Conversations in Black Freedom Studies(CBFS) is a free public education series hosted by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In connection with the hybrid event on Policing Blackness: Resisting Repression, State Violence, and Surveillance on Thursday, February 5th, we are interviewing four of the guest speakers: LaShawn Harris, author of Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City, Aaron G. Fountain Jr., author of High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America, Brittany Friedman, author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, and Joshua Clark Davis, author of Police Against The Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back.
Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS): What led you to write your recently published books?
LaShawn Harris (LH): Being raised in the Bronx (NY), I grew up seeing a 1981 New York Daily News picture, featuring sixty-six-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs. I grew up hearing Eleanor Bumpurs’ name in Hip Hop music and in movies, particularly Spike Lee’s 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It and his 1989 film Do the Right Thing. And my family lived across the street from Eleanor Bumpurs. I was ten years old when she was killed.
These personal connections inspired years of scholarly research. I was curious about what happen to her and my Bronx community (Morris Heights) on October 29, 1984. And I was curious about Eleanor Bumpurs’ life prior to her killing, as well as the impact of state violence of families.
My interest in Eleanor’s interior life was also inspired by historian Brenda Stevenson’s 2015 book, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s 2013 film Fruitvale Station, political activists Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin’s 2017 book Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin, and journalist Matt Tabbi’s 2017 book I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, — these works offer readers and moviegoers glimpses into the lives of Latasha Harlins, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and Eric Garner, those African Americans killed by police and white civilians. These accounts underscore victims’ less familiar interior lives, highlighting their ambitions, familial relationships, and pleasures and fears. These important texts humanize victims. They also illuminate the impact of police and state-sanctioned violence on victims’ families; those left behind to mourn and pursue legal justice.
Aaron G. Fountain Jr. (AGF): The project formed almost by accident. It originated in a public speaking project I did on the Pledge of Allegiance. A few pages in a book about the history of the Pledge led me to write about junior high and high school students who sat during the Pledge as a form of political protest, which sparked federal lawsuits in New York and New Jersey.
While completing that project, I began noticing numerous references to high school students involved in civil rights and anti-war protests. That led to a second summer research project focused on high school students and the antiwar movement, which I later carried into my dissertation.
However, I had long known that high school student activism was a national and international phenomenon. My dissertation focused on the San Francisco Bay Area, which made that reality harder to demonstrate to others. While doing archival research, I collected materials I intended to use later and eventually wrote a national overview using character-driven microhistories. I also collected 16,000 pages of previously-classified FBI documents and knew there was a grander story to tell.
Brittany Friedman (BF): In 2013 I was a curious graduate student, and I was very unsatisfied with what I saw being put forth in the official law enforcement narrative about Black liberation movements that have been influential in uniting the struggle for freedom across the prison and societal boundary. I could sense that what I was reading was very biased, that it was reproducing criminalization in terms of promoting a dangerous narrative that we have seen used time and time again about Black people and Black freedom fighters in the United States.
Criminalization has long been a tool to oppress, particularly when people are speaking out against the government and state-sanctioned violence. For Black people that are imprisoned, the state benefits by attaching the motif of the dangerous Black man—a motif that has been promoted throughout the history of chattel slavery all the way up to the notion of Hillary Clinton’s “super predator” comment in the 1990s.
I could clearly see the racist dog whistling in these official narratives and so I decided to go and investigate. I would begin investigating what brings about this rise in freedom movements behind bars.
I then asked myself important questions that I knew I would need to answer with data—what’s the environment that even led to this happening and then what happened to the movements once they emerged? Once I had findings, I began to question: how does this cycle of resistance and repression shift the way the prison was run and what does that ultimately mean for the way that our society is governed more broadly?
And so, the journey of unearthing began.
Joshua Clark Davis (JCD): I started writing this work in 2017 after watching for several years with respect and admiration as Black Lives Matter blossomed as a movement. At the same time, I was very skeptical as I heard journalists and other observers claiming that the BLM was taking on a cause that the civil rights movement never had, i.e. “BLM continues the unfinished work of the civil rights movement,” as though civil rights organizers never fought police violence, only suffered through it. BLM organizers weren’t saying this, but media were, and when I began to look for historical literature to answer the question of “Well, what did the civil rights movement do against police violence?” I was surprised to see that very little had been written—but also surprised to discover that the movement had a tremendous but unrecognized record of organizing against police violence throughout the ’50s and ’60s. That was the genesis of my book.
CBFS: How does your book shift our understanding of the relationship between policing/the carceral state and the Black Freedom Movement?
