice principles may better inform the international legal order, but also to expose the ways in which conventional justifications and practices are vulnerable to their piercing and incisive criticisms. As international law struggles as part of the battle ground between violent, racist, fascist territorial expansion on the one hand and those opposed to it on the other, Carbado, Crenshaw, DeSautels-Stein, and Thomas's volume, and along with it their contributors, will be a go-to resource for those assessing how to move forward both inside and outside the academy." ―Sam F. Halabi, Jotwell
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Devon W. Carbado is the Elihu Root Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and Distinguished Research Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment (2022). Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is Professor of Law at UCLA and at Columbia Law School, where she is also Founding Director the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS). Justin Desautels-Stein is Visiting Professor at Duke Law School and Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School. He is the Founding Director of the University of Colorado's Center for Critical Thought, and the author of The Right to Exclude: A Critical Race Approach to Sovereignty, Borders, and International Law. Chantal Thomas is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where she also directs the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Overseer Class: A Manifesto
by Steven W. Thrasher
Amistad, 2026
[Publication date: May 19, 2025]
From its inception in the 70s and 80s, critical race theory's target was the field of law, revealing it to be a repository for racial power. This particular critique of law was explosive because of law's putatively apolitical status, making it a unique site for an intellectual sit-in that has forever changed the way that race and racism are understood in American society.
Several decades later, as indicators of populism and white nationalism spread across North America and Europe, critical race theory remains markedly absent from discourses in global affairs and international law. This volume opens the door for CRT to enter the international sphere. Featuring contributions from 30 of today's leading scholars from around the world, Race, Racism, and International Law explains how the concept of racial difference sits at the foundation of the legal, political, and social structures of hierarchy that shape the contemporary global order. Helmed by four pioneering experts, two in CRT and two in international law, the volume's approach targets regimes of power and violence that implicate racism, capitalism, and colonialism. This volume lays the groundwork for urgent and provocative new modes of critique and analysis.
REVIEWS:
"This volume showcases an impressive array of scholars; and they have produced an unprecedented collection of essays that pose a serious challenge to the traditional conceptions of what constitutes legitimate scholarship in the field of international law. Their ideas are provocative and insightful. Not only do they advance a compelling discourse that theorizes and historicizes issues of race and racism, they also astutely advance discussions about racialized borders and concerns related to the materiality of race and rights. Simply put, it is a groundbreaking contribution." ―Luke Charles Harris, Vassar College
"This volume is significant and makes a notable contribution to the literature on international law and racism. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and its resonance globally, a volume of this kind is of particular interest both in the USA and abroad. The editors and contributors are leaders in critical race theory or international law." ―Penelope Andrews, New York Law School
"This volume is long overdue in the field. International lawyers have been complacent about their ethnocentric critical attitude for too long. If there is a chance to salvage international law as a tool to resist the current sinister turns in global governance, colorblindness and the so-called 'perpetrator perspective' must be, as this book invites us to do, fought at all costs." ―Jean d'Aspremont, Sciences Po Law School and University of Manchester
"Carbado, Crenshaw, DeSautels-Stein, and Thomas have undertaken an extraordinarily valuable exercise in using this volume not only to map the pressure points where racial justice principles may better inform the international legal order, but also to expose the ways in which conventional justifications and practices are vulnerable to their piercing and incisive criticisms. As international law struggles as part of the battle ground between violent, racist, fascist territorial expansion on the one hand and those opposed to it on the other, Carbado, Crenshaw, DeSautels-Stein, and Thomas's volume, and along with it their contributors, will be a go-to resource for those assessing how to move forward both inside and outside the academy." ―Sam F. Halabi, Jotwell
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Devon W. Carbado is the Elihu Root Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and Distinguished Research Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment (2022). Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is Professor of Law at UCLA and at Columbia Law School, where she is also Founding Director the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS). Justin Desautels-Stein is Visiting Professor at Duke Law School and Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School. He is the Founding Director of the University of Colorado's Center for Critical Thought, and the author of The Right to Exclude: A Critical Race Approach to Sovereignty, Borders, and International Law. Chantal Thomas is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where she also directs the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Overseer Class: A Manifesto
by Steven W. Thrasher
Amistad, 2026
[Publication date: May 19, 2025]
The author of the critically acclaimed The Viral Underclass (one of Kirkus Reviews best books of 2022) is back with The Overseer Class, which explores what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions—but under the conditions of a kind of Faustian bargain.
Our society places so much weight and attention on those who become the first or only of their identifying group that we miss one of the inherent issues in that model. This book is about the kinds of compromises made by a small but influential group of people from minoritized groups in the United States as they have entered segregated institutions in highly visible positions. People in the overseer class wield enormous institutional power, even necropolitical power over who lives and who dies; it’s just that their power is predicated upon repressing other people who look (or speak/have sex/come from places) like them.
