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

Hinton begins with a story of an African American boy in Carver Ranches, Florida, who threw a rock at a police car and elicited an unnecessarily violent response from the police, nearly causing a riot. In similar communities all around America, the inherently threatening presence of police often triggered incidents like this, which then led to a cycle of greater police presence.

While many rebellions were sparked by individual encounters between Black people and the police, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, hundreds of rebellions sparked all over the country. People felt that the nonviolent approach to civil rights had failed, and the only way for Black people to achieve the equality they deserved was through violence. This prompted President Johnson to provide greater funding, training and weaponry to the police, who then invaded Black communities in a much more noticeable and threatening way with the explicit goal of finding potential rioters before they could cause trouble.

The invasive presence of police with military-grade gear, who were perceived as “looking for trouble” (23), inevitably triggered a rebellious response from the members of those communities. Young people came together to protect each other from police, whom they did not view as peacekeepers but as aggressors. Police would go after young people congregating in parks, participating in normal teenage activities, and in response the teenagers would throw rocks at them. Hinton gives several examples of cases when the police attempted to arrest supposed “troublemakers,” and others in the community came together to fight the police and prevent the arrest.

Repeatedly in many cities, police concluded that they needed to crack down even harder on these communities, instead of wondering whether their presence itself was causing the violence. Police often met rock-throwing protesters—some as young as junior high school age—with riot gear and tear gas. Tear gas was seen as a nonviolent alternative to drawing their guns on protesters, despite the fact that it can have lasting effects on the lungs, liver, and heart.

The use of tear gas was only a temporary solution, however, and could sometimes cause the violence to escalate rather than cease. In some cases, snipers would shoot at police as an “expression of collective violence” (38), and though relatively few officers were actually killed by snipers, the media and politicians exaggerated the reports. In one incident in Carver Ranches, police towed away a Black man’s car because some white men claimed he’d stolen a part, even though he had documentation proving that he had purchased the part legally. This led to a gunfight outside the man’s home, endangering children inside. Some Black community leaders, such as ministers or activists, would step in to try to de-escalate the violence, while also remaining critical of the police and urging them to show empathy to those participating in rebellious acts.

Consistently, members of African American communities were responding to a double-standard of policing, as they saw members of white communities being left alone while behaving in ways that would cause Black people to be targeted by law enforcement. Many police departments ignored formal complaints lodged by citizens and resisted efforts to regulate officers’ behavior, though in some places police violence was acknowledged as a legitimate problem. Some communities made attempts to actually listen to the complaints, and made calls for more social programs to address the needs of impoverished Black youths, though the response to these complaints was still often slow and half-hearted.

This cycle of over-policing, met by community rebellion, met by increased violence on both sides, with only meager attempts to address the underlying problems, set a pattern that continues to this day in “zero tolerance” and “broken windows” policies (45).

Hinton focuses on rebellions centered around Black public housing projects in the period between 1969 and 1972. She begins by discussing the Pyramid Courts housing project in Cairo, Illinois, which was constructed to segregate Black residents from white residents. While both the white and Black housing projects were poorly kept, Pyramid Courts especially fell into disarray, forcing residents to live in intolerable conditions.

A rebellion started in 1967 between Black residents and white vigilantes. The local government spoke to civil rights activists John Lewis and Charles Koen, who insisted that the African American community needed to be hired in more jobs and given more representation; they also demanded an end to segregation in the city. The government’s response was lackluster, and despite some victories in court, the white residents of Cairo refused to comply with desegregationist demands. White supremacists began harassing the residents of Cairo, culminating in a violent protest in 1969, which the Black residents were blamed for even though white vigilantes had instigated it. The cycle of violence continued in Cairo for another three years, and residents of Pyramid Courts learned to adapt to the life-threatening conditions.

The case of Pyramid Courts is just one example of many involving run-down housing projects all around the country during this period. While such projects started in the New Deal Era as an appealing housing option for Black Americans, by the 1960s they had deteriorated due to neglect, over-policing, and racism. Police saw it as their duty to be a constant presence in these communities, which were seen as hubs of criminality, and the residents predictably responded with rebellion. In the Sierra Vista project in Stockton, California, during July 1968, Black residents even kidnapped two police officers by locking them inside a gymnasium, as the culmination of a rebellion that had begun when police officers broke up a late-night party and threatened to arrest the partygoers.

This incident resulted in the city authorities actually listening to the needs of Black residents—specifically to the Black Unity Conference, who called for community policing, investment in social programs, and an official method for residents to file complaints against police mistreatment. Although most Stockton citizens recognized that greater force wasn’t going to solve the problem, the city authorities quickly returned to the status quo and continued over-policing the Sierra Vista project. That same month, in Peoria, Illinois, another rebellion broke out in the Taft Homes project, first sparked by the police’s mistreatment of a 16-year-old pregnant girl named Sirita Hines. Afterward, city officials urged “cooperation” (63) and made some investments into the community, but two years later another rebellion broke out, also centered around Sirita Hines.

Hines and her roommate Dorothy Johnson were being evicted from their home, and the police arrested Johnson and moved the women’s furniture out onto the street. Residents of Taft Homes, led by Horace Jones of the United Front Organization, moved the furniture back into the apartment, and when the police returned the scene escalated into violence that damaged many local businesses. The media afterward criticized the Black citizens and warned that such uprisings would discourage future investment in their communities.

In general, with the combinations of poverty and over-policing, housing projects all over the country became “powder keg[s]” (68) of Black rebellion in the late 1960s and early 1970s.