LH: The book highlights an American epidemic gripping 1980s Black women’s lives: wanton police violence. It broadly explores police brutality incidents that occurred beyond the public gaze. Police assaults occurred in women’s most sacred spaces: their homes. Police home assaults were part of a longstanding history of racialized and gendered state violence that occurred throughout the twentieth century. Yet the socioeconomic and political landscape of the post-Civil Rights and Black Power eras, particularly the 1980s, ushered in new policing apparatuses that transformed shaped police officers’ thoughts about and interactions with Black women. The nation’s growing militarized carceral state, an emerging drug epidemic, and scathing portrayals of Black women as lawbreakers and Black households as locations of criminality intensified the surveillance, criminalization, and brutalization of women. Consequently, Black households, the areas that women established as the foundation for their creativity, safety, and autonomy, became combat zones, as well as sites of terror, human violation, and sometimes even death. Police home attacks were distinct forms of gendered state and anti-Black violence. It was a kind of violence that upended women’s intimate lives, and according to anthropologist Christen Smith, a “kind of spiritual terror – an attack not only on the body but also the psyche and refuge of the soul.” Violent assaults interrupted women’s efforts at fashioning sovereign and safe spaces for themselves and their families.
AGF: Sociological literature still dominates how many people think about policing in schools, often framing it as a phenomenon that emerged in the 1990s in response to youth violence and later school shootings. However, the origins of this development lie much earlier, in the 1960s, at the height of Black student protest and school desegregation. Several scholars have noted this, but my intervention shows that the process was multipronged.
School districts adopted a variety of security measures before placing police and security guards in schools. Policing also included school administrators secretly collaborating with the FBI and police intelligence units to monitor and thwart student activism. Students also contested these policies and provided their own analysis for what drove social unrest in high schools. Finally, in some racially tense environments, Black students and their parents demanded police or security guards in schools to provide physical protection from white violence.
BF: My book Carceral Apartheid demonstrates that it is not just white supremacy that is fundamental to the widespread use of incarceration in the United States, but it is also lies and illusions. This means lies are institutionalized to perpetuate white supremacy. Lies have become a routine way to get rid of political opposition in the form of Black and Indigenous protest. Lies are a way to systematically distort narratives and portray populations as criminal, or as naturally deviant, in order to imprison them.
What is especially insidious about this is that it, lies permeate every aspect of our society ranging from the way that children are raised very young to see difference, all the way up to the way that politicians speak about communities that are most impacted by incarceration.
I also envision that Carceral Apartheid will contribute to discussions around what I term “racist intent” in the book, meaning that we need to look at and dissect the intentions of racism rather than seeing what I’m describing as solely being the product of collateral consequences. Instead, there is a state intention behind the development and promotion of what I term “carceral apartheid” as a system of governance.
We should care about how white supremacy and lies are fundamental to the origin of prisons because they undergird the birth of the colonial expansion that created America. White supremacy and lies are the bedrock of why our nation originated as one of violence through containment and detention.
The fact that from our nation’s beginnings, prisons have been used as a tool of political warfare against populations that the government sought to control, beginning with the Native Indigenous populations and with those who were displaced Africans that were also Indigenous to their homelands, but then stolen from their lands to work as slaves in this new country, allegedly built on democracy. At the time, the scientific justifications for deploying white supremacist violence in this way were widespread.
The eugenicist frameworks that put whiteness on a pedestal to justify the intentional othering of populations and then the using containment tools to decimate them is why I very much think that we should care about these connections. Without white supremacy and lies, America would never have existed. It is why the state, and many Americans hold onto white supremacy and rampant illusions so dearly and deny their existence as real. In order to keep America as they know it, they must perpetuate false narratives that keep people bound.
JCD: 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, activists confronted police abuses head-on by staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing department headquarters, and blocking traffic to protest officer misdeeds. Years before the FBI launched COINTELPRO against so-called Black extremists, civil rights organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression–what we might call slow violence–in the form of police surveillance, infiltration by undercover officers, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at derailing their movement.
In the intervening decades, local law enforcement have done their best to erase the memory of this repression. Police Against the Movement returns activism against police abuses to the center of the civil rights story, confronting a campaign to conceal the struggle against state violence that continues to this day.
CBFS: What lessons would you like organizers today to learn from the history you write about?
