Elizabeth Hinton — America on Fire (w/ Nikole Hannah-Jones)

What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. 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.

Black rebellion, America On Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California.

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Elizabeth Hinton is associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and a professor of law at Yale Law School. The author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, she lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Hinton will be in conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, an award-winning investigative reporter who covers civil rights and racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine. She also serves as the Knight Chair of Race and Investigative Reporting at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill and a co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, an elaboration on the original 1619 Project in the New York Times, will hit bookshelves this November.

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