Snapshots From the Heyday of the Resistance

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

In the first half of the 1960s, the promise of “nonviolent resistance” fueled the Civil Rights Movement and helped prompt long-overdue reforms. But the backlash against these changes led to police crackdowns, vigilante violence, and other harms against America’s Black population. Cities began boiling over into outbreaks of violence, which contemporaries called “riots.” It’s more helpful, though, to think of these outbreaks as rebellions against injustice.

Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton makes no bones about her purpose in this volume: she wants to reevaluate the “race riots” of the later Civil Rights Era. Contemporary accounts, mostly taking police and civic authorities at their word, regarded these outbreaks as inexplicable outbursts of Black anger, a narrative encouraged by racist stereotypes of unaccountably angry Black culture. Hinton wants to situate this violence in its historical context, and maybe shed light on its causes and legacy.

In Hinton’s first part, she considers the violence that swept American cities in the later Civil Rights Movement. Covering the years between approximately 1968 and 1972, she looks at the waves of race violence that swept many American cities—though such violence was widespread, Hinton selects a few representative cities, and Cairo, Illinois, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, loom large. The scars from these years remain visible on the urban landscape.

This violence was depicted, in contemporary news accounts, as uncaused and mystifying. But Hinton finds substantial causes. Usually, White vigilante communities with chillingly fascist names like the White Hats would attack Black neighborhoods in backlash against Civil Rights gains, prompting Black community groups to organize against them. The police then used this organization as justification for high-handed crackdowns on suspiciously localized “crime.”

Violence wracked mostly Black neighborhoods, but other minorities also suffered friction, particularly Hispanic communities, as Puerto Rican populations were growing throughout America. The state refused to leave communities of color alone. The combination of White vigilantism and aggressive policing created unsustainable tensions in minority communities. In many cases, police departments and White backlash groups actively provoked confrontations in hopes of creating camera-friendly violence.

Both sides saw the cyclical confrontations as essentially without cause. White people considered Black populations as innately violent, and therefore practiced preemptive crackdowns, while Black communities didn’t perceive the police as agents of peace. Tensions multiplied through means that seem, historically, ironic. As lethal violence against minority populations became impolitic, police responded through heavy use of tear gas and attack dogs, powerful tools that nevertheless compounded hostile feelings.

Elizabeth Hinton

In many cities, vigilante gangs and White supremacists had explicit police support. Many operated as almost extensions of the state. The structure of federally subsidized public housing projects, like Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green, aimed to accustom Black residents to constant police presence, a presence aimed not at maintaining the peace or preventing crime, but at cracking down on resident organizations. Sadly, over time, such preemptive crackdowns worked.

Hinton’s second part considers the legacies this generation of violence created. Black violence was briefly commonplace, but police succeeded in cracking down harshly, sapping community groups’ will to resist. These crackdowns included police, with federal backing, stockpiling weapons once common in war. The instruments of state continued treating Black violence as a counterinsurgency, and not surprisingly, Black populations responded much like chronically occupied populations of enemy nations.

Instead of responding to high-handed policing with armed resistance (and justifying further crackdowns) after 1972, Black communities began bottling up resentments. Forceful resistance began happening only after exceptional cases of egregious injustice. Hinton describes outbursts that happened in Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1992, and Cincinnati in 2001. Hinton also situates these outbursts in historical context which we, who lived through these times, often lacked.

A careful historian, Hinton mostly avoids commenting on events too recent for more global comprehension. Only in her conclusion does Hinton connect over fifty years of violence to the events of 2020, when the George Floyd killing prompted an interracial alliance into the largest sustained protest actions in American history. In her final pages, Hinton brings her historical narrative up-to-date through Fall of 2020. But observant readers will recognize hints of the present throughout her history.

This book isn’t a sociological analysis of themes and psychology behind what happened. Hinton instead writes a straightforward narrative history of events, using the participants’ own words where possible, to show a straight line of violence through the late Civil Rights era, to our own time. As the best history generally does, Hinton presents us, her audience, to ourselves. Because history isn’t about the dead past, it’s really about us.