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

by Elizabeth Hinton

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book
Best Books of 2021: TIME, Smithsonian
New York Times Book Review • Editors' Choice

“Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system.” —Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Washington Post

From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era.

What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.

Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds.

Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California.

The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631498916
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	302,390
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

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

"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 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] 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

★ 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