America on Fire

The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

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Pub Date 18 May 2021 | Archive Date 30 Apr 2021

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Description

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.


About the Author: Elizabeth Hinton is associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and a professor of law at Yale Law School. She is also the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.

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...


Advance Praise

"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." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"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 coeditor 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

"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." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781631498909
PRICE $28.95 (USD)

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