Over the past two decades, violence has become a prominent subject in studies on the history of the African American freedom struggle after World War II. A number of historians have studied white supremacist violence that targeted black citizens in the rural South between the 1940s and 1970s; others have explored African American self-defense groups that sought to repel such violence. Militant Black Power organizations like the Black Panther Party have also received much scholarly attention. By contrast, there are relatively few scholarly works on the urban unrests that many historians continue to refer to as “race riots.”

Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire is the most comprehensive study of those racial conflicts and makes a compelling argument about their role in the African American freedom struggle. Focusing on the period 1968–1972, when hundreds of American cities went up in flames, Hinton argues that such conflicts have to be understood as rebellions rather than “riots” because they constituted a form of violent protest against police brutality and systemic racism in urban Black communities. She rejects widely held views of urban uprisings, which many U.S. politicians and officials interpreted—and continue to interpret—as spontaneous acts of crime that require more forceful policing in poor African American neighborhoods. Instead, Hinton regards them as political violence that aimed to effect fundamental change in law enforcement, employment, education, and housing. America on Fire thus reinterprets urban rebellions as an integral part of the Black freedom struggle, rather than as a deviation from it.

Hinton’s argument is not entirely new, but her superb book provides the most extensive evidence to support it and reveals, like no other study before it, the extent to which urban unrest was a reaction to racist policing. Poor and working-class African Americans rebelled against racial profiling and police brutality in their urban communities, where a long history of excessive policing was exacerbated by the impact of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Crime in the second half of the 1960s. Almost every violent protest during the period 1968–1972 was triggered by everyday encounters between white police officers and Black citizens. White authorities responded to these “riots” with even more extreme policing, which only confirmed many African Americans in their belief that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s had done nothing to improve the lives of poor Black citizens in urban America. Relying on the rich Records of the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, Elizabeth Hinton skillfully dissects the conditions that led to unrest, sheds light on the various groups that participated in or reacted to violent uprisings, and analyzes their aftermath. She shows that neither African American activists’ efforts to publicize the dismal conditions faced by Black residents nor numerous commissions that identified systemic racism and police brutality as the root cause of urban violence prompted city authorities to reconsider the War on Crime or to take seriously the needs of the urban poor.

But America on Fire goes even further in its examination of urban unrest, comparing the rebellions of the late 1960s and early 1970s with those that have taken place since then. The study reveals that the rebellions that occurred in cities such as Miami, Florida, in 1980, and Los Angeles, California, in 1992, grew out of the same grievances that had triggered previous uprisings. However, post-1972 unrests became rarer and began only after particularly brutal cases of police violence. At the same time, they became more violent. According to Hinton, the declining number of rebellions after the 1970s was due to a number of factors, including the mass incarceration of young African American men, the escalation of the War on Crime and the subsequent War on Drugs, growing Black political representation, and the tendency of many citizens of color to accept the daily reality of aggressive policing. Another factor that her book only hints at might be that, compared to the 1960s and 1970s, present-day police forces have much more liberty to use lethal force when encountering African Americans that they deem a threat. Hinton suggests that urban rebellions are likely to continue as long as national, state, and local authorities focus on controlling poor minority communities rather than devising policies that serve their needs.

Meticulously researched and cogently argued, America on Fire is an important book that forces historians to reconsider their interpretations of violence in the post-1945 African American freedom struggle. It also compels them to take seriously the conspicuous continuities in the history of systemic racism, white supremacy, and Black protest. During a time when Black Lives Matter activists call attention to the very same conditions against which urban rebels protested so vehemently in the 1960s and 1970s, Elizabeth Hinton’s enlightening study should be read by scholars and policymakers alike.