Ten Insights from a New Book about Black Rebellion
by Patrick Chura, Ph.D.,
University of Akron
America on Fire, a new book by Elizabeth Hinton, explores the history of police violence and Black resistance in U.S. cities during the 1960s and 70s.
A touchstone for Hinton’s well-researched study is the work of the Kerner Commission, created by Lyndon Johnson in 1967 with the task of determining the origins of race-driven conflict in American cities.
The commission’s 426-page report, progressive for its time, found that the cause of urban “riots” was not Black lawlessness but white racism. The report called for full integration of Black citizens into “the mainstream of American life” and stated that this goal could only be achieved by massive investment of federal resources to equalize opportunity in minority communities.
President Johnson saw such conclusions as politically radical and impossible to implement. Instead, LBJ did what the USA always does. He doubled-down on brute force. The federal funds that could have improved people’s lives went toward hiring thousands of police and equipping them with ever-deadlier military weaponry.
Hinton’s book does a historical deep dive into a great many Black protests. One that happened in my adopted hometown of Akron, Ohio is a good example. Over four nights in August 1970, law officers brandished shotguns and used tear gas and night sticks to disperse street crowds in Black neighborhoods. The local newspaper sided with the police without mentioning the grievances of the insurgents, whom they called “hoodlums” and “far out radicals.”
Hinton lays out similar events in order to present a set of striking truths that still resonate:
1. President Johnson’s strategies repressed mass violence, but they ironically made further violence inevitable. Between 1964 and 1972, the United States endured bloody internal conflict on a level not seen since the Civil War.
2. The cause of the conflicts was “unnecessary and aggressive police interventions in Black communities,” which accumulated into hostility and set off preemptive, violent reactions.
3. The so-called urban “riots” of the 1960s and 70s can only be understood as rebellions. They were not based on a wave of criminality; they were a sustained insurgency. They were not attacks on American institutions but appeals for inclusion within them.
4. In this period there emerged a “cycle” of over-policing and rebellion, of police brutality and community violence that defined life in segregated low-income urban areas.
5. In Black neighborhoods, aggressive over-policing became a fact of life. The message was that Black people should get used to police surveillance of their pickup basketball games, walks home from work, and family barbeques. Poverty and harassment gave residents good reason to rebel.
6. Throughout the twentieth century, whenever people of color disrupted the status quo, white people formed armed groups. In the East St. Louis massacre of 1917 and Tulsa massacre of 1921, white mobs, backed by law enforcement, destroyed the future of Black communities. On a smaller scale, this happened in dozens of cities in the late 1960 and early 1970s.
7. The idea that “both sides” were responsible for the violence was based on the assumption that the status quo of second class citizenship for Blacks was acceptable and should remain in place.
8. White people could attack Black people and face no consequences; Black people were criminalized and punished for defending their communities. The white majority saw no reason to end the domination of political and economic institutions that systematically excluded African Americans from jobs, housing, and educational opportunities.
9. Similarly in schools, Black student rebellions were not outbursts of criminality but reactions to unequal educational conditions. Increasingly, the state adopted a militaristic approach to manage behavioral issues, with minority students punished disproportionately.
10. U.S. policymakers had a choice between overwhelming brute force and positive meaningful action to remove racial inequities. They generally pursued the “punitive path,” and still do.
Elizabeth Hinton is a professor of Law, History and African American Studies at Yale. A great value of her book lies in its clear-eyed assessment of familiar social phenomena:
–Police violence causes community violence. The cycle of violence and rebellion can be broken, but not by the application of more violence. Patrolling low-income neighborhoods with outside forces does not promote public safety.
–Embracing mass incarceration as a policy response is counterproductive. Instead it functions merely as a crime promotion program.
–Full partnership and equal opportunity in all facets of society can’t happen while the white elite still holds racist attitudes that prevent it from truly sharing power.
Hinton acknowledges that change is possible and that, in 2021, some lawmakers are listening. But she predicts that the country “will continue to see the fires of rebellion.” Violence will not end, Hinton asserts, until the nation stops expecting police to manage conditions that are beyond their control.
