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

“As much as nonviolent direct action, with its august lineage going back to Gandhi and others, violent rebellion offered a means for people of color to express collective solidarity in the face of exploitation, political exclusion, and criminalization. Both traditions continue to ground movements for racial justice. Yet the violent conditions that have shaped the Black experience have made violent responses and the politics that fueled them inevitable.”

Hinton draws upon The Connections Between Past and Present in movements for racial justice, pointing out that such movements historically have made progress through both nonviolent and violent protest. This challenges a dominant narrative in American culture that the nonviolent strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. is a legitimate form of protest, while the more violent ideology of the Black Power movement led by Malcolm X is illegitimate and immoral. Hinton argues that, in fact, violent protest can also be a powerful, legitimate, and sometimes necessary force for change—a point she will return to in the Conclusion of the book.

“In the late 1960s and early 1970s, rebellions usually started when law enforcement meddled, often violently, in ordinary, everyday activity […] or when the police intervened in matters that could be resolved internally (disputes among friends and family). Rebellions began when the police enforced laws that would almost never be applied in white neighborhoods […] Likewise, they erupted when police failed to extend to residents the common courtesies afforded to whites.”

In past decades and even up to the present, Black Americans often get blamed for instigating violence with the police. Hinton, however, argues that the cycle of violence usually started with the police: Police applied a double standard in their treatment of Black residents, inserting themselves more often in situations where they didn’t need to, enforcing strict rules that they would normally let slide, and refusing to show any respect or leniency. This pattern of behavior meant that Black people would react with hostility to police presence, reflecting The Role of Police in Enforcing Systemic Racism.

“The cycle began with the police, who moved through the ghettos of America ‘like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country’ […] so that their very presence—their perceived callousness to the inequality around them—felt violence in itself.”

Many times throughout America on Fire, Hinton illustrates the “us versus them” mentality of the police, who viewed Black Americans not as citizens in need of protection but as potential criminals and terrorists. They saw Black people as hostile to them, which made them behave in ways that caused Black people to be hostile, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and perpetuating The Cycle of Repression and Violence.

“When officer Charlie Robertson and other cops arrived at the park, they did not follow the protocol they would have used to disperse a large gathering of Black youth. No one was chased, no one had the end of a billy club shoved into their back. Instead, the officers chanted ‘white power’ and ‘we have to stick together’ alongside the white gangs.”

While Hinton frequently highlights The Role of Police in Enforcing Systemic Racism, here the police of York, Pennsylvania, openly declared their solidarity with the white supremacists. This open racism became even more troubling in light of the fact that officer Charlie Robertson would eventually become the mayor of York. Although she does not elaborate on this point, the meaning is clear: White supremacy infects America’s systems of power at all levels.

“As longtime local civil rights leader and United Front Founder Charles Koen preached at an organization rally, this work was ‘larger than Cairo.’ It was part of a broader movement to ‘replace the white value system’—capitalism—with a system based on cooperation and community. It was clear the state would not guarantee Black residents protection or rights, and it would not respond to their basic needs. ‘It’s up to us.’”

Charles Koen (See: Key Figures) was a former civil rights activist who abandoned the policy of nonviolence, arguing that Black people needed to be able to defend themselves. His United Front organization based its ideology on a mixture of Black Power’s systemic critiques and a radical interpretation of Christianity that called for collective community support. Koen linked America’s capitalistic system with whiteness, and white supremacists often tried to paint Koen and others like him as radical communists bent on overthrowing America itself. Ironically, though, the community work done by groups like the United Front or the Black Panthers filled the gap where the government failed, providing important social support for impoverished families.

“The policeman today bears the brunt of the failures of government. Poverty, inequality, disease, ignorance, and the alienation of youth were not caused by the policeman, but he is the agent who most often comes face to face with these problems. He is the one who is called when the system breaks down.”

This quote, spoken by police officer Charles A. O’Brien, is one of the few times in America on Fire when an officer recognizes the social issues at the root of Black rebellion, instead of assuming that rebellions started because Black people were inherently violent. Although O’Brien did make many critical statements about Black violence, he understood that the problems would never be fixed until the government took responsibility for fixing the system that had failed Black Americans. He also recognized that, in some ways, the police were also victims of the system, as they were sent to subdue the rebels because the government had no interest in actually solving the problem.

