Recasting ‘Riots’ as Black Rebellions

By Peniel E. Joseph

Review of:
AMERICA ON FIRE
The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s
By Elizabeth Hinton

America memorializes the civil rights movement’s modern era in sepia-toned images. Through the retrospective lens that valorizes this past even as it obscures essential aspects of it from the present, John Lewis, one of the peaceful demonstrators who faced down horrific violence as a Freedom Rider and on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, was acknowledged by the end of his life as an icon of personal dignity and civic virtue. We rarely, if ever, stop to think that the biggest obstacles that Lewis and millions of Black Americans confronted during the Jim Crow era were not racist demagogues, such as the Alabama governor George Wallace, nor white supremacists, such as the Ku Klux Klan. The biggest threat to the struggle for Black citizenship and dignity in America during this period was, as it remains in ours, the police.

“America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s,” by Elizabeth Hinton, a Yale University professor of law, history and African-American studies, and one of the country’s leading scholars of mass incarceration, offers a groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly heart-rending account of the origins of our national crisis of police violence against Black America. Her book reconceptualizes the Black freedom struggle between the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Lives Matter 2.0 demonstrations that galvanized the nation, and much of the world, in 2020.

Through 10 crisply written and lucidly analytical chapters, Hinton reframes the conventional understanding of the long hot summers of the 1960s and their aftermath. She begins by challenging the common use of the term “riot” to describe the civil disturbances that threatened to shatter America at the time. Hinton reminds us that the racial massacres that formed an archipelago of Black suffering and death from Springfield, Ill., in 1908 to Chicago in 1919 and Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, were riots instigated by whites, although they remain unlabeled as such.

Indeed, she argues, the violent clashes, often with the police, that have broken out in Black communities from the 1960s up to the present “can only be properly understood as rebellions” — part of “a sustained insurgency.” “America on Fire” persuasively expands the chronology of these actions from a discrete six- or seven-year period in the ’60s to encompass, in evolving stages, every decade since. By her calculation — she includes a 25-page timeline of dates and locations — between July 1964 and April 2001 nearly 2,000, often violent, urban rebellions erupted in the United States in response to the racially biased policing of housing projects, public schools, parks, neighborhoods and street corners.

America learned the exact wrong lessons from the burning embers of Watts, Newark and Detroit, setting the stage for a shift from the War on Poverty to a War on Crime funded by the 1968 Safe Streets Act, which put the federal government in the business of crime control and encouraged local police departments to identify potential criminals before they committed crimes — in short, to try to manage problems caused by systemic racism beyond residents’ control.

Hinton recounts, in finely grained detail, how new resources devoted to policing Black communities in cities such as York, Pa., and Stockton, Calif., exacerbated the racial segregation, disinvestment, violence and punishment that would permanently scar the entire nation. The 1968 Kerner Commission report on the urban upheavals of the ’60s became an instant best seller that urged wholesale structural changes in policing, social welfare policies, employment, health care and more. But the commission’s recommendations were ignored in favor of equipping cities with police departments that had “veritable arsenals at their disposal.”

“America on Fire” documents scores of confrontations among Black communities, the police and white vigilantes in small and midsize cities undergoing a grueling process of school desegregation, emerging Black electoral power and inequality intensified by a rapidly deindustrializing economy. The police became a ubiquitous presence, surveilling, harassing and intimidating Black communities at the precise moment that Great Society programs receded. “The message was simple,” Hinton writes. “Black people should get used to the police being part of their pickup basketball games, walks home from work and family barbecues.” The expansion of law enforcement paralleled the rise of Black elected officials, creating a Dickensian fork in the road for much of the African-American community. Those able to escape from housing projects, poverty and segregated neighborhoods found access to undreamed-of opportunities just as the police were designated the primary enforcers of the nation’s rigid color line.

In a very real sense, “America on Fire” chronicles how law enforcement became the nation’s main policy tool both for stemming urban unrest and for stifling Black demands for citizenship and dignity. What Hinton characterizes as “the cycle” — “overpolicing” practices that resulted in Black rebellion, which led to more violent countermeasures by law enforcement backed by elected officials from both major parties — indelibly transformed not just big cities but “smaller municipalities that are left out of standard accounts of this era.”

In the late ’60s and 1970s, police departments from Alexandria, Va., to Asbury Park, N.J., became a gateway to a sprawling, racially unjust system of punishment, incarceration and sometimes death. In Cairo, Ill., relations between the Black community and the police frayed to the point that Time magazine described life there as a “war,” one that featured law enforcement officers terrorizing Black residents by firing shots into the local housing projects and tacitly aiding white vigilantes in threatening them. Black activists at the time fought a valiant, mostly unsuccessful, effort to institute police reforms and persuade the nation to invest resources in jobs, schools and anti-poverty programs instead of punishment and prisons. Police surveillance of Black communities became normal, as did the deployment of military-grade weapons, tear gas and armored vehicles.

The 1980 urban rebellion in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami came in response to a not-guilty verdict in the trial of police officers accused of fatally assaulting a Black motorcyclist the year before. By this date, poor, heavily policed Black communities openly rebelled only in extraordinary instances of police violence or injustice, a pattern that would continue with the 1992 Los Angeles uprising in the wake of the Rodney King verdict and in Cincinnati in 2001, after the police there killed an unarmed Black man, Timothy Thomas.

One of this book’s many virtues is the way it contextualizes the emergence not just of the Black Lives Matter protests but of our larger contemporary moment. The Department of Justice’s consent decrees with the city of Cincinnati in the 1980s, which required the local police force to address systemic abuse; President Obama’s support for body cameras; and calls to reimagine public safety were all in keeping with the kind of demands originally made by Black Americans who were scarred by police violence.

The sometimes violent urban rebellions in Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown, and in Baltimore after the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, contributed as much to a changing political landscape, Hinton suggests, as peaceful demonstrations did, underscoring the fact that peaceful protests alone have rarely been sufficient to garner national political attention or to force policy transformation.

Hinton’s unstinting examination of this history ultimately leaves one with hope for the future. Proposals to defund the police and abolish prisons have now entered the national conversation in a way scarcely imaginable before last year. Local municipalities have pledged to reallocate funds designated for punishment to education, child care, health care and anti-poverty efforts, fulfilling demands Black communities have been making for years.

Just as it did in 1968, America now finds itself at a political and moral crossroads. The popular notion that violent, racially biased policing is a product of “bad apples” fails to recognize what Hinton memorably characterizes as a “poisoned tree,” whose rotten core continues to perpetuate the cycle of police repression and Black rebellion that captured the world’s imagination in 2020 — in demonstrations that proved to be the biggest social movement in American history.

“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 is a professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of, most recently, “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.”

Originally posted here.