The American Right to Riot: On Elizabeth Hinton's "America on Fire"

Elizabeth Hinton | America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s | Liveright | 2021 | 408 Pages

“Rioting is not protesting,” then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden stated in August 2020. “Looting is not protesting,” he continued, “Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It's lawlessness, plain and simple." Biden spoke these words just days after white vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse shot three individuals who were protesting the police shooting and maiming of Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse killed two of them. Biden’s statement also came after clashes between Trump supporters and anti-police protesters in Portland resulted in one death. Over a half century prior, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s response to the 1967 Detroit uprising, where forty people died, numerous buildings were destroyed, and thousands were injured and arrested, carried a nearly identical message: “There is no American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from the rooftops. That is a crime.” 

Condemning and criminalizing Black protest that dares to veer from “peaceful” to “destructive” is a longstanding—some might argue constitutive—American tradition. In a political economy premised on racial capitalism, where the nation’s unequally distributed wealth has long been generated through the extraction, exploitation, and premature deaths of Black and racialized people, the state has a vested interest in designating Black resistance as profane and deserving of repression. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Black resistance was highly visible. Scores of uprisings in these years, often triggered by specific incidents of police brutality, spoke to the persistent of a violent structure of white supremacist governance. Ultimately, uprisings revealed the hollow promises of liberal civil rights legislation and antipoverty programs in dismantling US racial apartheid. Both bleeding-heart liberals and raging conservatives alike labeled these insurgencies as “riots.” A distinctly anti-Black framing conjured alongside—indeed, as some scholars have argued, in a direct effort to undermine—apparent expansions of Black civil rights via the Civil and Voting Rights Acts created a criminalizing common sense that depicted Black “rioters” as inherently deviant individuals fundamentally deserving of social control and state repression. 

Elizabeth Hinton’s new book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, revisits this era of Black uprising, and specifically the “largely forgotten, post-King rock throwing, arson, and window breaking” that occurred in the five years between 1968 and 1972. One of the central purposes of the book is to disabuse readers from using the term “riot”—a “misnomer,” in Hinton’s words, that asserts an incorrect and criminalizing “diagnosis” of these moments of “mass violence.” By describing the context of constant police terrorism (often enacted in partnership with homegrown white vigilantes) and broader state neglect in Black communities, Hinton reinterprets this period as one of “sustained insurgency.” Black rebellions, Hinton argues, mobilized “against a broader system that had entrenched unequal conditions and anti-Black violence over generations.” Hinton’s critique of “riot” as a racially-charged descriptive term that obscures the inciting role of pervasive anti-Black law enforcement and the state’s organized abandonment of Black communities is not necessarily a new practice. But as public commentary on last summer’s uprisings reveals, the denigration of Black uprisings against policing as “riots,” or the valorization of only “peaceful” and “respectable” modes of protest, is still a central feature of the counterinsurgency playbook developed by the post-Civil Rights state, media, and corporate elite. To disrupt this reactionary framing, Hinton utilizes unseen primary source documents housed at the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence to examine the five-year period between 1968-1972, which she determines to be the “crucible period of rebellion,” and the legacies of this crucible moment throughout the late-twentieth century. 

In part, Hinton’s articulation of the sheer scale of Black rebellion during this period is an historiographical intervention in and of itself. While most people perhaps recall uprisings against police violence in the “archetypal ghettoes” of Harlem, Newark, Watts, and Detroit, Hinton reveals that between 1964 and 1972, but especially 1968 and 1972, the nation “endured internal violence on a scale not seen since the Civil War,” with nationwide cycles of targeted police violence followed by some form of Black insurgency. The extensive timeline of Black rebellions included at the end of the book serves as a testament to this claim, as does Hinton’s emphasis on lesser-known, mid-sized cities far from urban centers, such as Harrisburg, PA and Cairo, Illinois. Taken together, these aspects highlight how everyday Black people everywhere actively fought hyper-militarized, aggressive policing underwritten by the War on Crime. Demonstrating the ubiquity of Black rebellions also refutes the more common renderings of radical Black protest as fringe responses to anti-Black state violence, the province only of revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers or Black Liberation Army, which problematically codes Black rebellions as extreme or illegitimate. As today’s pundits freely brandish questionable claims of Black support for law enforcement to undermine radical calls for police and prison abolition, Hinton’s counterhistory of truly mass Black community revolt against law enforcement situates the use of “collective violence to demand structural change” as a central, rather than marginal or unserious, tactic in pursuit of real Black liberation. 

