The Civil-Rights movement was a rebellion against the law. It had to be. And the police were called upon to crush it. From marches to sit-ins to prot… - Adam Serwer

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The Civil-Rights movement was a rebellion against the law. It had to be. And the police were called upon to crush it. From marches to sit-ins to protests, many of the most iconic images of the era were representations of police brutality: the Birmingham police siccing dogs on protesters, Alabama state troopers beating marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Atlanta cops manhandling Martin Luther King Jr. after an arrest at a sit-in. These images showed white Americans who had averted their eyes from the realities of segregation-from their restaurants to their schools to their neighborhoods that it was enforced at the point of a gun in their name. (p 259 "Abolish Police Unions")

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About Adam Serwer

Adam Serwer (born 1982) is an American journalist and author. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic where his work focuses on race, politics, and social justice.

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Additional quotes by Adam Serwer

It is not American Jews who have betrayed their Israeli cousins. It is the Netanyahu-led Israeli government that has betrayed Jews outside Israel, by aligning itself with nationalist parties in countries like Poland and Hungary, who are hostile to the ideals that make it possible for Jews in the diaspora to live free of persecution. (p 205)

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans.* Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace. (p28 "The Myth of Kindly General Lee")

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