(theme music playing) HORSLEY: Hello, everyone.

Welcome to another P&P Live.

My name is Bashan.

I am part of the event staff with Politics and Prose.

What began in spring 2020 as local protests and response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement.

Billions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation's streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader systemic oppression of Black people.

To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence, yet as the acclaimed historian, Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.

This recent iteration of Black rebellion as America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence.

Elizabeth Hinton is an associate professor of history in African-American studies at Yale University.

And she's also a professor of law at Yale Law School.

She is also the author of, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.

Ms. Hinton will be in conversation today with Nikole Hannah-Jones, an award-winning investigative reporter who covers Civil Rights and racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine.

And a co-founder of the Ida B.

Wells Society.

Forthcoming will be The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, an elaboration on the original 1619 Project in The New York Times.

And it will hit bookshelves this November.

Without any further ado, Ms. Hannah-Jones, the floor is yours.

HANNAH-JONES: Well, I just wanted to say thank you Politics and Prose for hosting this conversation.

And, um, just so excited to be in conversation with you, Dr. Hinton.

If you look at, at my book, it's, it's completely dog-eared and, um, every page has underlines on it.

Um, it's, it's such a, just a fascinating and important study and, um, just so necessary in these times.

So I, I wondered if just to begin, um, the book of course is called America and, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.

What is the thesis of the book?

And, um, after that, then tell us how you became interested in the subject and decided to a book about it.

HINTON: So the book traces the history of Black rebellion from the, the kind of, what I call the crucible era of the late '60s and early '70s through the present.

And in doing so, draws our attention to the cycle, which we're still very much stuck in of police violence and community violence.

One of those central findings of the book is that far from actually, um, effectively controlling crime or preventing violence and social harm, police violence precipitates community violence.

The response, the immediate response on the part of Black Americans living in the communities that were targeted by the early programs of the War on Crime in the 1960s, was to fight back.

Um, and we see this cycle unfolding in its various forms through the remainder of the 20th century.

And then of course, into our old, own time.

And last summer, we again witnessed, you know, the streets of American cities look to many, resemble to many like what we witnessed in the 1960s, um, uh, emerging mass protest movement.

What we saw last summer, someone called the largest mass mobilization in U.S. history.

In fact, that was defined by both...

I mean, last summer was the vast majority of protests were peaceful, but by both non-violent and violent protest for racial justice catalyzed by incidents of police brutality.

And the, you know, the, the extreme violence of the 1960s has haunted the United States ever since.

My, my first book traced the history of federal crime control policy from the Kennedy administration through the Reagan administration, to really look at the ways in which the targeted crime control programs that federal policymakers began to embrace at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and progressive social change in the War on Poverty, fostered the mass criminalization of low-income Americans of color in the communities that they targeted.

And over the course of doing that research, most, I mostly consulted White House central files of the presidential administrations I engaged with, but I began to notice that, you know, the period that we typically thought of as being kind of the peak years of urban disorder, that is like really the long, what's known as "The long hot summer in '67" with Detroit and Newark.

And then the hundred some cities that erupted in response to Martin Luther King Jr's assassination in April, 1968.

I began to notice that rebellion, um, persisted well into the 1970s and beyond.

And so, you know, this became a question that I couldn't quite capture in that, um, in that history of federal policy, how, how are residents actually responding to the expansion of American police forces and the militarization of police in their communities as those, uh, those strategies hit the ground beginning really, uh, in the late '60s and into the, into the 1970s.

HANNAH-JONES: So I have so many questions and, and, and I'm trying to make sure I put them in an order that, that makes sense for the conversation.

So let, let's start just with terminology.

Um, of course we have, um, been taught to call these riots and you're clearly calling them rebellions.

And of course that terminology, I mean, we know that language really determines how we think about something.

Um, so talk about the use of those two terms and, and what does riots, the word riots evoke when we think about Black people, uh, up uprising versus rebellions?

HINTON: That's such an important question.

And let me, let me first say that, you know, my choice of the, to use the word rebellion also, you know, comes from the ways in which the people who participated in these acts of political violence understood their own actions.

So for instance, you know, in my home state of Michigan, the Detroit uprising of '67 is not known by the people... HANNAH-JONES: Mm-hmm.

HINTON: Who have participated in it as the "Detroit riot."

That's what other people call it.

HANNAH-JONES: That's right.

HINTON: It's still called "The Great Rebellion."

Um, residents saw themselves as rebelling, and they did not see themselves as rioting.

And I think, you know, first and foremost, it's really important to, especially in trying to privilege the groups of people who, um, embrace this form of, of, of political protest to privilege the ways in which they understood themselves and their own actions and not the ideas that other people imposed on them.

And so the use of the term riot is part of what has kind of kept us, um, in this cycle that I described earlier.

You know, when Harlem was the first city to, uh, to really explode on the national stage in, in the summer of 1964 and, you know, residents erupted in response to the, the killing of a 15-year-old high school student by a New York City police officer.

And even though, you know, the, the, the kind of root causes of the rebellion, the socioeconomic drivers that compelled people to throw rocks at, at the windows of stores and, and burn buildings, and, and fight back against police who were brutalizing them, were rooted in the same grievances as mainstream Civil Rights organizations.

That is a desire and a demand for decent jobs, um, access to expanded and robust educational opportunities, uh, adequate housing and, and basically full political and economic inclusion in American society.

Johnson, and other officials from jump said, distinguish this political violence from Civil Rights said, you know, this, this riot in Harlem has nothing to do with Civil Rights.

It is criminal.

