From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing
and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil
rights era.
As the “War on
Crime” targeted American cities from the late 1960s onward, Black
residents threw punches and Molotov cocktails at police officers,
plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions.
Drawing on new sources, Elizabeth Hinton reveals that these so-called
riots were not explosions of criminality, but collective acts of
rebellion against police brutality and racism.
A leading scholar of
policing, Hinton documents the most important lesson from these flash
points—that police violence precipitates community violence—and
shows how it continues to escape policy makers, who respond by
further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying
socioeconomic causes. Ultimately, Hinton argues that we cannot
understand the civil rights moment without coming to terms with the
astonishing violence, and hugely expanded policing regime, that
followed it. Taking us from Watts in 1965 to the murder of George
Floyd in 2020, Hinton’s highly anticipated America on Fire
offers an unprecedented framework for understanding our current
crisis.