The most obvious contemporary overseer is the Black police officer. The Overseer Class begins with this quote from James Baldwin from 1967:
“The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. ‘If you must call a cop,’ we said in those days, ‘for God's sake, make sure it's a white one.’ We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder--on your head--to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other n******.”
But this dynamic does not only exist within law enforcement, it exists in many different spheres and The Overseer Class explores what it looks like in mass media, universities, corporate America, the military, and government. The Overseer Class aims not only to educate us and start this discussion but to provide a framework for challenging that dynamic. It is a weighty topic but one that Dr. Thrasher is well-equipped to handle.
The author of the critically acclaimed The Viral Underclass (one of Kirkus Reviews best books of 2022) is back with The Overseer Class, which explores what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions—but under the conditions of a kind of Faustian bargain.
Our society places so much weight and attention on those who become the first or only of their identifying group that we miss one of the inherent issues in that model. This book is about the kinds of compromises made by a small but influential group of people from minoritized groups in the United States as they have entered segregated institutions in highly visible positions. People in the overseer class wield enormous institutional power, even necropolitical power over who lives and who dies; it’s just that their power is predicated upon repressing other people who look (or speak/have sex/come from places) like them.
The most obvious contemporary overseer is the Black police officer. The Overseer Class begins with this quote from James Baldwin from 1967:
“The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. ‘If you must call a cop,’ we said in those days, ‘for God's sake, make sure it's a white one.’ We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder--on your head--to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other n******.”
But this dynamic does not only exist within law enforcement, it exists in many different spheres and The Overseer Class explores what it looks like in mass media, universities, corporate America, the military, and government. The Overseer Class aims not only to educate us and start this discussion but to provide a framework for challenging that dynamic. It is a weighty topic but one that Dr. Thrasher is well-equipped to handle.
REVIEWS:
“In this blistering follow-up to The Viral Underclass, journalist Thrasher lays siege to the politics of “representation,” wherein members of marginalized groups are given visible positions of authority in powerful institutions. Thrasher argues that such roles are Faustian bargains, as these figures are inevitably called upon to enforce their own oppression or the oppression of others. He labels such figures the “overseer class,” tracing the “deep roots” of representation back to slavery, when Black overseers had to be more cruel than their white counterparts to prove “they were worthy.” Today, Thrasher argues, structural incentives for the marginalized to become overseers have persisted… By turns maddening and inspiring, this shines a harsh light on a political dead end in order to illuminate real possibilities for change.”
Our society places so much weight and attention on those who become the first or only of their identifying group that we miss one of the inherent issues in that model. This book is about the kinds of compromises made by a small but influential group of people from minoritized groups in the United States as they have entered segregated institutions in highly visible positions. People in the overseer class wield enormous institutional power, even necropolitical power over who lives and who dies; it’s just that their power is predicated upon repressing other people who look (or speak/have sex/come from places) like them.
The most obvious contemporary overseer is the Black police officer. The Overseer Class begins with this quote from James Baldwin from 1967:
“The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. ‘If you must call a cop,’ we said in those days, ‘for God's sake, make sure it's a white one.’ We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder--on your head--to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other n******.”
But this dynamic does not only exist within law enforcement, it exists in many different spheres and The Overseer Class explores what it looks like in mass media, universities, corporate America, the military, and government. The Overseer Class aims not only to educate us and start this discussion but to provide a framework for challenging that dynamic. It is a weighty topic but one that Dr. Thrasher is well-equipped to handle.
The author of the critically acclaimed The Viral Underclass (one of Kirkus Reviews best books of 2022) is back with The Overseer Class, which explores what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions—but under the conditions of a kind of Faustian bargain.
Our society places so much weight and attention on those who become the first or only of their identifying group that we miss one of the inherent issues in that model. This book is about the kinds of compromises made by a small but influential group of people from minoritized groups in the United States as they have entered segregated institutions in highly visible positions. People in the overseer class wield enormous institutional power, even necropolitical power over who lives and who dies; it’s just that their power is predicated upon repressing other people who look (or speak/have sex/come from places) like them.
The most obvious contemporary overseer is the Black police officer. The Overseer Class begins with this quote from James Baldwin from 1967:
“The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. ‘If you must call a cop,’ we said in those days, ‘for God's sake, make sure it's a white one.’ We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder--on your head--to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other n******.”