It is tied to juvenile delinquency, it's meaningless, and in labeling it and seeing it as a riot and kind of divorcing it from its political motivations then, and seeing it as something labeling and as something that's criminal, then the only response to that criminal action, right, is the police.

It's not the demands that people want.

It's not, it's not the drivers that are bringing them to the streets and protest in the first place.

And so if the o, if riots are criminal and and the only solution is police, then again, we're caught in this, in this cycle that the only, the, the, the, the response on the part of policymakers is to continue to escalate the deployment of the very thing that, that is, that is precipitating the political violence in the first place.

And that is of course, law enforcement.

HANNAH-JONES: Take me through this kind of language shift then, and how that happens with President Johnson, because of course, uh, President Johnson helps get the, uh, major Civil Rights legislation passed through Congress.

And as, you know, Black people are seeing the largest expansion and securing of their rights since Reconstruction.

We're also seeing rebellions happening all across the country, and particularly outside of the kind of apartheid south, where these laws are taking effect.

And, and Johnson of course, is very perplexed by this.

Um, Black people are getting all of these rights and yet they're, you know, they're "rioting," all across, um, these urban, Northern and Western areas.

Um, so how does the architect of the Great Society, um, who believes that, you know, we need to have a War on Poverty, who is helping push through Civil Rights legislation begin to say, we're not accepting.

Why, why does he begin to see the shift?

And is it because he thinks he will lose political support?

Or does he actually believe that, that this violence is not political violence?

HINTON: Well, I think, I think one is a combination of both.

I mean, it's such an important question that lays the backdrop for many of the dynamics I'm describing in this book, but that really goes to the heart of a lot of what I take up in the first book in, in the, what, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, and trying to explain, um, how we became a mass incarceration society and the origins of that, you know, in this, in this Great Society War on Poverty, War on Crime moment.

And, you know, a big part of it is, a big part of that has to do with the well, one, I mean, it's the, it exemplifies the failures of liberal social policy and the ways in which policy makers own, Johnson's own some racist assumptions shaped what was, what he saw as possible and feasible.

So, you know, and this, this goes back to people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who were very influential over the direction of domestic policies during the Johnson administration that said, you know, that recognized, uh, historical racism, that recognized some of the socioeconomic dynamics behind Black poverty, but ultimately, and this is so key, saw the root cause of Black poverty as being Black behavior.

HANNAH-JONES: Yeah.

HINTON: So if the root cause of Black poverty is pathology, then, you know, Johnson and his council of economic advisers said, "Okay, well, we can actually fight the War on Poverty on the cheap."

We don't really need a major structural intervention, what we need, and this is, um, this is a phrase that Ramsey Clark used, who was considered one of the most liberal officials of the era, that, you know, the War on Poverty should be about helping the disadvantaged helping themselves.

So instead of a job creation program, there were job training programs.

HANNAH-JONES: Mm-hmm.

HINTON: Um, instead of really investing in robust public schools, there were remedial education programs, uh, clinics for, um, and resources for young mothers and, and women to teach them how to be, how to, how to maintain their homes.

Um, you know, all these programs to make in the words of Johnson and his officials, "Black people into productive citizens" um, instead of actually, giving, you know, instead of making the fundamental systemic transformations that were necessary.

So again, in the, in the absence of, you know, despite this, the, the grand title of the War on Poverty and the rhetoric behind it, you know, for, for, for many Americans of color in big cities and small cities in the, in the Northeast and the South and the West, uh, fundamental conditions had not changed.

And increasingly throughout the '60s, police were increasing, were relied upon to manage the effects of that, the material effects of that poverty, and inequality, and, um, and kind of serve as a deterrent, as policy makers, strategize to prevent, uh, future as they would say, rioting, future rebellions.

Um, so again, the, these racist, pathological assumptions that seeped into the policies of the, the Johnson administration really failed to allow the kind of promise of the War on Poverty to take hold and, uh, and to effectively, right, give people the resources that they needed, that, that, uh, compelled them to feel like they had no other recourse, but to, uh, engage in violent protest tactics, um, in the end.

HANNAH-JONES: Yeah, it's such an interesting, um, it's a, it's a important nuance that I think many progressives, uh, fall into the trap now, where they, they acknowledge that they are all of these societal forces that are leading to Black disadvantage, but then their ultimate argument is that that Black disa... that disadvantage has somehow damaged Black people, right?

And so that, yes, it started as a structural thing, but then it has this kind of, uh, corrosive effect on Black culture and then Black culture becomes responsible.

HINTON: Absolutely.

HANNAH-JONES: Um, and, and of course we still, we still often see that.

I would like to talk to you before we start, um, moving up to more modern times, I'd like to talk to you about the slave patrols and the role of policing and how, what we started to see, um, in the 1960s and clearly the type of surveillance, um, and policing that we see in Black communities today is really a legacy of slave patrols where policing was a form of social control.

Can you, can you talk about that?

HINTON: Yeah.

So in many ways, you know, law enforcement strategies that um, that, that shape American life today grow out of both, uh, the, the strategies that were used from 1619 onwards to, uh, to control and contain, uh, racially, marginalized groups, indigenous groups, enslaved people, poor, poor White people.

Um, and in particular slave patrols kind of func... in the purpose and function of slave patrols kind of laid the groundwork, um, for some of the functions that when modern police forces really took hold, um, would later assume.

So slave patrols were responsible for dispersing slave gatherings, identifying runaway, uh, enslaved Africans, uh, confiscating contraband, meaning books and, and weapons.

Again, you know, Black people, the second amendment never applies to Black people who are, um, not, not... don't enjoy or don't have access to the same second amendment rights as, um, as White people do.