“In the present era, many still talk about bad apples in police departments and about the ‘99 percent who are good cops.’ But as many Black people understood in earlier periods and understand today, the problem was twofold: the bad apples could only spring from a poisoned tree.”

Hinton here draws a parallel between the rhetoric of the crucible period and the rhetoric of today surrounding “bad apple” police officers. Although the term “bad apple” comes from an old saying about how a single bad apple can spoil the bunch, people still consistently use it to brush off individual violent encounters with police as outlier cases that say nothing about systemic racism in law enforcement. Hinton uses the “poisoned tree” metaphor (See: Index of Terms) to illustrate that Black Americans understood that, like apples from a poisoned tree, bad police officers were born from a toxic, racist culture within their departments.

“[W]hen their appeals to the city council and nonviolent demonstrations failed to convince officials to implement meaningful reforms, or when a white civilian murdered a Black person and faced almost no consequences, the community rebelled […] It was clear the bad apple sprung from a poisoned tree, and many concluded that it could only be cut down by violence of their own.”

Building off of the “poisoned tree” metaphor, Hinton illustrates how many Black Americans came to the conclusion that, as morally admirable as nonviolence was, sometimes a violent response may be necessary to reform a deeply corrupt system. There are many examples in the book that show the systemic racism that pervaded the justice system, from “bad apple” cops who abused Black people, to judges and juries that frequently allowed murderers to go free with no consequences.

“The protesters—‘all these little high school kids, bloodied, reeking of tear gas,’ as Barnes later described it—marched to the A&T campus. ‘Here we were, high school students, and we were confronted with police in full riot gear, pepper gas,’ Barnes said. ‘We were brutalized, basically, we were beaten, locked up.’”

Black student-activist Claude Barnes, whose denied election win was one of the major sparks that set off a student rebellion in Greensboro, North Carolina, describes the scene of militarized police battling student protesters. Barnes’s imagery emphasizes the power imbalance between law enforcement and the young people, highlighting how disproportionate the police response was to the protesters and reflecting The Role of Police in Enforcing Systemic Racism.

“[C]ity and school officials had dismissed the student movement, arguing that it was led by a group ‘of not-too-bright black students’ who were ‘being led astray by “outsiders” and “radicals.”’ This view ignored the underlying problems that motivated the protesters in the first place […] It was easier for authorities to scapegoat students for operating in a ‘Panther-like’ fashion than to acknowledge they might have a real point to make.”

The talking point that Black protesters, in this case high school students, were manipulated by “outsiders” and “radicals” was common in the societal discourse around civil rights. As Hinton points out, this talking point was a way of dismissing the legitimate concerns of the protesters by suggesting that they cannot think for themselves. In the Conclusion, Hinton draws upon The Connections Between Past and Present by arguing that similar rhetoric was used during the protests of the summer of 2020.

“Rather than simply engaging with students putting forward a set of deeply felt and serious-minded demands, administrators often turned to disregard and repression as their chosen tactics. And when this response led to Black political violence, the ‘solution,’ even among Black authorities themselves, always involved state-sanctioned counterinsurgency in defense of the existing racial order.”

The response of the school administrations to the demands of Black students is a microcosm of the response of the US government to the needs of Black Americans generally. When Black people, both students and non-students, attempted to peacefully make their grievances known, they were almost always ignored and dismissed. This inevitably led to violent rebellion, at which point the authorities always preferred to send in law enforcement to quell the rebellion, rather than invest the time and energy into fixing the underlying problems. Thus, The Cycle of Repression and Violence continued.

“The concept of ‘alienation’ united the progressive idea that society treated Black people unfairly with the regressive notion that Black people suffered from a pathology that left them unwilling (as the liberal side of the debate argued) or unfit (as many conservatives suggested) to participate in society.”

