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

The scene of rebellion in Louisville, Kentucky, May 27, 1968. (AP)

AMERICA ON FIRE

The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

ELIZABETH HINTON

For James Matthews, Leon Mebane, Willie Grimes, Charles Scott, Arthur McDuffie, Timothy Thomas, and their families.

CONTENTS

AMERICA ON FIRE

O N A COLD M ONDAY at the start of February, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond sat down at a whites-only lunch counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina. A waiter refused to serve the young men and suggested they order take-out instead. The four North Carolina A&T students remained at the counter. The store manager approached and asked them to leave. Still they did not move. A police officer arrived, slapping his nightstick in his hand in an attempt to intimidate. Rather than allow the students offense against Jim Crow to continue, the manager of the store closed it for the day. Two dozen Black students returned on Tuesday. Over fifty Black students and three white students participated in the sit-in the next day, Wednesday, February 3, 1960.

News of the protest spread, and soon the sit-in movement had expanded to fifty-five cities and thirteen states. By April, over fifty thousand students were involved. Conceived and organized entirely by young people, the sit-in movement ultimately led to the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was run by activists such as John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael. As a Fisk student, Lewis participated in the sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee, and he would go on to steer the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961 and speak at the March on Washington in 1963. Carmichael joined the sit-in movement as a high school student and would famously call for Black Power at an SNCC rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1966. Together Lewis, Carmichael, and tens of thousands of other young Black Americans signaled that their generation was prepared to risk their lives for freedom and equality. From Greensboro onward, the sit-ins helped build momentum and support for racial justice.

The students in Greensboro engaged in a nonviolent protest to demand full integration, the right to vote, equal educational opportunities, decent jobs, protection against white supremacist terrorism, and an end to police violence. These were the central aims of the civil rights movement more broadly. By the end of the decade, Black students at North Carolina A&T State University were still protesting, but now they were destroying property, assaulting police officers, and shooting in the direction of law enforcement, if not coming close to killing cops in self-defense. In May 1969, after Black students at Greensboros James B. Dudley High School were arrested, brutalized, and tear-gassed by police during a series of protests against arbitrary disciplinary measures, A&T students came to the teenagers defense. The confrontations between local police and Black high school and college students led authorities to call the National Guard to A&Ts campus, unleashing violence and repression that ended in the killing of sophomore Willie Grimes.

A pivotal stop on the road to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, by the end of the decade Greensboro was a site of sustained violence. It was far from unique in this regard. Between 1964 and 1972, but especially between 1968 and 1972, the United States endured internal violence on a scale not seen since the Civil War. Every major urban center in the country burned during those eight years. Violence flared up not only in archetypal ghettoes including Harlem and Watts, and in majority-Black cities such as Detroit and Washington, DC; it appeared in Greensboro, North Carolina, in Gary, Indiana, in Seattle, Washington, and countless places in betweenevery city, small or large, where Black residents lived in segregated, unequal conditions. In the north and the south, the east and the west, the rust belt and the Sunbelt, Black people threw rocks and bottles at police, shot at them with rifles, smashed the windows of businesses and institutions, hurled firebombs, and plundered local stores. These eventswhat we commonly call riots, or what people who are to the left-of-center sometimes refer to as civil disturbancescaused hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage. Most immediately, they shaped the lives of the storeowners whose businesses were destroyed, of the parents who lost their teenage sons to the police, and of the firefighters and cops who were harmed or killed. But ever since, Americans have been living in a nation and a national culture created in part by the extreme violence of the 1960s and early 1970s.

The aftershocks of that era have, at times, taken the form of mass violence to which all Americans have been witness: in Miami in 1980, in Los Angeles in 1992, in Cincinnati in 2001, and in more recent years in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The enduring impact of the violence of the 1960s and 1970s has been felt more regularly, and more acutely, by Black people in American cities who faced new policing practices that emerged under the banner of the War on Crime: the routine stop and frisks that attacked peoples dignity, the breaking up of community gatherings, the presence of armed, uniformed officers in the hallways of under-resourced public schools, and more. While such strategies helped repress mass violence as a regular phenomenon, they ironically made further riots inevitable. These strategies remain in place today.

Mass incarceration is one consequence of the draconian police ethos born in the 1960s and 1970s in response to mass violence. Another consequence is a semantic habit that hides a deeper reality. A central contention of this book is that the term riot is a misnomer. Due to the rhetoric of politicians, media coverage, and much of the academic research on the subject, Americans have become accustomed to think of these moments of mass violencefrom Harlem in 1964 to Minneapolis in 2020as misguided at best, and meaningless or irrational at worst. In either case, these incidents are often seen as being devoid of any political motivation or content. Sympathetic liberals may have believed then, and believe now, that the anger and discontent behind the violence was legitimate. Yet they often concluded that rioting was a pathological impulse, rooted in spontaneous, uncontrollable emotion. In this view, the riots were ultimately counter-productive: the violence only alienated allies and intensified anti-Black sentiment. Proponents of law and order from across the political spectrum, in partial contrast, believe that riots should be seen as nothing other than events of mass criminality.

President Lyndon B. Johnson championed the latter view when responding to the first urban riots in the 1960s. The riotsas well as other criminal and juvenile delinquency problems in our citiesare closely connected, Johnson announced following the release of an FBI report on the violence that swept through eight cities in the summer of 1964. Each riot began with a single incident and was aggravated by hoodlums and habitual lawbreakers, he added. Three years later, Johnson told the nation during a televised address delivered in the middle of the unprecedented violence in Detroit in 1967, which ended in more than forty deaths, a thousand injuries, at least 7,200 arrests, and the destruction of hundreds of buildings: There is no American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from the rooftops. That is crime.