And basically, you know, the, the, the function and logic of slave patrols was containing and exerting social control over people of color.

And this of course is the fundamental logic of American policing um, in general.

Even though today, you know, it's the, the kind of poli... policing itself or the, um, the kind of inherent, uh, purpose and function of police is very different in both low income communities of color and in, uh, in, in, in middle-class and wealthy, uh, White areas.

So in low-income communities of color, the purpose of police is to identify criminals, arrest them and remove them from the community, um, to help facilitate the process of incarceration.

In White and middle-class communities, the purpose of policing is to, uh, protect property.

And this, you know, this deeply, deeply shapes and, and grounds, uh, racial inequality, but also, uh, the, the kind of fundamental social divisions that have structured American society from its very foundings.

HANNAH-JONES: Yeah, I think like that, that's such an important point in, and in your book, you have these amazing examples, that I think will be, uh, not astounding at all to Black people but quite astounding to White people who have just fundamentally never seen the type of policing that Black people have experienced, which is, I think why they have such a hard time understanding, uh, Black relationships to police.

So you talk about, um, Cairo, Illinois, or Illinois, I got real Black on that one, Cairo, Illinois.

And, um, it's a place that I've studied quite a bit because of their, their fights over housing.

HINTON: Mm-hmm.

HANNAH-JONES: And the segregation and their public housing, which are actually ongoing.

Um, and it's, it's a southern, um, Illinois city, a lot of people because we have so much racial amnesia in this country don't know that, that Southern Illinois, basically the south.

HINTON: Yeah.

HANNAH-JONES: Um, I mean, it, it, it's, it's not literally north... south of the Mason-Dixon line, but it is the south, um, and, and operated at de jure segregated, um, for much of the history of this country until really the 1950s and '60s.

So you talk about this community that's literally in a proxy war with the police.

HINTON: Yeah, yeah.

HANNAH-JONES: Can you, can you talk about, a bit about that story and, and, uh, how it fits into the larger story, uh, in the book that you're trying to tell?

HINTON: Yeah.

So the, the, the Cairo story is one that, um, I weave throughout the book, but it, it figures really prominently in, uh, um, in the first part because Cairo was the site of the, the longest rebellion.

It really, I mean, you could argue started in '67, but the, the kind of height of the violence, uh, was between '69 and '72.

And essentially, you know, Cairo is exceptional in many ways, but also so reflective of, uh, America as a whole, and is a kind of warning sign to all of us about the, the kind of power of American racism, which I'll explain in a second.

So basically, you know, Cairo is a, by the, by the late 1960s, as Nikole said, it's basically, you know, it's the very Southernmost tip of, of Illinois.

There's about 8,000 residents just under half were Black.

Uh, most of the Black residents in the city lived in this housing project called Pyramid Courts, and had no political power whatsoever because, uh, of the winner take all voting structure.

So they never were able to achieve the majority for political representation.

The town, the political and economic institutions in the town were entirely run by White people.

They were completely locked out of jobs.

And throughout the '60s, actually, Cairo became a really important site for, um, for John Lewis in '63 to, to, uh, to work with activists there and, um, and launch a sit-in movement.

You know, there was a really robust freedom struggle, not entirely non-violent freedom, struggle that relied on, um, lawsuits and sit-ins and protests to, to desegregate the town.

And, um, essentially, you know, the, the kind of power and racism was so pronounced in, in, in Cairo because the White political, and economic establishment, there was deeply, deeply, um, entrenched with White vigilantism in general and the police force.

So it was, um, so that kind of like trying like the White vigilantes, the political and economic elites in the police force were so deeply intertwined that Black residents in Cairo basically had no recourse, no, for, to, to achieve any kind of, um, basic political or economic rights, um, and no protection against White vigilante violence.

So beginning in the late 1960s, the, uh, the White vigilantes began to literally, stand on the Mississippi levees, the town borders the Mississippi River and shoot into the, the all Black housing project of Pyramid Courts every night.

And eventually, the residents in Pyra... Pyramid Courts fought back both by boycotting the white stores in the cities, organizing with brother, brothers and sisters in the Chicago Urban League and other Civil Rights organizations to help provide them basic food and clothing as they refuse to participate in Cairo's economy, because they said, we're not gonna buy from these White store owners so they can buy bullets to shoot at us.

So when.

HANNAH-JONES: Wait, I, I want you to slow this down a little bit.

HINTON: Yeah.

HANNAH-JONES: Because if you're not reading the book, I just, this story is crazy.

HINTON: It's incredible.

HANNAH-JONES: Even for people like, you know, myself who like studies that like torrid racial history of this country all the time, like they were terrorizing this community.

You talk about how families were like, uh, they, they didn't have wanna put lights on in their house at night time.

HINTON: Yes.

HANNAH-JONES: They were afraid to let their kids go outside.

Can you just talk a little bit more about that terror... HINTON: Yeah.

HANNAH-JONES: That was being rained down with the acquiescence of the police force on this community?

HINTON: Yeah.

And, and it's, and it's the kind of it's, it's that, you know, in, in, kind of researching this story, I mean, it is a haunting, it is a haunting terror that we often think about as being kind of part of an earlier chapter of, um, of American history, you know, in the, in the 1910s, or maybe even in the 1950s and, you know, relegated to Mississippi and Alabama, but this is Cairo, Illinois in the 1970s.

And that was actually one of the things that really surprised me.

I mean, because of the ways in which White power operated this city, um, young, young Black children walking home from school were attacked by German Shepherds and their parents couldn't do anything about it.

