America on Fire
The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Between 1964 and 1972, the United States endured domestic violence on a scale not seen since the Civil War. During these eight years, Black residents responded to police brutality and systemic racism by throwing punches and Molotov cocktails at police officers, plundering local businesses and vandalizing exploitative institutions. Ever since, Americans have been living in a nation and national culture created, in part, by the extreme violence of this period.
In America on Fire, acclaimed professor Elizabeth Hinton draws on previously untapped sources to unravel this extraordinary history for the first time, arguing that we cannot understand the civil rights struggle without coming to terms with the astonishing violence, and hugely expanded policing regime, that followed it. A leading scholar of policing, Hinton underlines a crucial lesson in the book – 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.
Taking us from the uprising in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965 to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Hinton’s urgent, eye-opening and much-anticipated America on Fire offers an unprecedented framework for understanding the crisis at the country’s heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
America's seasons of unrest were an understandable response to a racist police state, according to this impassioned history. Yale historian Hinton (From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime) surveys smaller-scale Black "rebellions" that erupted from 1968 to 1972 in towns like Cairo, Ill.; York, Pa.; and Alexandria, Va., along with the 1980 Miami uprising, the 1992 Los Angeles riot, and recent Black Lives Matter protests. Her narrative elucidates a common cycle of escalation: abrasive or violent police intrusions attracted rock-throwing Black crowds, then police—and sometimes allied white vigilantes—imposed brutal crackdowns that provoked looting, firebombings, and gunfire. She paints rebellions as a militant form of civil rights activism that sought "structural change" and "community control of resources," and castigates policymakers who responded with anticrime measures that inflamed tensions rather than providing jobs, education, and housing. Hinton presents a strong case that harsh policing and systemic disadvantages sparked violence, but she downplays antipolice violence, including sniper fire aimed at officers, and doesn't fully reckon with the economic damage rebellions caused to Black communities. The result is a searing yet one-sided history. Photos.