America on Fire

A radical reckoning with the racial inequality of America’s past and present, by one of the leading scholars of policing and mass incarceration in the US

It’s often understood that the period of widespread rebellions across America in the 60s largely ended after the wave of protests following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. But from 1968 to 1972, there were thousands of urban rebellions across the United States, almost all of which were the responses of Black communities’ to police brutality and racism. In America on Fire, acclaimed scholar Elizabeth Hinton will tell the story of these rebellions for the first time, bringing to light never-before-seen archival research, in order to reframe the way we understand the politically-motivated uprisings of Black communities in the decades since.

                              

In light of the continuing protests in response to the murders by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others, as well as the shooting of Jacob Blake, this book offers an unprecedented framework for understanding the current crisis and demonstrates that we cannot truly understand the civil rights movement without coming to terms with the astonishing violence and hugely expanding policing regime that followed it. Following in the tradition of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, America on Fire is a groundbreaking investigation into a hidden history that will force us to rethink the way we talk about urban violence and ‘rioting’ in response to institutionalised racism.