There was no, until people arm themselves in self-defense organized, built cooperatives based on socialist principles and, and basically said, okay, we've got to, we've got to figure out, led by an amazing activist named Charles Koen in the Black United front, which was a vibrant Civil Rights organization in the city.

You know, we're gonna do this two pronged, uh, legal assault in every way we can on, uh, the, the, the rampant discrimination within institutions in Cairo.

And, you know, also by the way, the schools there, like many other places didn't desegregate until the late '60s.

And once they did following larger patterns, many of the parents pulled White students out, put them in private schools.

HANNAH-JONES: Right.

HINTON: Um, so this, this violence because of the, the ways in which this White supremacy was, was entwined with the political establishment and the police lasted for a very long time.

Um, and there was a lack, you know, I mean, it's not as if...

There was coverage of what was happening in, in Cairo, which was surprising.

I mean, some of that coverage and actually, you know, the way that I encountered this city in the archive that I used for much of the book was that essentially, uh, that, that these Black snipers were shooting up, you know, innocent White people.

And they were shooting at the police station for no reason.

And it was chaos because of these militant Negroes.

I mean, that was the coverage.

It was not, a lot of the coverage was not, you know, look at this community that is being terrorized and oppressed, but instead focusing on, uh, again, thinking about who has access to the second amendment.

Um, you know, what, what, what Black leaders in the community did to protect that community from vigilante violence.

Um, and in the end, I mean, I think this is where Cairo was really just a warning to the U.S., um, the, the establishment of Cairo, rather than conceding rights and political and economic power to Black residents basically let Cairo's, tanks Cairo's, uh, economy.

They either left the city or tanked the economy.

HANNAH-JONES: Yes.

HINTON: It was more important to them to to hang onto white supremacy then, to, to provide for their own children.

Um, and, and I think that, especially in the context of what we're seeing now is a really, really, uh, telling warning sign about the lengths that White people will go to, uh, maintain systems of racial oppression.

HANNAH-JONES: Right, and that's clearly, I mean, in your hometown of Detroit, Newark, name your, your city, saw that same pattern that was, that retrenchment, and then withdraw rather than share, uh.

HINTON: Exactly.

HANNAH-JONES: Economy, facility, education, anything.

Um, so your book, you know, we, we all kind of think about those big rebellions in the '60, and, um, for those, you know, the Cairo story is a few years before I'm born, not too long ago, a few years probably before you were born, not too long ago.

Um, but when we, we hear those stories, I think those of us who didn't live through it, I think White Americans probably in general, kind of don't realize how all across the country, it was like almost a state of war.

Um, I, I interviewed Walter Mondale for, um, an investigation I did on housing segregation and failures to enforce the, the Fair Housing Act.

And he talks about in '68 leading up to the Fair Housing Act, they literally thought the United States was on the brink of civil war.

That's, that is the only reason they get the Fair Housing Act passed.

And then we've just erased that from our memory.

And you talk about in your book, how between '68 and '72 in a four-year period, there were nearly 2000 uprisings, uh, in nearly 1,000 cities, which means there were multiple uprisings happening in some cities.

HINTON: Yeah.

HANNAH-JONES: And they weren't just in these big cities like LA or Detroit, but in places like my hometown, Waterloo, all of these little towns, uh, across the country.

Talk about, um, the extent of this, how violent this period was, the extent of these uprisings, and why we've kind of purged that from our, our national memory of, of that era.

HINTON: Yeah.

I mean, just one comment, 'cause I, I almost, um, I almost responded to this before when you mentioned it, but, you know, just like about kind of White denial of, um, of the violence that's been inflicted on Black people.

I mean, I think that's so like, that is what, in some ways it answers this question, right?

'Cause that's part of the reason why we haven't really understood this history of the '60s and '70s, I think.

And even I see this in, uh, the archives that I use.

Like there's, there's just been a denial.

Well, one there's this idea that like, racism is really a figment of Black people's imagination.

That, that we just like, everything is just overblown and that police brutality isn't something that's real, but it's just, it's something that Black people imagine or fabricate Um, and I think, you know, that really began to change, um, or at least that I think White Americans began to recognize, okay, maybe this actually is a thing with Rodney King in '91.

When, you know, there was this videotape beating.

HANNAH-JONES: Mm-hmm.

HINTON: And I think that's one of the things that's made a big difference in recent years with, you know, the fact that we all have these cameras in our pockets.

Like now, what's been going on in our community is that Black people have known about for years.

And people of color have known about for years is now on display.

And there's now proof, uh, that is undeniable that the American public as a whole has to, um, has to reckon with.

So the question, you know, that, so that '68 to '72 period is so important.

That's what I call the crucible period.

And it goes back to what I was talking about earlier about Johnson and the War on Crime.

So the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 is passed June.

Um, it's one of the last major pieces of domestic legislation Johnson enacts, and basically takes all of these experimental programs the federal government had been funding in big cities, in LA, in Baltimore and in Miami and Detroit, um, which had facilitated the transfer of surplus military weapons from Vietnam and Latin America and the Caribbean, and also helped to expand and professionalize police forces and train them and riot control techniques.

All these things that had been happening in the largest American cities where, where rebellion might've taken an even larger hit to political and economic institutions started to flow through this new federal grant program, this unprecedented federal intervention and local law enforcement to smaller, and mid-sized towns to rural communities.

To places like Cairo and places like York, Pennsylvania, and places like Albuquerque, New Mexico and Carver Ranchers, Florida, all of these smaller communities now had expanded police forces, now had, you know, M4 Carbine re, rifles and Bulletproof vests and tear gas and the weapons of the War on Crime.

