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

This chapter focuses on the figure of the “Black sniper” (96), a trope perpetuated in the media during the late 1960s and early 1970s which was based in some reality, but also heavily exaggerated to stoke white fears of a widespread Black conspiracy against the police. As the Black Power movement gained greater influence, Black Americans around the country began to stress more and more the need to exercise their second amendment rights to protect themselves and their communities against white terrorism.

However, their efforts to defend themselves with firearms were widely criticized as examples of Black violence, even though white people who exercised their second amendment rights received no criticism. Some Black people began targeting police with gunfire to intimidate them, giving rise to the figure of the Black sniper. Law enforcement particularly feared Black veterans, who had been trained to kill and were likely to have resentments against the authorities. The police’s obsession with the idea of Black snipers often made them paranoid, resulting in them firing their guns wildly, hitting innocent citizens.

Despite the widespread narrative, there was little evidence that many actual Black snipers existed, and most likely a lot of the stories stemmed from law enforcement officers and National Guardsmen accidentally firing on each other. One Life cover story claimed to interview a conspiracy of Black snipers who participated in the 1967 Newark rebellion, though later the author admitted that they had largely fabricated the story; nevertheless, this article became a reference point for many media figures discussing the idea of the Black sniper. Paranoia about sniping led to greater police violence, and in response Black citizens made greater efforts to arm and defend themselves.

The United Front led by Charles Koen in Cairo trained Black citizens to use firearms; they believed that the nonviolent protests of the civil rights movement earlier in the decade had failed because the Black protesters had not been able to defend themselves. During the early 1970s, the number of police officers killed on duty reached its highest peak ever, although this also corresponded with the highest number of officers being on the streets. Meanwhile, police killings of Black people also increased, although these were treated as isolated incidents. In the Detroit suburb of Inkster, a young Black soldier named Darnell Stephen Summers organized the Black Youth Council to help teach his community to defend themselves. The organization opened the Malcolm X Cultural Center, prompting local law enforcement to descend on the area and demand that Summers change its name.

In early August of 1968, Black police officer John Knight and his white partner Thomas Freeman approached a suspicious Mercury Cougar, only to be met with gunfire. Neither officer was seriously injured, but Turhan Lewis, a member of the Black Youth Council, was later arrested for the assault despite his car not matching the officers’ description. Shortly afterward, another officer named Robert Gonser was killed by gunfire from a Pontiac Bonneville, resulting in white law enforcement from the surrounding areas swarming into Inkster to find the perpetrator. Two Black teenagers, 16-year-old Herman Matthews and his 14-year-old cousin James, were targeted by officers merely on the basis that James was wearing a white shirt. The boys fled in fear; Herman was captured and arrested, but James was gunned down and murdered by the officers. Afterward, the community came together and overwhelmingly voted to keep the Malcolm X Cultural Center, and the officers responsible for James Matthews’s death were suspended, though they never faced any murder charges.

Distrust of law enforcement continued to escalate in Black communities around the country, especially after the brutal assassination of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark at the hands of the FBI and Chicago police. Meanwhile the authorities increasingly feared that Black youth were on the verge of an insurrection, and law enforcement officers claimed that there was a coordinated conspiracy to kill the police. Both sides saw themselves as acting in self-defense. The Black Panthers created a system to “police the police” (116) by displaying guns when officers threatened Black citizens and by posting bail for those arrested by the police.

Although the Black Panthers were acting in self-defense and for the survival of their community, they were frequently painted as violent radicals who posed a threat to America itself. Charles A. O’Brien, the deputy attorney general of California, testified that police officers were being used as the scapegoat for the systemic failings of society, and that the government needed to do more to address poverty and inequality. His viewpoint was an outlier, however, and none of the government authorities seemed to realize that groups like the Black Panthers and the United Front were, in fact, attempting to address the systemic problems O’Brien pointed out.

The title of this chapter, “The Poisoned Tree,” refers to the systemic corruption and racism within America’s police departments. While abusive officers were often presented in the media as lone “bad apples,” Hinton argues that all of these bad apples were growing from a poisoned tree. She centers this chapter around one “bad apple” in particular, officer Claiborne T. Callahan, who patrolled a Black neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, and was known to the residents for being aggressive and disrespectful.

In October 1969, Callahan broke up a street football game, and afterward attempted to arrest a teenage boy in a McDonald’s parking lot for allegedly swearing at him. Another young boy, Keith Strickland, intervened and was severely beaten by Callahan with his gun. Strickland’s mother Sadie Pinn and another man named Gary Peters both also tried to intervene and save the children from Callahan, only to be met with violence themselves; Peters was arrested and convicted of assault and battery. When Pinn tried to call an ambulance for her bleeding son, no ambulance came, and she was forced to dress his wounds herself.

After this incident, protesters in Alexandria demanded that both Callahan and the police chief, Russell Hawes, resign. In previous years, the Black community of Alexandria, represented by the Urban League, had attempted peaceful talks with the law enforcement community in the hope of improving relations, but the police had stopped attending the meetings.

After the incident with Callahan, Hawes came to his defense, arguing that he had acted properly in the situation and that the people were only calling for his resignation because they didn’t like how effective he was at enforcing the law. Racial tensions had been growing for years in Alexandria, and when the Black community saw that Callahan was going to face no consequences for assaulting children, they broke out in mass violence around the city, targeting businesses and public institutions.

This forced the Alexandria City Council to hold a public hearing on the Callahan incident, and after hearing from the Black residents and members of the Urban League, the city agreed to some moderate reforms to address the problems of police violence. One Black resident pointed out that they had been asking for these reforms for a year, but they didn’t get any response until after resorting to violent rebellion. Several Black residents were not satisfied with the reforms promised by the city, and still called for consequences against Callahan, though they were ignored. Meanwhile, white business owners and public figures in Alexandria heaped praise upon Callahan and turned him into a hero. Chief Hawes, however, was pressured to resign due to his outdated views of Black people.

The problems between law enforcement and the Black community in Alexandria were far from over, as another six days of violent rebellion were sparked the next year after the murder of a Black teenager by a white 7-Eleven employee. The murderer was given an extremely light sentence, and the obvious apathy of city officials toward Black people motivated the rebellion. To the people of Alexandria and many other cities, it was clear that the problems they faced were not the result of a few individual “bad apples,” but of an entire political and legal system that was poisoned and must be cut down with violence.