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

In this section, Hinton juxtaposes the systemic failures of public schools with the systemic failures of the government as a whole to illustrate the problems faced by Black Americans. In multiple cities, students repeatedly identified necessary reforms to make their schools more just and equitable, but the administrations—even majority Black administrations—refused to hear their demands. Likewise, on a broader scale, the commissions established around the country were able to identify the social problems that led to Black rebellion, and presented many suggestions for positive reforms, but both politicians and law enforcement officials repeatedly failed to implement these reforms.

In both cases, authorities preferred to meet Black people’s complaints with state-backed violence rather than invest the time and money into changing the system itself, revealing yet another facet of The Role of Police in Enforcing Systemic Racism. Black students were repeatedly criminalized for protesting against racism and inequality in their schools. This not only made it more difficult for the students to attend school—thus harming their education—but also gave rise to “the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ that scholars and activists have identified in recent years” (148). When asked why she wasn’t attending school, one Black student said, “Why would we show up to a prison? The police will be patrolling the halls and once we step out of line they’ll throw us in jail” (148). As seen in the first section of this book, the invasive presence of police did not help to bring peace but only to escalate the tension, setting off The Cycle of Repression and Violence. Hinton emphasizes the overreaction of law enforcement against the young student protesters with a quote from the teenage activist Claude Barnes: “Here we were, high school students, and we were confronted with police in full riot gear, pepper gas” (163).

The overreaction of police caused isolated student protests to spread throughout entire cities and escalate into violence and looting, which then led to even greater retaliation by the police and caused the death of multiple innocent students. Although the typical public narrative was that these students were out-of-control hooligans terrorizing the schools, Hinton argues that “these rebellions were not outbursts of criminality, but reactions to unequal educational and socioeconomic conditions” (149), and that the escalating violence was a result of school administrations choosing repression over dialogue with their students.

The unresponsiveness of the school administrations to Black students’ needs was a microcosm of the larger failure of the government to address the needs of Black Americans as a whole, even when presented with clear solutions. Just as school officials and law enforcement had disregarded the student protesters as being “not too bright” (167) and easily manipulated, the states’ commissions “recognized that police brutality plus desperate socioeconomic conditions equaled rebellion, but […] also depicted the rebels as emotional and senseless” (189). As with the schools, in most cases “the ‘solution’” adopted by politicians “always involved state-sanctioned counterinsurgency in defense of the existing racial order” (169), once again illustrating The Role of Police in Enforcing Systemic Racism.

Hinton argues that the failure of government to enact any real reforms lay not only with the politicians and police departments—though their resistance to reform was a major part of the problem—but also with the commissions themselves, who tended to “pathologize” (175) Black people. Even while identifying real social problems, the commissions also painted Black Americans as “delusional” (175), essentially arguing that both sides of the conflict were equally to blame for the cycle of violence. The police reinforced this view as they defended their own actions, and in doing so displayed their own racist double standards. Since government officials refused to invest the money and energy necessary for addressing the root causes of Black rebellion, and because police departments resisted any kind of reforms from within, very little positive change came from these commissions, and in fact “many of the cities they tried to save went into steep decline despite their efforts” (171).

One such city was Cairo, where “the sustained violence against Black people […] led to the slow death of the city consumed by its own racism” (196). As Cairo fell into decline, white residents fled to more prosperous areas, while Black residents had no choice but to stay and live with the legacies of racism and violence. Hinton draws attention to The Connections Between Past and Present, observing that “the consequences” of the states’ failure to address systemic racism and police brutality “are still with us today” (193). Cairo and other cities have still never recovered from this period, thanks to the “mealymouthed and noncommittal” (193) response of authorities to the problems identified in the commissions’ reports.

With this observation, Hinton bridges the first half of the book—an analysis of the “crucible period” of Black rebellion in the late 1960s and early 1970s—to the second half, which explores the fallout of this period in the following decades, continuing up to the George Floyd protests of 2020.