America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

by Elizabeth Hinton

Overview

New York Times Book Review • Editors' Choice

"If you want to understand the massive antiracist protests of 2020, put down the navel-gazing books about racial healing and read America on Fire, Elizabeth Hinton’s scintillating account of the urban rebellions that engulfed the country since 1967. Collective political violence erupted everywhere, she argues, from big cities to segregated towns and hamlets, in response to racialized policing, government divestment, and economic violence that locked working-class Black communities in a cycle of poverty, precarity, and premature death. Rebellions ebb and flow but the conditions persist and we continue to reap the consequences. The lessons are clear: changing white hearts or training more cops won’t do. To put out the fire this time requires dismantling the entire state and corporate machinery of violence."
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"In America on Fire, the brilliant political historian Elizabeth Hinton offers an indispensable account of the devastating cycle of police violence and community violence in the United States from the 1960s to the 2020s. With revelatory evidence, Hinton argues that these decades are best understood as an era of near constant Black rebellion, a pattern of politics whose history is essential to any understanding of the state of the nation, and the way from here."
—Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths

"Elizabeth Hinton, our generation’s leading historian of the carceral state, uncovers the all-but-forgotten history of police repression, uncivil disobedience, and ignored commission recommendations in the wake of the civil rights and Black Power movements. In a shocking tour of towns in upheaval and cites aflame, this excellent history courageously reveals inconvenient truths about the origins and depths of America’s policing and community violence crises. America on Fire unmasks our myths about police reform, black protest, and the ‘urban crisis,’ and raises urgent questions about whether the fire this time will be different."
—Brandon M. Terry, professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University, and co-editor of To Shape a New World

"In this powerful, eye-opening book, Elizabeth Hinton reframes our understanding of the origins of the current struggle for racial justice. Focusing on uprisings in small, less well-known cities, she shows how beginning in the 1960s, biased policing sparked violent rejoinders, to which authorities responded with more even repressive policing. She insists that we think of these uprisings not as nihilistic ‘riots’ but as political rebellions with clear causes and demands. Sadly, lack of substantive progress in addressing the underlying causes has helped produce the crisis we are now experiencing. No book could be more timely."
—Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Fiery Trial and DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University

"In this long overdue, desperately needed, and deeply careful look at the urban violence that erupted across this country during the 1960s and 1970s, Elizabeth Hinton reveals the sobering truth that this nation learned precious little from that period, and has paid a high price indeed for its ignorance."
—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water

"America on Fire is a book about people who get ignored by history, whose anger does not get to be righteous. Revelatory and remarkable, it is a story of how the people after the Civil Rights Movement made known that they had a right to be free."
—Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon

"If the crisis in American justice is ever to be resolved, it is going to take a full-scale reimagining not only of where we are in terms of policing and race but of how we got here. This is a job for historians, and there is no scholar today more insightful about this issue than Elizabeth Hinton. In America on Fire, Hinton shines a new light on the urban mass upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the “War on Crime” was new, and on those that occurred from the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the criminalization of black communities “demanded” the militarization of the police. Generally known derisively as chaotic, destructive, and community-sabotaging “riots,” these upheavals in Hinton’s account are rebellions—collective action that serves as a purposeful and inevitable response to ongoing daily police violence and brutality against black communities. This book will surely make many policy-makers and readers alike uncomfortable. More importantly, though, Hinton guides us to understand black rebellion as intentional, strategic, and ultimately necessary for progress."
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Church

"Sweeping in its analysis and searing in its prose, Elizabeth Hinton’s brilliant new work is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the history behind the Black Lives Matter movement. As America on Fire makes clear, the urban riots of the last half century were not isolated or irrational incidents, but rather part of a sustained rebellion against systemic racism and structural inequalities, a struggle that continues today."
—Kevin M. Kruse, professor of history, Princeton University

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631498909
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	64,439
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Hinton is an associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and professor of law at Yale Law School. The author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, Hinton lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I Origins