But this dynamic does not only exist within law enforcement, it exists in many different spheres and The Overseer Class explores what it looks like in mass media, universities, corporate America, the military, and government. The Overseer Class aims not only to educate us and start this discussion but to provide a framework for challenging that dynamic. It is a weighty topic but one that Dr. Thrasher is well-equipped to handle.
REVIEWS:
“In this blistering follow-up to The Viral Underclass, journalist Thrasher lays siege to the politics of “representation,” wherein members of marginalized groups are given visible positions of authority in powerful institutions. Thrasher argues that such roles are Faustian bargains, as these figures are inevitably called upon to enforce their own oppression or the oppression of others. He labels such figures the “overseer class,” tracing the “deep roots” of representation back to slavery, when Black overseers had to be more cruel than their white counterparts to prove “they were worthy.” Today, Thrasher argues, structural incentives for the marginalized to become overseers have persisted… By turns maddening and inspiring, this shines a harsh light on a political dead end in order to illuminate real possibilities for change.”
--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Steven Thrasher is always a must-read, and not just when he’s writing for Lit Hub! His follow-up to The Viral Underclass looks at what happens when members of minority groups achieve some kind of institutional power and what can happen when those white-supremacist structures are inhabited by the very people they were designed to oppress. Think Black cops, think Clarence Thomas, and get ready to get mad.
--LitHub
Reading Steven Thrasher's urgent and incandescent The Overseer Class -- which exposes and explores the myriad instruments and skeletons of multiracial fascism --- reminded me that longing to be as fearless, rigorous, and conscientious as him is like wishing to sing like Stevie or shoot like Steph. Some shit just ain't possible for everyone. Gonna keep trying, though.
--Damon Young, author of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker and Winner of the Thurber Prize in American Humor
Oppressive systems need us—to do their bidding, repeat their lies, accept their awards, scold their foes, and mask their machinations with our melanin. But what if we refused to oversee exploitation in exchange for proximity, protection, or prestige? From policing to media, universities to corporate boardrooms, government to the military, The Overseer Class reveals how power requires our complicity. By tracing these dynamics, Steven Thrasher invites us to stop tap dancing for self-interested institutions and start sharing risk, cultivating courage, and fighting for the common good.
--Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice and Imagination: A Manifesto
The Overseer Class are the gatekeepers, those Black people (and other people of color) who make an agreement with power to do the bidding of white supremacy and to keep the people who “look like them” and to whom they are not responsible, in their place. Where the overseer class are concerned, skinfolk are most definitely not kinfolk and Black faces in high places will be just as, if not more, brutal. Thrasher reminds us that that brutality is a choice. And one could choose otherwise, one could be, in the language of the text, a Toni (Morrison) - a black person who knows that their job is to make something possible for someone else, to see our struggles in Ferguson, Atlanta (cop city) and Gaza, as linked. The Overseer Class: A Manifesto is a call to overthrow the overseers in order to make another kind of world.
--Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes and National Book Award Finalist
Steven W. Thrasher’s latest tour de force exposes an inconvenient truth: today’s rising fascism, state violence, campus repression, carceral expansion, and U.S.-backed war and genocide would not be possible without the rainbow coalition of the willing—better known as the Overseer Class. He tells it like it is and has receipts. A fresh and urgent take on what our enslaved ancestors always knew: the overseer is the master’s first line of defense.
--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
The Overseer Class is one of the most clear-eyed and intellectually serious books I’ve read about how power actually works in contemporary America. With extraordinary range and narrative control, Steven Thrasher weaves history, reportage, and moral argument into a bracing anatomy of how institutions recruit their most effective agents from the very communities they claim to represent—turning the language of progress and inclusion into tools of discipline and control. What makes this book so powerful is not just its anger, but its ethic of solidarity. Thrasher practices critique as an act of care: a demand that we take responsibility for one another ("We are connected in radical love," as he puts it) rather than hiding behind comforting illusions about representation and reform. He exposes the seductions of liberal power with ferocious clarity, while insisting that another way of being together is possible. This is a beautifully written, morally uncompromising work, one whose unusual authority comes from the fact that Thrasher does not merely theorize these dynamics; he has lived their consequences. The Overseer Class will change how readers understand politics, institutions, and their own complicity within them.
--Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America, named one of the Best Books of 2025 by the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and President Barack Obama
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steven W. Thrasher, PhD is the author of the award-winning book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, which was a New York Times's Paperback Row Editors' Pick, named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews, was longlisted for both the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Literature, and won the 2023 POZ Award for Best in Literature. He is also the inaugural Daniel Renberg Chair for Social Justice in Reporting at the Medill School of Journalism and a faculty member of Northwestern University's Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. An internationally renowned scholar on race, gender, and infectious disease, Dr. Thrasher's writing has been published by the Guardian, Atlantic, New York Times, Scientific American, Literary Hub, and in many academic journals.
Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back
by Joshua Clark Davis
Princeton University Press, 2025
[Publication date: October 7, 2025]
A bold retelling of the 1960s civil rights struggle through its work against police violence—and a prehistory of both the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements that emerged half a century later
Police Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing outside department headquarters, and blocking city streets to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of police surveillance, infiltration by undercover officers, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at discrediting and derailing their movement.
The history of the civil rights era abounds with accounts of physical brutality by county sheriffs and tales of political intrigue and constitutional violations by FBI agents. Turning our attention to municipal officials in cities and towns across the US—North, South, East, and West—Davis reveals how local police bombarded civil rights organizers with an array of insidious weapons. More than just physical violence, these economic, legal, and reputational attacks were designed to project the illusion of color-blind law enforcement.
The civil rights struggle against police abuses is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression. By placing activism against state violence at the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement offers critical insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest.
REVIEWS:
"Police Against the Movement is a stark and horrifying look at the range of police abuses and the ways dissent continues to be suppressed. It’s an important book."
Police Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing outside department headquarters, and blocking city streets to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of police surveillance, infiltration by undercover officers, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at discrediting and derailing their movement.
The history of the civil rights era abounds with accounts of physical brutality by county sheriffs and tales of political intrigue and constitutional violations by FBI agents. Turning our attention to municipal officials in cities and towns across the US—North, South, East, and West—Davis reveals how local police bombarded civil rights organizers with an array of insidious weapons. More than just physical violence, these economic, legal, and reputational attacks were designed to project the illusion of color-blind law enforcement.
The civil rights struggle against police abuses is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression. By placing activism against state violence at the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement offers critical insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest.
REVIEWS:
"Police Against the Movement is a stark and horrifying look at the range of police abuses and the ways dissent continues to be suppressed. It’s an important book."
---Eleanor J. Bader, The Progressive
"A vital retelling of the history of the Civil Rights Movement. . . . Police Against the Movement is
a clarifying, necessary account of how long the police have fought the
movement, and why equality and freedom are not possible until they are
defeated."
---Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us
“This is a civil rights story that few know. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Americans built potent grassroots movements to make this nation a more just society. Police attempts to shut down their efforts have been relentless and consistently denied and covered up. But there has always been determined activism to counter such police abuse, and to demand accountability. Joshua Clark Davis has rescued this history powerfully in this must-read book.”
—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“Deeply researched and written in lively prose, Police Against the Movement takes us beyond federal surveillance to examine the local police departments across America that infiltrated and provoked activists in the Black freedom struggle. And the movement fought back, seeing no difference between police brutality and the slow death of legal surveillance, entrapment, and mass arrests in Black communities. This is a revealing history of political policing and police repression.”
—Naomi Murakawa, Princeton University, author of The First Civil Right
“When I was a child, my parents—both civil rights organizers—shared their suspicions that police were spying on our family and trying to destroy the Black freedom movement. In brilliant, harrowing detail, Joshua Clark Davis reveals how right they were. This lucid account exposes a chapter of American history that many hope to hide but is more relevant than ever in today’s political climate.”
—James Forman, Jr., Professor at Yale Law School and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Locking Up Our Own
“This gripping book provides a kaleidoscopic look at the foundational role that policing—and its opposition—played in the modern civil rights movement. Joshua Clark Davis provides an invaluable service in restoring the local police department to its rightful place as a fundamental barrier to racial justice across the nation. An excellent book, smartly told and rife with lessons for the present.”
—Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey
—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“Deeply researched and written in lively prose, Police Against the Movement takes us beyond federal surveillance to examine the local police departments across America that infiltrated and provoked activists in the Black freedom struggle. And the movement fought back, seeing no difference between police brutality and the slow death of legal surveillance, entrapment, and mass arrests in Black communities. This is a revealing history of political policing and police repression.”
—Naomi Murakawa, Princeton University, author of The First Civil Right
“When I was a child, my parents—both civil rights organizers—shared their suspicions that police were spying on our family and trying to destroy the Black freedom movement. In brilliant, harrowing detail, Joshua Clark Davis reveals how right they were. This lucid account exposes a chapter of American history that many hope to hide but is more relevant than ever in today’s political climate.”
—James Forman, Jr., Professor at Yale Law School and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Locking Up Our Own
“This gripping book provides a kaleidoscopic look at the foundational role that policing—and its opposition—played in the modern civil rights movement. Joshua Clark Davis provides an invaluable service in restoring the local police department to its rightful place as a fundamental barrier to racial justice across the nation. An excellent book, smartly told and rife with lessons for the present.”
—Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey
