By Elizabeth Hinton
Liveright Publishing Corporation – 2021
Reviewed by Steve Halpern
In the year 1967, I was a high school student in Newark, New Jersey. In July of that year, Newark erupted in a rebellion protesting routine police brutality. At that time, I had no idea of why those rebellions erupted. The press argued that there were “snipers” who were firing guns from rooftops. The press also argued that this was not a rebellion, but a “riot.”
Elizabeth Hinton quoted Newark Police Director Dominic Spina who had a different idea about who the snipers were. “I think a lot of the reports of snipers was due to the, I hate to use the word, trigger-happy guardsmen, who were firing at noises and firing indiscriminately at times.”
Activist Willie Wright suggested that the idea of the “sniper thing” was a “myth” fabricated by the governor “and his gestapo to commit mass murder in this town.” In all, the National Guard murdered about 24 Newark residents. Three of those victims were children. If I had a different skin color and lived in a different neighborhood, I might have been one of those children who were murdered.
In the year 1967, I didn’t know much about racist discrimination. Clearly, the school I attended, like schools throughout this country, made it a conscious policy of avoiding the issue of the long history of discrimination in this country.
I began to question the political economic system because of my experience and not because of what I learned in high school. I went to a dilapidated high school that was a few blocks away from the low-income housing projects.
Just a few miles outside of Newark there are several suburban schools that appear to be more like country clubs, located in wooded areas with access to swimming pools and tennis courts. I began to think that this profound difference in the funding of education wasn’t happening because of a mistake or a lack of sensitivity. No, there was something profoundly wrong with this dramatic difference in the funding of education.
I’ve read a number of books about the struggle against discrimination in this country. Those books usually report that the civil rights movement, in essence, ended with the murders of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Then, there were the massive international demonstrations that erupted in 2020 protesting the many murders of Black people by the police.
However, Elizabeth Hinton gives a list at the end of her book that is about 75 pages long. This list reports on all of the rebellions against police brutality and discrimination between the years 1964 and 1989. Hinton gave the following summary of what happened between the years 1968 and 1972:
“Between May 1968 and December 1972, some 960 segregated Black communities across the United States witnessed 1,949 separate uprisings—the vast majority in mid-sized and smaller cities that journalists at the time and scholars have tended to overlook.” “Over these four years, nearly 40,000 people were arrested, more than 10,000 were injured, and at least 220 people were killed.” These numbers do not include prison rebellions, including the one at Attica, and the murder of George Jackson during this same period.
So, the question to be asked is why did 1,949 rebellions erupt all over the country? Hinton begins to answer this question with the first sentence in her book: “The residents of Carver Ranches (Florida) didn’t have sidewalks, fire hydrants, or a sewer system. They did, however, have police patrolling the streets.”
She went on to argue that rebellions often erupted “when law enforcement meddled, often violently, in ordinary, everyday activity (a group of kids doing what kids do).
The rebellions in Watts in 1965 and Newark in 1967 started with the arrest of a Black motorist. The rebellion in Detroit in that same year started with a police raid on a speakeasy. The police and the National Guard murdered scores of Black people during those rebellions.
The federal government recognized that murdering citizens in cold blood didn’t look very good to the world. So, they started giving the police massive amounts of tear gas. During the demonstrations against police brutality in Philadelphia this past summer, the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at demonstrators.
We might think about the fact that in those same years the United States government mobilized millions of soldiers to go to war against the people of Vietnam. James Baldwin wrote about the similarities in the wars against Korea and Vietnam, and the wars against Black people in this country.
“I began to feel a terrified pity for the white children of these white people: who had been sent, by their parents, to Korea, though their parents did not know why. Neither did their parents know why these miserable, incontestably inferior, rice-eating gooks refused to come to heel, and would not be saved. But I knew why. I came from a long line of miserable, incontestably inferior, rice eating, chicken-stealing, hog-swilling niggers––who had acquired these skills in their flight from bondage––who still refused to come to heel, and who would not be saved. If two and two make four, then it is a very simple matter to recognize that people unable to be responsible for their own children, and who care so little about each other, are unlikely instruments for the salvation of the people who they permit themselves the luxury of despising as inferior to themselves. Even in the case of Korea, we, the blacks at least, knew why our children were there: they had been sent there to be used, in exactly the same way, and for the same reasons, as the blacks had been so widely dispersed out of Africa––an incalculable investment of raw material in what was not yet known as the common market.”
Just as Baldwin compared the struggle of Black people in this country to the struggle of Koreans, he also compared the struggle of the Black Panthers to the struggle of the Vietnamese people.
“Let us tell it like it is: the rhetoric of a Stennis, a Maddox, a Wallace, historically and actually, has brought death to untold numbers of black people and it was meant to bring death to them. This is absolutely true, no matter who denies it––no black man can possibly deny it. Now, in the interest of the public peace, it is the Black Panthers who are being murdered in their beds, by the dutiful and zealous police. But, for a policeman, all black men, especially young black men, are probably Black Panthers and all black women and children are probably allied with them: just as, in a Vietnamese village, the entire population, men, women, children, are considered as probable Vietcong. In the village, as in the ghetto, those who were not dangerous before the search-and-destroy operation assuredly become so afterward, for the inhabitants of the village, like the inhabitants of the ghetto, realize that they are identified, judged, menaced, murdered, solely because of the color of their skin. This is as curious a way of waging a war for a people’s freedom as it is of maintaining the domestic public peace.”
Elizabeth Hinton also wrote about rebellions in the schools. I was a part of one of those rebellions when I attended Arts High in Newark, New Jersey. While I was a student at Arts, the teachers in that city went on strike. As students, we raised our own demands. Among those demands was to have the same funding for our education as the suburban students had for their education. We marched in front of the Newark City Hall to advance our demands.
The years I went to Arts High were the same years that were watershed moments in the history of music in this country. Groundbreaking sounds were emerging in Rhythm and Blues, Jazz, and Latin music. However, we were not allowed to perform or learn anything about this music that was popular all over the world. Instead, we performed the marching band music of John Philip Sousa.
So, during my senior year of high school my music class walked out in protest. The administration of the school yielded, and we finally learned a few things about the history of Jazz.
Elizabeth Hinton also reported on the truce between gangs in Los Angeles. Young Blacks joined gangs because gainful employment wasn’t available. When the gangs had a truce, the number of murders in that city declined dramatically.
While these gangs reduced the violence in Los Angeles, the government proceeded to substantially increase funding of the police. President William Clinton signed his crime bill and the number of people housed in the dungeons of this country skyrocketed. Disproportionate numbers of Black people have been locked up.
Hinton also gives evidence showing that in isolated areas police reform has had some modest results. From what I understand, the police in Newark, New Jersey did not fire one shot for an entire year.
However, Hinton also recognizes that the only way to effectively deal with this problem is to take on the source of these rebellions. That is to begin to reverse the institutionalized discrimination in this country.
Clearly, America on Fire is an essential book to read for anyone who is interested in the unvarnished history of this country. I also agree with Hinton in that there will be no lasting peace until a government does everything in its power to do away with all forms of racist discrimination. Clearly that isn’t happening today.
However, I believe a weakness in Hinton’s book is that she doesn’t advance a Marxist class analysis to this question. The United States has a capitalist political economic system. The government routinely supports the corporate drive to maximize profits. Throughout the history of this country, the government has allowed for discrimination.
By keeping the wages of Black people down corporations not only save money, they also keep the working class divided. My opinion is that the only way for the entire working class to advance is to recognize the need to take on all forms of discrimination.
This past summer millions of people demonstrated against murders by the police. Elizabeth Hinton noted that many, if not most of those who demonstrated were not Black. This is an excellent sign for the future.
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