1 The Cycle 19

2 The Projects 46

3 The Vigilantes 70

4 The Snipers 94

5 The Poisoned Tree 121

6 The Schools 144

7 The Commissions 170

Part II Legacies

8 The System 201

9 The Proposal 229

10 The Reforms 257

Conclusion 287

Acknowledgments 309

Timeline of Black Rebellions 313

Notes 339

Index 381

Editorial Reviews

03/22/2021

America’s seasons of unrest were an understandable response to a racist police state, according to this impassioned history. Yale historian Hinton (From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime) surveys smaller-scale Black “rebellions” that erupted from 1968 to 1972 in towns like Cairo, Ill.; York, Pa.; and Alexandria, Va., along with the 1980 Miami uprising, the 1992 Los Angeles riot, and recent Black Lives Matter protests. Her narrative elucidates a common cycle of escalation: abrasive or violent police intrusions attracted rock-throwing Black crowds, then police—and sometimes allied white vigilantes—imposed brutal crackdowns that provoked looting, firebombings, and gunfire. She paints rebellions as a militant form of civil rights activism that sought “structural change” and “community control of resources,” and castigates policymakers who responded with anticrime measures that inflamed tensions rather than providing jobs, education, and housing. Hinton presents a strong case that harsh policing and systemic disadvantages sparked violence, but she downplays antipolice violence, including sniper fire aimed at officers, and doesn’t fully reckon with the economic damage rebellions caused to Black communities. The result is a searing yet one-sided history. Photos. Agent: Adam Eaglin, the Cheney Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/16/2021

Between 1964 and 1972, the United States experienced various levels of violence and civic unrest, the effects of which continue to shape the country today. Hinton (history, African American studies, Yale; From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime) persuasively argues that this violence is best understood as a rebellion against police brutality and entrenched racism and inequality, while people were also seeking better housing, employment, educational opportunities, and police reforms. Anti-crime legislation pumped millions of federal dollars into law enforcement agencies, which allowed police departments to modernize equipment and acquire military-grade weaponry and vehicles. Violent policing towards Black communities attracted large demonstrations in places like Cairo, IL, which Hinton argues led to more violence between the police, their white supporters, and Black people. Hinton traces the legacy of Black rebellion through 2020, including recent protests over police officers killing Black people. This penetrating and incisive account of Black rebellion is based on extensive primary research, particularly from the archives of the Lemberg Center for Study of Violence. VERDICT Readers interested in social movements in the United States, past or present, will not want to miss this illuminating work.—Chad E. Statler, Westlake Porter P.L., Westlake, OH

Library Journal

★ 2021-03-30
Thought-provoking examination of “the cycle,” whereby minority protests against police brutality beget only more violence.

Yale historian Hinton focuses largely on Black communities. Early on, she recounts the history of lynch mobs across the country, reacting to Black advances in economic well-being and civil rights through armed violence, “a means to police the activities of Black people and to limit their access to jobs, leisure, franchise and to the political sphere.” In time, police forces came to do this work, and the result, “especially between 1968 and 1972,” was “internal violence on a scale not seen since the Civil War.” In a pattern all too familiar to minority citizens and, after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, to everyone with the means to see, the police typically react with more violence when some previous act of their violence is called into question. This is in some measure, by Hinton’s account, because of easily exploited calls on the parts of politicians and some voters for “law and order,” which in turn hinges on White fears “that Black people might rise up in violence,” fears that began with the first enslaved Black person on the continent. The cycle of public rebellions begins, as the author sharply describes it, with the police interfering with some ordinary activity, whether skateboarding or drinking in a park, and then confronting other young people who arrive to aid their peers. That cycle, Hinton persuasively argues, “began with the police.” Here she quotes James Baldwin, who noted that police rampaged minority communities “like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country.” Among Hinton’s many villains are one-time Florida state’s attorney Janet Reno, who declined to prosecute “police officers who violently attacked or killed Black residents.” Other attorneys have followed suit to this day—and so, Hinton’s well-reasoned and emphatically argued book has it, the cycle continues and shows no signs of abating.