And when these expanded militarized forces came into segregated, um, low-income Black communities, residents responded as they had in, you know, Harlem and Watson, they, they rebelled.

And so I think this is, this is like the real key thing that we, that historians miss, because, you know, we had this, there were several hundred rebellions from 60, um, '64 to '68, but after the Safe Streets Act, you know, once this new War on Crime is really, really hitting in cities big and small throughout the United States, that's actually when rebellion peaked.

You know, it didn't, like the Martin Luther King, Jr. rebellions, after, following the assassination were not the last hurrah.

They were only the beginning of what would come as the War on Crime unfolded.

And I think in terms of the history of the freedom struggle, um, and the way that we understand how communities respond to the expansion of policing of their ordinary and everyday lives, um, this, this history, the fact that so many people, um, responded to police violence with violence, uh, tells us a lot about dynamics between police and communities, how we got to where we are, and also expands again, the kind of boundaries of, um, of what we think of as, uh, as Black protests, because, you know, the rebellions were, um, in this later period, the, the most widely adopted form of protest among young Black people.

And I think, you know, that that chapter of the freedom struggle has been left out and is I think important in terms of understanding the longer, um, histories of the, of the protest movement, that for racial justice, that, that we, that continues today.

HANNAH-JONES: Can you talk a little bit more, I thought this was, uh, a fascinating, um, part of your book and also really critical for understanding what we've seen in terms of police response, uh, to Black Lives Matter, uh, protests and other uprisings is, um, and this is, this is why studying history, right, is so important because you look at what happens and if you've only ever remembered police coming out with tanks.

And, uh, military grade equipment and using tear gas, and you just think that's the way it's always been.

And you don't realize that no, policing didn't have to be like that.

It wasn't always like that.

So talk about how, at the end of, of, you know, the Vietnam War, Korean War, the Vietnam War, we have all this surplus military equipment, and it's actually kind of astounding that the response of the government is let's give this, this...

So when they call it the War on Crime, literally war they're using war, right?

War tools, um, war gear.

Can you talk about why the government thinks that this is what they should do with that excess equipment and how that transforms the relationship that police have with these communities?

I mean, if you, you treat police like they're soldiers, um, in gear for, um, enemy combat, they treat the communities they're policing like enemies, right?

HINTON: Exactly, that's a really good point.

It ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And I think one way to think about this, and one way to think about the kind of period of rebellion and the, the enduring implications is, is, um, as an era of insurgency and counterinsurgency.

Um, you know, I mean, Black people have all, has, have historically been an insurgent force.

The threat of Black rebellion has always kind of haunted, um, White political and economic elites, uh, from... HANNAH-JONES: Since the Declaration of Independence, Right?

HINTON: Exactly, exactly, exactly.

And so, um, and, and policymakers at the time in the '60s, recognized that, um, and, and saw rebellion as a threat.

And one of the big things I argue in the book is that, you know, the declaration of the War on Crime itself was in response to the demographic changes, brought by the great migration.

The fact that cities were becoming Blacker and that there was a growing population of Black youth that policy makers weren't providing jobs.

And robust opportunities for.

And they said, in the beginning of the Kennedy administration, started calling Black youth social dynamite.

'Cause they said, if we don't do something they're gonna explode.

And so I think, you know, this, this insurgency counterinsurgency extends both to, you know, what was going on in the streets of American cities, but also what's going on in, in Vietnam.

Um, and in, in many ways we can think about it as being kind of part of a larger continuum of intervention and occupation in, you know, as, as many, um, uh, Black radicals talked about in the time in occupied territory, in a colonized community.

I mean, there was, you know lots of, in the era of rebellion many Black theorists understood the kind of conditions of the community as being part of an internal colony, and in many ways with the deployment of this war.

And I think Nikole, I'm so glad that you said that because it wasn't just like.

The War on Poverty might've been a, a metaphor, but the War on Crimes and Drugs, are actually like, they are real wars on people of color.

Um, and you know, with that also ties to the kind of larger, um, military and then prison industrial complex, where, you know, it's lucrative for these companies to be making these weapons and technologies that can be used both, um, overseas, but also against, um, domestic insurgence at home.

HANNAH-JONES: Yes.

You know, it made me, um, think about this idea of the "Internal Enemy" which we see around the War of 1812, where Black folks are like, whoever's gonna get us free that's the side we're fighting on.

Um, and you know, the White, uh, White Americans were understanding that there was an enemy within that they couldn't trust because they were trying to fight for their freedom.

Um, which makes me talk about why when we see, um, colonized communities in other countries, when we see, uh, communities in other countries, though, uh, clearly not in, not in Israel, but in other places kind of rising up and, and taking whatever they can throwing stones.

We understand that these are political acts, right?

We understand that these are oppressed people who are, um, responding to their circumstance, but we do not translate that to, uh, Black Americans.

And in fact, we just act like they're a bunch of people who just, uh, you know, unorganized, no thought, animalistic, operating on instinct and just wanna, you know, loot and tear up things.

Talk about why we are unable to actually see and recognize the political actions and that Black people are, are, are asserting agency in this moment.

Um, why, why, why can't we talk about them that way?

HINTON: Yeah, I mean, well, I just, it gets to the heart of the, kind of the ways in which White supremacy structures, um, the narratives that we tell ourselves and, and, and, and the ways in which racism truly pervades our society.

I mean, we think, you know, we saw this throughout the 20th century when the U.S. is fighting for democracy abroad and, and denying equal rights to Black people and other, um, racially marginalized groups at home.