Hinton argues that although commissions on Black rebellion identified the root problems, they were ineffective at spurring real change. One major reason for their ineffectiveness, she claims, is that the well-meaning liberals on these commissions attributed Black rebellion to what they called “alienation,” a term that suggested Black people had willingly checked out of society because they pathologically saw racism everywhere (See: Index of Terms). Although these commissions acknowledged that racism was a systemic problem, they also painted Black people as paranoid and overly sensitive, essentially blaming them for their reaction to living in a racist society.

“Police tended to respond to any Black protest, regardless of form, with violence. It seemed—to Cobb and to so many other Black people in Cairo, Harrisburg, and across the rest of the country—to be the American way.”

This quote highlights the essential problem that many Black Americans found with the nonviolent approach to the fight for civil rights. Many believed that the nonviolent movement of Martin Luther King Jr. had failed, because regardless of whether the protesters were violent or not, they were always framed as illegitimate. In contrast, because the police were sanctioned by the state, their actions were always framed as legitimate, even when they were brutalizing and murdering innocent Black people. The phrase “the American way” suggests a system built on white supremacy, with any challenge to white supremacy, no matter how peaceful, seen as inherently a threat to the system and met with the same degree of violent suppression.

“They implied that ‘derogatory remarks’ directed at police justified violent retaliation even as they deemed Black violence in response to abusive policing entirely illegitimate.”

This quote highlights the double standards in how law enforcement and Black rebels were often framed in the cultural narrative. While Black violence was always condemned, even if it was sparked in response to an officer being disrespectful or abusive, if a Black person was disrespectful to a police officer that was treated as a justification for assault and even murder. Once again, Black people challenging the system in any form was always seen as illegitimate, while the police—with their state-sanctioned monopoly on violence—were often seen as legitimate even when they murdered Black people in cold blood.

“[T]he actual outcome was ambivalent—not intentionally malicious, but mealymouthed and noncommittal. In a sense, the responsibility lies with liberalism itself—in the premise that goodwill, educational opportunities, markets, and limited anti-discrimination laws will solve inequality ‘in due time.’ The consequences are still with us today.”

Hinton critiques the effectiveness of the commissions that sought to understand the root causes of Black rebellion. Although they did identify that poverty, systemic racism and over-policing were the source, they failed to effectively fix the problem because of their reluctance to challenge the system itself. Instead, they simply hoped that the system would correct the problem on its own. This belief contrasts with those of Charles Koen and the Black Panthers, who understood that the only way to truly solve the problem is to directly challenge the entire white capitalist system. The commissions’ unwillingness to take such a bold step means that even today, many of the problems they identified have not been solved.

“Koen understood perhaps better than anyone else that the sustained violence against Black people in Cairo in the past decade led to the slow death of the city consumed by its own racism. Everyone lost.”

The example of Cairo shows how a white supremacist ideology is destructive for all Americans, not just Black Americans. Koen’s United Front in Cairo fought against white supremacy by training Black people to defend themselves and by organizing nonviolent boycotts against white-owned businesses that discriminated against Black people. Rather than give up their racism, the white residents of Cairo allowed their city to fall into economic despair. Hinton presents Cairo’s fate as a warning of what might happen to America if it refuses to purge the systemic racism from its culture.

“The message was clear enough, at least to those for whom it was intended—the police wouldn’t change, and the legal system would continue to sanction their behavior. It was up to Black residents themselves to ensure their safety and livelihood through compliance.”

This quote comes in the context of messaging sent out to Black people to comply with police orders and avoid any confrontation, with the implication that any Black people who were murdered by the police had brought it on themselves. Law enforcement’s state-sanctioned monopoly on violence meant that any abuse or killing of Black Americans could automatically be viewed as justified, while the smallest sign of defiance or disrespect from Black people would be used to justify the violence used against them.

“Similar to Arthur McDuffie, Jeffrey Kulp had been the target of lethal violence due to his skin color. One killing was sanctioned by the state, the other was committed by an oppressed community; both were products, in different ways, of a criminal justice system fundamentally opposed to fairness and justice for Black Americans.”

