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Hinton, Elizabeth

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

Liveright (New York)

2021



OUR SYNOPSIS: Elizabeth Hinton makes clear that the urban uprisings in American cities between 1964 and 1972 were collective rebellions against systemic racism, oppressive policing, and anti-Black violence. She centers the stories of the people, mostly Black and young, who participated in these rebellions. When white observers portrayed these events as lawlessness that necessitated restoration of order, this reflected an assumption that there was no need to change the systemic oppression causing the unrest. This thinking also encouraged forceful law enforcement responses that exacerbated violence rather than addressing core causes. Hinton shows that government commissions appointed to report on such causes after a rebellion failed to sufficiently identify them, instead pathologizing Black participants. She argues the Kerner Commission was an exception in adequately identifying racial issues, but lack of government motivation for change meant it was not acted upon.

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • Hinton refers to the interrelationship between police violence and urban rebellion as “the cycle,” repeating itself in cities across the country. How can this cycle be broken or interrupted?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “Between 1964 and 1972, the United States endured internal violence on a scale not seen since the Civil War. Every major urban center in the country burned during those eight years. Violence flared up not only in archetypal ghettoes including Harlem and Watts, and in majority-Black cities such as Detroit and Washington, DC; it appeared in Greensboro, North Carolina, in Gary, Indiana, in Seattle, Washington, and countless places in between—every city, small or large, where Black residents lived in segregated, unequal conditions.” (3)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

  • 1968 unrest

  • Freddie Gray

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