And, and, and really, you know, some have argued that like that, um, in the context of this kind of Cold War PR, uh, needs, this is part of the reason why we ended up getting Civil Rights legislation because the U.S. could not 'cause no longer begin to be the, you know, pretend to be like the arbiter of democracy while, um, maintaining apartheid at home.

I mean, I think, you know, this too has to do with the, like one just how dehumanized in general Black people are, how Black protests or protests for racial justice in general historically has been criminalized.

I mean, you know, I, I look a lot in the book at, and the book focuses on, uh, violent political rebellion, but as soon as Black people started in the, in the '50s started, you know, marching in the streets and filing lawsuits and demanding equal rights, conservatives immediately said, this is criminal.

HANNAH-JONES: That's right.

HINTON: And we saw it last summer.

We saw it last summer when nonviolent protest chanting Black Lives Matter, demanding and racial justice are still... HANNAH-JONES: Yeah.

HINTON: Called criminal and violent, even when they're peaceful.

So it is this double standard of, of, of the kind of protests that, that is acceptable for Black people to embrace.

And again, the fact that any call for racial justice because of the threat it represents to the status quo in American institutions is, is immediately, by at least some swabs of, of the population treated as something that's criminal.

So I think it relates to that.

HANNAH-JONES: Yeah, it's, it's, you know, in the last year with the pandemic, we, we've seen, uh, White Americans asserting, some White Americans asserting that having to wear a mask was a violation of their rights, right?

Um, but Black people are just supposed to submit to police, let them stop you, let them search you, comply.

Um, that expectation does not hold for White Americans.

And I think I'd love for you to talk about just the, the different, um, expectations of rights that we have for Black folks when police, I mean, in my neighborhood, they'll just put up a surveillance tower.

You literally don't like... HINTON: Right, right, yeah.

HANNAH-JONES: It's a watch tower in the middle of the neighborhood and you have no idea why it's there and you cannot fathom this happening in White communities.

Uh, and just knowing that the police are watching you, the sense all the time that, that you are being watched and surveilled but that you also should just comply.

Um, it's much like, you were Black people don't have second amendment rights.

Uh, it seems like there are other rights that, uh, we are not expected to be able to assert as well.

HINTON: Yeah.

And I mean, I think just exactly what you're saying, the way that Black people and that, uh, Black spaces are policed and surveilled.

And this is something that, you know, again, I mean, this, this ties to the kind of the, the mass community responses to the, the early deployment of these tactics during, during the War on Crime that led to that crucible era of rebellion.

When, you know, like a group of teenagers hanging out in a park, uh, get arrested for trespassing.

Uh, that would never happen if a group of white teenagers were hanging out, I don't know, in front of a roller skating rink in the suburbs... HANNAH-JONES: Right.

HINTON: Or something like that, right?

Um, uh, a party or a family barbecue getting broken up, again, because when Black people gather, and this goes back to the slave patrol comment, um, and the history of slave patrols, gatherings of Black people are always a threat.

HANNAH-JONES: Suspicious, yes.

HINTON: Yeah.

Again, like in part, because of the threat of rebellion, in part because the, the threat of insurgency.

Um, and, and, and therefore, uh, can, can be policed and therefore, um, you know, the, the police officer in searching for, assuming that there is criminal activity going on because of assumptions about Blackness and criminality, because of the links between Blackness and criminality in the American imagination, um, you know, ends up, it ends up being able to use state power to, to police and to circumvent, um, even instances of Black joy.

We know this doesn't happen in suburban communities.

I mean, you know, we think about Dante Wright who was pulled over for not having an air freshener on his rearview mirror.

That would never happen in, uh, in, in, in a White suburb of, uh, of Minneapolis.

HANNAH-JONES: Right.

HINTON: That would never happen.

That would never happen there.

HANNAH- JONES: Well not to a White person in a White suburb but it would happen to us in a White suburb.

HINTON: Yes, exactly.

Right, right, right.

That's what I meant, that's what I meant.

Um, you know, so again, so much of what, you know, the aggressive enforcement of misdemeanors... HANNAH-JONES: Yes.

HINTON: Which has been, what has propelled these wars in low income communities of color and mass incarceration, um, you know, does just simply does not, is, is not part of one's life and existence, um, in, in White communities and in many middle class communities as well.

HANNAH-JONES: Right.

Yeah.

I mean, that's also a legacy of slavery when, during the period of Reconstruction, right?

Uh, White people, criminalized normal behaviors in order to be able to arrest Black people and forced them to work on plantations.

Um, we don't... HINTON: Just on that real quick I mean, that's the like, I mean, that is the tendency, that is like the one, you know, like one of the big historical trends that we see, like every time rights, the bounds of citizenship and rights expands for oppressed groups... And for Black Americans, we get new criminal laws.

We get a cla, clamped down, and we get, uh, a mass incarceration that happened after the Civil War in 1865.

And then it happened a century later in 1965 when Johnson called the War on Crime.

HANNAH-JONES: So what I love about this book is it, uh, it deep, I don't know if this is word I'm going to make it into a word, de-pathologizes these rebellions, right?

And actually says, these rebellions are a very natural response to the circumstances that Black people are living in, because there is no expectation that you can go to the police for help, or you can go to the county commission or the mayor for help.

That the systems, um, they're the ones sending the police into your neighborhoods to do these things to you, and you are not going to be able, um, to actually go through the "proper channels."

Right?

So talk about what the book offers for instruction, um, in terms of understanding what we saw in 2020 and the path forward.

HINTON: So there are a lot of moments where I try to emphasize where there are missed opportunities or where there were, there were alternatives presented to both federal state and local officials, um, that, that, that weren't pursued.