Throughout America on Fire, Hinton takes pains to show the humanity of the victims of violence, both white and Black, and to not shy away from the horror of their deaths. Both Arthur McDuffie (a Black man) and Jeffrey Kulp (a white man) were innocent men brutally murdered by racially motivated violence, and their deaths were equally tragic. However, because Kulp died at the hands of Black rebels while McDuffie died at the hands of white police officers, McDuffie’s death was not treated as the crime it was. As in many places in this book, Hinton here makes the point that white people—including cops—very often became indirect victims of systemic racism; it did not only affect Black Americans, though they were harmed the most.

“In a May 1982 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gates famously remarked on the use of choke holds by police: ‘We may be finding that in some blacks when it is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.’ This and other racist beliefs were widely held throughout the LAPD; some officers informally referred to ‘Black on Black’ homicide cases as ‘NHI,’ for ‘no human involved.’”

The LAPD of the 1980s is one of the most important examples of a “poisoned tree” police department, illustrating The Role of Police in Enforcing Systemic Racism. Chief Gates’s use of the phrase “normal people”—suggesting that Black people are not normal—and his false assumption that Black people have a different physical reaction to choke holds than people of other races, shows the extent to which he and others in his department viewed Black Americans as less than human. The acronym “NHI” makes this dehumanization even more explicit.

“Officers exhibited ‘gang-related behaviors’ themselves. In one particularly violent raid on two apartment buildings—during which police ransacked homes, tore up family photos, smashed toilets, and poured bleach on residents’ clothes—officers tagged the community with their own graffiti. ‘LAPD Rules,’ they wrote, threatening: ‘Rollin’ 30s Die.’”

Ironically, the police department fighting with the Black gangs of Los Angeles. Became, in many ways, the worst gang of all, adopting many of the same behaviors exhibited by the Crips and Bloods. The difference is that the Black gang members’ behavior was criminalized, while the officers’ behavior was sanctioned by the state and therefore legitimized. The feud between the police and the gangs in LA. shows how systemic racism could easily turn police into the very criminals and terrorists they were meant to be fighting against.

“‘I’m concerned as to the true motives of the gang members as to why they would make peace,’ McBride said in a separate interview. ‘Is it so they can better fight with us, so they can better deal dope or so they can better be constructive in their neighborhoods? That would be the last item I would choose because gang members have a thug mentality.’”

Officer McBride, another member of the LAPD, is here quoted expressing his disbelief over the peace treaty established between the Black gangs of LA. Although former gang members were making a sincere attempt at uniting and supporting their communities, the police who had been fighting them for so long were unable to accept it. In the minds of officers like McBride, Black gang members were not complex human beings capable of change, but cartoonish “thugs” who were violent by their nature. His statement again reflects the dehumanizing racist attitudes that permeated the LAPD of the 1980s, and The Role of Police in Enforcing Systemic Racism.

“Until this nation imagines a different approach to public safety, beyond police reforms, it is not a question of if another person of color will die at the hands of sworn, even well-trained officers, or if another city will catch fire, but when.”

Hinton predicts that police reform, while a positive change worth pursuing, is not enough to stop more instances of violent rebellion in the future. Without deep systemic changes that address issues of poverty, inequality, segregation and a justice system that allows police officers to walk free for murder, she believes that there will inevitably be more instances of The Cycle of Repression and Violence beginning again.

“Both strains of Black protest have served important purposes historically. Any successes of the nonviolent, direct political action of the civil rights movement depended on the threat of violent, direct political action […] The violent and nonviolent expressions of Black protest are entwined forces, and rebellion must be understood on its own terms, as a type of political action that has been integral to the history of the freedom movement in America.”

Hinton here circles back to a point she made in the Introduction. There, she argued against the narrative that violence is always an illegitimate form of protest, arguing that it is just as legitimate—and sometimes necessary—as the nonviolent kind of protest espoused by Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Through many examples in the book, Hinton showed that when Black people demanded change peacefully, they were repeatedly dismissed and ignored, and only after the eruption of violence were the authorities willing to listen to their needs. She also links Black rebellion to the history of America itself—a nation founded on violent revolution.