LH: I want readers and organizers to think more deeply about families/survivors of state violence. Police violence impacted families in various ways. Many suffered long after victims’ deathly encounter with police and long after media headlines, justice campaigns, and legal pursuits ceased. These families experienced, what scholar Rob Nixon calls, a slow violence. This form of violence is gradual and veiled, delayed in destruction, and “an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” As victims and survivors of slow violence, families experienced harms that unfolded across time – in the days, months, and years in after violent and explosive events. The long-term impact of slow violence potentially places some families in jeopardy of experiencing mental health crises.
AGF: Organizing is hard work and often involves delayed gratification. Although many students of the era were quite successful in achieving their demands, it required sustained pressure and monotonous, behind-the-scenes organizing to maintain momentum.
I also want people to look more closely at the high school scene. Much of student activism is hyperlocal, yet when students organize today, it is often viewed as disconnected from broader national and historical movements. That disconnect obscures just how deep and continuous these traditions really are.
BF: First, validation–that the darkness people perceive about the world is true and not an exaggeration. There’s so much effort through external pressures such as media outlets and politicians, and institutional pressures, such as education or communal networks that can work together to make truth-tellers feel they should shrink their voice. However, our voice is our greatest liberation, and I want people to feel this when reading Carceral Apartheid.
Second, hope–that even though human beings have survived the horrors of carceral apartheid for generations, they continue to successfully organize for freedom. Throughout its pages, my book documents government efforts to destroy entire communities, yet we also see resilience, strategy, brilliance, and hope to not only survive, but triumph.
And finally, to this point–I believe we come into this life following a long line of liberators before us, meaning we never walk alone. The idea of walking alone is one of the greatest lies we are fed because isolation, whether through solitary confinement or convincing people they are alone, is an effective tool against organizing. So, I hope people takeaway the true fight that remains within humanity to resist, even in the face of the rising darkness we continue to witness.
JCD: I suspect most organizers already know from firsthand experience the political lessons found in my book, but for those who don’t, I think key insights include 1) organizers’ urgent need to protect oneself from surveillance and infiltration without falling prey to the paranoia and chilling of speech that law enforcement hope to foment; 2) the power of movements doing research for themselves using a variety of legal tools and open records strategies, and especially to research and document state violence when journalists and other political actors won’t; 3) the importance of working with attorneys who operate with the mindset of political organizers, whether they identify as movement lawyers or not; 4) the need for a truth-and-reconciliation commission in the United States to confront the historical record of police attempts to sabotage the civil rights movement.
AUTHOR BIOS
LaShawn Harris is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and former Managing and Book Review Editor for the Journal of African American History. She is a historian of U.S. history with a focus on African American, Black Women’s, and urban histories. Harris’s scholarly essays have appeared in Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. Her first monograph, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2016 and won the Organization of American Historians’ Darlene Clark Hine award and the Philip Taft Labor Prize from The Labor and Working-Class History Association. Harris is also the author of Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City, published by Beacon Press.
Aaron G. Fountain, Jr. is a historian who studies high school student activism in the 1960s and 1970s, covering themes of education, race, political radicalism, and surveillance. He holds a Doctorate in History from Indiana University, and writes and presents public talks about twentieth-century American political and social history. His first book is High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America. He has also begun his second book project, a cultural and political history of teenagers and the Vietnam War in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Dr. Fountain has published widely in academic and public-facing outlets, and his freelance essays explore themes of student activism, race and ethnicity, and online misogyny.
Brittany Friedman is a sociologist, cultural & political theorist, author, and spiritual herbalist. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, where she received the 2024 Raubenheimer Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. She is the host of the podcast Exploitation Nation on Apple podcasts and Substack. Much of her work is organized around investigating and making sense of the grave harms we grapple with in our society and how they are perpetrated by individuals and institutions who use power to engage in disinformation, target vulnerable populations, and reproduce social and economic inequalities. Like Ida B. Wells and other seers before us, we must look until we cannot sit still. Once we uncover these harms, the work is to dream a path forward. To this end, Dr. Friedman also focuses her energy on restoring harmony through reimagining how we can heal and transform systems of oppression and control into structures of life, joy, and creativity. She is the author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.
Joshua Clark Davis is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Baltimore. He is also the author of Police Against The Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back, a retelling of the civil rights movement through its overlooked work against police violence—and the police who attacked the movement with surveillance, undercover agents, and retaliatory prosecutions. His first book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, examines organic food stores, feminist enterprises, Black bookstores and other businesses that emerged from movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Dr. Davis has published widely and earned awards from the Fulbright Program, the Silvers Foundation, and the NEH Public Scholars Program.