Um, and I think one of the, one of the first big ones is the Kerner Commission, the Kerner Commission, you know, Johnson calls the Kerner Commission in the middle of the Detroit rebellion of '67 to investigate the causes of, um, all the rebellions that had, that had rocked American cities during his presidency.

And th, and when the Kerner Commission produced its best-selling report, Johnson didn't really like what they had to say.

They said, look, if we wanna, you know, if we wanna address riots as they would have, as they called them, um, we got to go far beyond the War on Poverty for all the reasons I mentioned earlier, you know, the, the kind of the, the lack of, uh, uh, of a big structural intervention.

The Kerner Commission said, we, we, we essentially need a Marshall plan for American cities.

We have to invest in these communities.

People are rebelling because they want jobs.

People are rebelling because they want educational opportunities.

We have to provide people with decent housing.

This is gonna take a massive mobilization of both the public and private sector.

And we gotta start investing in these communities.

And instead of making those investments into robust social institutions and welfare programs, and, uh, and basi... And meeting people's basic needs, that investment went into police and surveillance and incarceration time and time again.

I mean, even, you know, in, in Cairo, a commission came in '72, just as the violence had subsided to investigate what had happened, the Federal Civil Rights Commission and identified many of the socioeconomic drivers of the violence, and also, you know, called out the, the deep alliance between the White power structure and White vigilante groups and said, first and foremost, the police department has to admonish White supremacist groups and, and make clear that they're not entangled with them, which, which later the police department continued to refuse to do.

Wouldn't even make a statement saying, you know, there are no vigilantes here.

Um, but time and time again, the, the, the socioeconomic causes that many people drew attention to as a way to prevent rebellion in the future were consistently ignored.

And so I think one of the big, and, and the consequences of divesting from social welfare programs and investing instead in policing and incarceration in low income communities has brought us to the point where we are today.

And so I think, you know, we're at this crossroads where the, the kind of the, the punitive policies of the immediate post-Civil Rights period have not worked.

They've exacerbated inequality in many communities.

They have not kept, uh, they have not effectively dealt with the problem of gun violence and crime, in some of the most vulnerable communities in this country.

And so now it's time to do, um, what many communities are call, are calling for and what the people want.

And that is investing in a different set of resources into communities and empowering community organizations to address public safety concerns, um, and needs on their own terms.

I mean, that, that is what we need going forward.

Police reform.

Another point I make in the book is not gonna get us out of this.

It hasn't gone far enough.

It's we got to go back to what the Kerner Commission said more than 15 years ago.

We need a massive, we need a massive set of new investments and a structural transformation.

HANNAH-JONES: Yeah.

It also said that White people were, uh, implicated in the ghetto.

They created it, they sustained it... And it's their obligation to undo it.

Um, I remember the first time I read the Kerner Commission, uh, report, I was like, damn, they were not playing around.

You can't even imagine a report like that, uh, coming out today.

Um, so Kelly wants to know how difficult was it to research this book?

Um, what was the most challenging about your research and what methods did you use?

HINTON: So, you know, in, in many ways this book was the, the, the sources that I use for this book, the access that I gained was kind of a stroke of luck.

And I, and I wonder if in some ways we, um, because the archive that I used was private for so long, if this is part of the reason why we didn't know this history.

I mean, I think, you know, in some ways, um, it's so key to, to be transparent, to open up records as much as we can.

Um, but the record, the... What I use for the, you know, that, that late '60s crucible period, and, and all of the kind of quantitative measure of rebellions, the timeline that's included, the 25 page timeline of Black rebellions in the back of the book comes from the, the records of The Lemberg Center for the study of violence which formed right after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

And it was housed at Brandeis.

And the researchers at the Lemberg Center basically wanted to understand, um, American violence, and not just Black rebellions, but the labor struggles and the anti-war protest, and the student movement that characterize '60s and early '70s.

And they did quantitative studies and interviewed people.

And most importantly, from my s... my purposes, um, collected tens of thousands of newspaper clippings from local newspapers, uh, depicting, um, violent, violence in, in American communities.

And, and I happened to, you know, as I mentioned, I, I knew that rebellion persisted, but it was in, into the '70s, but it was difficult to actually figure out what was going on there.

And it was in a conversation that was introduced at, at actually a barbecue, the colleague of mine.

I met, uh, Christian Davenport, who's a political scientist University of Michigan and runs the radical information project there.

And he said, he started talking about the rebellions.

He was actually getting ready to do a, um, a 50th anniversary commemoration program for the Detroit Rebellion in '67.

This was in 2016.

Now I'm being long-winded, I'm trying to wrap this up.

HANNAH-JONES: It's okay.

HINTON: I'm just so excited.

So we said, okay, you know, "I, I have this archive," he just had the Lemberg records in his possession.

He said, "I had this archive come to my office and check out these newspaper clippings."

HANNAH-JONES: Wow.

HINTON: And so I went there and I, and then I was like, oh, I just couldn't believe.

I mean, these boxes full of newspaper articles of this history that we had completely overlooked.

And all of these stories, all of these rich textures of these, these struggles, um, that were just incredibly compelling.

And, and the, the archive had been kind of like passed around among these, this group of political scientists.

And so that's why it hadn't been public.

I think parts of the archive are now, um, back at Brandeis.

And I know that Christian through the radical information project, is hoping to digitize much of the archive, but, um, so that was, you know, that was kind of a starting point, um, between the newspaper clippings, archival sources, various archival sources that I could get my hands on, oral history interviews, um, and secondary sources, especially in the later period.

Um, some secondary works in particular were super helpful.