Hinton’s focus on these five years of widespread Black insurgencies and confrontations with police contains other notable insights that reshape our understanding of the post-Civil Rights era. First, the text serves as a complement to Hinton’s pathbreaking first book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, which revealed how Johnson’s War on Crime and Congress’s 1968 Safe Streets Act massively expanded the power of police to repress and socially control Black communities deemed pathologically criminal by the postwar liberal state. Police departments of every size and location received money for new hires, surplus army weaponry, riot gear, and more, meaning that even mid-sized cities “would be patrolled by police departments with veritable arsenals at their disposal.” In America on Fire, Hinton takes us to the far-flung communities where this emboldening of police was principally felt, demonstrating how Black communities targeted by this unprecedented proliferation of police power and repression resisted this new formation of anti-Black violence. 

In this bottom-up history of the War on Crime, Hinton shows how violent rebellions against law enforcement in Black communities always developed in response to the “poisoned tree” of brutal assaults by police, police-facilitated white vigilantes, or both. Each story recounted by Hinton follows a similar “cycle,” where targeted and aggressive violence against Black people, coupled with the ongoing “infrastructure of racial oppression” of multiracial but heavily segregated municipalities, led to Black insurgency against law enforcement. When Black students in Harrisburg protested endemic racism in their public schools, officials sicced police on them, who escalated the conflict and sparked rebellion. In Cairo, Illinois, police openly collaborated with white gangs to terrorize Black residents, leading Black community members in a group called the United Front to develop an armed unit. Named the Black Liberators, the unit ran nightly “survival patrols” to protect community members from attacks. And on, and on. As Leo Burroughs, the director of community relations at the Alexandria, Virginia Urban League stated after police officer Claiborne Callahan aggressively and unashamedly attacked a group of Black youth, “When a man is unwilling to talk, you have to fight him.” 

Although Hinton does not make this point explicitly, her retelling of this era of Black rebellion shatters the false equivalency that pundits so often implicitly draw between the state’s violence against Black people and the violence involved in Black insurgency. Indeed, the book’s stories raise the question of what political work is being done when the starting point for a discussion of “violence” begins and ends with Black people throwing rocks or shooting at police, as if the decision to engage in a violent act can be extracted from historical and political context and judged solely on the material fact of its impact. Intentionally pushed from the (white and non-Black) public’s cognitive frame is the raft of death-dealing racialized violence emanating from state policy and from the violent actions of police zealously working to uphold the racial capitalist status quo. By relentlessly contextualizing Black rebellion against the reality of government neglect and police and white vigilante assault, Hinton questions the notion that the “violence” of Black rebellion can ever be collapsed with and judged alongside violence of the state. So long as “state violence was used to preserve racial hierarchy,” she writes, “Black rebellion was a self-fulfilling prophecy”—and one that represented a rational response to what many Black residents then and today correctly assessed as a “genocidal” police force. 

While Hinton does not go so far as to call for the abolition of policing outright, the stories she tells demonstrate that so long as policing exists, cycles of state violence will only continue and intensify. Her discussion of the failures of liberal commissions and other mere reforms offered in the aftermath of Black rebellion further emphasize this point—cities could not “talk their way out of inequality.” Even when the US Department of Justice oversaw a massive reform of a viciously anti-Black Cincinnati police department in 2002, the efforts produced only “limited change” for Black Cincinnatians, in part because of steadfast resistance from local officers. 

One of the most moving elements of Hinton’s text, however, is that it leaves readers reeling from the litany of evidence of anti-Black police violence and the shortcomings of liberal reform with a clear sense of what can be done instead. Black residents not only collectively rebelled against racialized state terror but also offered alternative visions of safety rooted in community care, redistribution, and conflict-resolution. In this history of grassroots, arguably proto-abolitionist Black struggle that emerged immediately in responses to the state’s carceral ramp up, Hinton shows how Black communities created structures to “fill the void created by the racist establishment” through developing community-run medical clinics, distributing clothing and food, providing shelter, and more. Indeed, battling police frequently was a form of community care—another site where Hinton implicitly challenges whether it is rhetorically correct to term Black confrontations with police as “violence” at all. In Peoria, Illinois, for example, residents at the Taft Homes public housing project threw rocks and bottles at police officers who were attempting to forcibly evict two residents, one of whom was a new mother. Police aggression against Taft Homes residents seeking to protect their community from displacement escalated into a full-blown uprising. Unshockingly, media coverage of the incident cleansed knowledge of the precipitating police eviction and smeared participants as “Black saboteurs.” Abandoned by the state, Black residents created systems of “cooperation and community” that, unlike the police forces deployed to criminalize them under the veneer of public safety, actually defused violence and offered some defense against the ravages of racial capitalism. 

Read against the context of contemporary calls to abolish or defund the police, Hinton’s work shows that such abolitionist visions are not newfangled or radical pipe dreams out of touch with the majority of Black people. They are longstanding demands present in the thousands of Black communities in all corners of the nation who went on the offensive to critique the unfulfilled promises of civil rights and to protect themselves against then-ascendant but not yet settled revanchist carceral state.