America on Fire

The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 60's

By: Elizabeth Hinton

Narrated by: Shayna Small

Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors - and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.

Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of systemic racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: The word "riot" was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions - explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post-Jim Crow United States no longer holds.

Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California.

The central lesson from these eruptions - that police violence invariably leads to community violence - continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: Rebellions will surely continue until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

©2021 Elizabeth Hinton (P)2021 Recorded Books, Inc.

Riot or Rebellion

This is a very informative book that tells the History of some of the key Rebellions in the USA against the oppressive living conditions in African Communities during the 60s and 70s.It gives details about the response of Racists Police Departments and City Officials. It discusses the planning of the protests by organizations and community leaders. It also discusses the spontaneous actions to Over-policing in the segregated ghetto communities.

A Good Choice

I suggest that this book be read and discussed in every public school American history class: there may be differences of opinion among readers, but that is what learning is all about.

Giant leaps of logic

The author takes giant leaps of faith of logic to relate and infer modern police malpractice to blatantly racist police policy from Jim Crowe until it’s end. There is a lot of shock and awe narrative that aids in demonizing the idea of the law is what makes us a civilized society.