That's how I was able to put, um, the, the many stories, but still only scratching the surface that I told in the book altogether.

HANNAH-JONES: So, um, I'm gonna go Stephanie Jones-Roger is another amazing, um, academic and historian.

Um, her book, uh, They Were Her Property is transformative.

You should also pick that up.

So she has a question and she wants to know, can you speak to how gender shaped the story you tell and the, and the events you examine in America on Fire?

HINTON: So that's such a, that's such an important question.

You know, I think one of the, one of the, the, the kind of central actors, at least in the crucible period were, were young kids.

I mean, most of the people who were involved were young people, um, many of high school age, but some as young as ten and 12 years old.

Young boys and girls who, uh, fought back against police together.

I think in, in many of the stories though, the, the kind of actors who are at the center of precipitating incidents are often women.

So when women are br, brutalized by police, for instance, in, um, in Peoria, Illinois, uh, a 16-year-old pregnant, uh, young woman was, uh, pushed to the ground by a police officer.

And, uh, after this happened, you know, many of her friends, other young teenagers stepped in to defend her.

And this ended up resulting in a rebellion that lasted for several days.

Um, a young woman, a young mother who was evicted from a housing project, um, in Peoria a few years later, um, as she was being evicted by the police residents came to her defense.

Moved, you know, back the baby crib back into the apartment.

And the police came back and this ended up resulting in a major rebellion where residents of the housing project, um, burned down many of the administrative offices in the housing project.

So, you know, women were, were, were both active and central participants in the rebellions, but also I think because of the, the gender violence that Black women, uh, in particular experienced, when, when, when police or state actors were seen inflicting violence against women, the commu, community was, was very quick to, to come again to, to, um, to their defense, to her defense part of the kind of shifts in, or, or the need to protect, um, Black women and the community when there was no other recourse for protection.

When a 16 year old, again, talking about differential policing a young pregnant White woman would never get pushed down on the ground by a police officer.

This just wouldn't happen, but, uh, a young pregnant Black women, women do and did, and that, that, that extreme violence in itself, um.

HANNAH-JONES: Yes.

HINTON: Ignites something much larger.

HANNAH-JONES: Thank you.

Yeah, that, that story particularly about, um, the community's response to the eviction, it was just, you know, it was, it was a beautiful story of, of community, right?

Of, of people.

And again, I think speaks to agency, which is so often stripped of these stories.

Like, they went, they knew which entity was oppressing, uh, them, and they went to destroy that particular entity and, and moving the woman back in and saying no you're not gonna make... You're not gonna make our community member, um, homeless.

Um, I just love how you're subverting, um, with this text, how we're thinking about these acts of rebellion.

Uh, we have two minutes, so I'm gonna ask one more question.

HINTON: I'll try to be fast, I'm longwinded.

HANNAH-JONES: No, you're not.

I mean, you know, you know a lot and we wanna hear it.

Um, so Vanessa Diaz says, "I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the significance of the murder of George Floyd being legally deemed a murder, since police murders of Black people are rarely deemed murder.

I understand the, the tension between the critique of policing and conceptualizations of legality as a whole, but this still seems like a very significant legal model."

HINTON: Hi, Vanessa.

Thanks so much for that question.

You know, one thing that was really one of my, one of my many reactions to the George Floyd verdict is like, okay, we can, we can actually call, we can call this a murder.

I mean, through the book... HANNAH-JONES: A murder.

That's right.

HINTON: I had to, you know, the, the book was vetted and fact checked and, you know, several lawyers read it and I could not use the word murder to describe any of the, you know, any of the police killings.

And now because it, the, the rare moment that Derek Chauvin actually was convicted for murdering George Floyd, we can call it a murder.

And I think, again, this goes to questions that we've been talking about throughout the discussion about like, who holds power, who holds... What, what kind of violence is legitimate.

Um, and, and, and how we, we, we view and respond to the kind of reality of state sanctioned killings against people of color.

I mean, for so long, um, again, as we talked about earlier, these incidents are seen as kind of like a figment of our imagination or overblown.

HANNAH-JONES: Mm-hmm.

HINTON: Um, when in fact.

These murders have, have defined, uh, Black American life in the United States historically.

And again, until we, until we get beyond these, these categories of who, of what kind of violence is, is legitimate, who has access to resources and the kind of narrowed response that is only again, going back to that earlier question about terminology that can only be solved by more police, um, we're gonna continue to see these killings, we're gonna continue to be stuck here, and we're gonna continue to live in a country that is... that where these injustices are experienced every day.

I mean, just earlier this week with Andrew Brown, Jr.

This is just, this is just part of life.

And yeah, you might get a small victory, um, to, to a certain extent where, you know, you get basic.

You get a basic, what should, you know, conviction for somebody who slowly murdered another person on camera for 9 minutes, but this is not, this is not, uh, justice.

And we still have such a long way to go.

HANNAH-JONES: Thank you for writing the book, and I really appreciate you asking me to be in conversation with you today.

HINTON: Thank you so much, Nikole.

It was my true honor.

As I said on Twitter earlier today, you are one of my biggest she-roes.

And national treasure.

So thank you so much for your brilliance, your wisdom, all the work that you're doing.

I can't wait to see where you go next and, uh... And, and for The 1619 Project to be, uh, to be out in November.

HANNAH-JONES: Thank you.

Me too.

Thank you.

HORSLEY: On behalf of Politics and Prose, I'd like to thank both of you for this wonderful discussion.

And of course, like to thank everyone who has tuned in.

And everyone out there, please stay safe and stay well read.

NARRATOR: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose bookstore locations, or online at politics-prose.com.

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