A must-read for all concerned with civil rights and social justice in modern America.

Kirkus Reviews

"Hinton compiles a breathtaking list of more than a thousand uprisings, far beyond those with which we are most familiar . . . Hinton is not just recovering Black resistance; she is also exposing a long, and ignored, history of white political violence, used to maintain the subordinated status of Black communities . . . In some of the most powerful parts of America on Fire, Hinton systematically unravels the failures of police reform."

The New Yorker - Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor

"Hinton’s passionate, occasionally gritty approach is the opposite of a gauzy PBS series: she drills down into the granular, highlighting the courageous men and women who stood tall in a hail of bullets."

Oprah Daily

"[Hinton’s] retelling of this era of Black rebellion shatters the false equivalency that pundits so often implicitly draw between the state’s violence against Black people and the violence involved in Black insurgency . . . One of the most moving elements of Hinton’s text...is that it leaves readers reeling from the litany of evidence of anti-Black police violence and the shortcomings of liberal reform with a clear sense of what can be done instead."

Cleveland Review of Books - Charlotte Rosen

"Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system. To be clear, Hinton does not think she’s merely engaged in an academic exercise to 'reframe' narratives or 'recharacterize' norms. Her work is far more consequential. She offers in America on Fire a vivid description of historical events. She provides an account — as her subtitle suggests — of an 'untold' story. Hinton tells this story with clarity, and her conclusions should serve as a wake-up call to policymakers. She charts a course to move beyond rebellions. The question, however, is whether the United States has the political will to do it."

Washington Post - Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.

"Few historians are defter at helping us make sense of our present than Elizabeth Hinton. . . . What emerges most clearly across the whole of the book is an urgent history of today. . . . To anyone in disbelief over the American fires of 2020 and 2021, America on Fire demonstrates why last year’s rebellions were not unbelievable. They were an entirely believable—perhaps predictable, even—product of the failures by this country and its government to confront and eliminate the many forms of violence it has reaped upon Black America."

The Metropole - Simon Balto

"Hinton masterfully examines multiple incidents across the country, illustrating not only the prevalence of rebellions but how ongoing violent racial discrimination is horrifically common. As Hinton links the history of rebellion to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, readers will be struck by the generational echoes of Black Americans’ struggle for justice."

Laura Chanoux

"This penetrating and incisive account of Black rebellion is based on extensive primary research... Readers interested in social movements in the United States, past or present, will not want to miss this illuminating work."

Chad E. Statler

"[A] gift to organizers and activists. It is more than just a historical book. It is political education."

Boston Review - Derecka Purnell

"America on Fire illustrate[s] the origins and legacies of the rebellions that sprang from police incursions in Black life. Hinton demonstrates that these rebellions against state repression, and the reactions of the state to the violence, express a cyclical, concentric process. . . . Hinton’s trenchant study… proposes that African Americans may not be able to free themselves without mixing nonviolent resistance and aggressive rebellion. . . . America on Fire closes with a ‘Timeline of Black Rebellions;’ those 25 pages correct any claims that the uprisings we’ve witnessed in America since Ferguson in 2014 are either new or over."

Boston Globe - Walton Muyumba

"[A] groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly heart-rending account of the origins of our national crisis of police violence against Black America…. America on Fire is more than a brilliant guided tour through our nation’s morally ruinous past. It reveals the deep roots of the current movement to reject a system of law enforcement that defines as the problem the very people who continue to seek to liberate themselves from racial oppression. In undertaking this work, Hinton achieves something rare. She deploys scholarly erudition in the service of policy transformation, propelled by Black voices whose hitherto untold stories of protest add much-needed sustenance to America’s collective imagination."

Peniel E. Joseph