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

Hinton begins this chapter with the funeral of Timothy Thomas, a young Black man who was murdered by police in Cincinnati, Ohio, in April 2001. Thomas was approached by the officers while buying cigarettes, and when he ran from them, they chased him down and shot him. Thomas technically had a criminal record at the time; police frequently stopped him and ticketed him for things like driving without a license, and because Thomas received so many such tickets he chose to ignore them, leading to a warrant for his arrest. This arrest warrant led the judge to acquit the officer who murdered Thomas of all charges, since Thomas clearly had a “history” (259).

Thomas’s death was the final straw after several more deaths of Black men at the hands of police in Cincinnati, due to a “zero tolerance” (260) law enforcement policy that targeted Black men substantially more than any other group. An uprising broke out in Cincinnati following Thomas’s death, but this time the response from authorities was different, as more diverse policymakers began to shift the focus to reform rather than violent suppression. Hinton proposes that the Cincinnati rebellion of 2001 marked a shift from the Black rebellions of the 20th century to the current style of protests we still see today.

As with another rebellion that had occurred in Cincinnati 33 years earlier, this rebellion was a protest against a police force weaponized against Black people. Thomas’s mother, Angela Leisure, led a group of protesters to a city council meeting to demand justice for her son’s death, only to be met with a reluctant response from city officials. The protesters took their anger out into the streets, throwing stones and bottles at police officers, looting several businesses, and beating a couple of bystanders. The mayor established a curfew, and hundreds of people were arrested. Thomas’s funeral was attended by several important civil rights leaders, the Cincinnati United Front, and members of the New Black Panthers, all of whom urged the people not to give up until they saw justice.

Black and white Cincinnatians were sharply divided in terms of wealth, even more than most American cities at the time. While a large portion of Cincinnati’s Black residents lived in extreme poverty, the city invested billions of dollars in football stadiums and projects to “gentrify” (268) low-income areas of the city. Meanwhile the “undesirables” (269), mostly Black men, were removed from the streets by being arrested or killed by police. The Ku Klux Klan even began holding rallies in Cincinnati in the 1990s. While many Black Cincinnatians didn’t condone the violence of the protests, they also saw that it was the only way to make their white neighbors wake up to the problems they faced.

Local and national authorities launched an investigation which concluded that the Cincinnati police department had a pattern of aggressive and irresponsible behavior toward Black citizens, and called for reforms in training and oversight. However, similar reforms had been called for over the past 30 years, and the police still only responded to criticism and protest with more violence. Although Cincinnati did have a relatively diverse police department, Black people were still underrepresented compared to the overall population of the city, and many residents viewed the Black officers as just as bad as the white ones, because the problem was with the system and the culture within the department itself. Officers had an “us against them mentality” (273) instead of seeing themselves as public servants there to keep residents safe.

Cincinnati’s United Front brought a lawsuit against the police department on behalf of a Black man who alleged that he had been the target of racial profiling. This led to leaders from both sides of the conflict coming together as a coalition to talk about conflict resolution, although the police refused to even discuss the idea of systemic racism within their department. Nevertheless, there was optimism that some reforms might be achieved, and for the first time citizens were allowed to have a real voice in policing policies. A number of diverse racial, ethnic, religious and LGBTQ groups came together in a peaceful march, followed by a boycott, to call for an end to racial profiling.

The coalition decided that the police needed to be retrained and change their entire culture. These reforms were met with strong resistance from the police department, who felt they were unrealistic and unnecessary. In 2006 the department adopted “Operation Vortex,” which aggressively ramped up the racial profiling and arrests in Black areas of the city, leading to another lawsuit from the ACLU. Only federal intervention finally forced the Cincinnati police department to make changes, and relations between police and Black residents did eventually start to improve, though many of the underlying issues of poverty and unemployment still remained. Instead of investing money in the real needs of Black Cincinnatians, the city officials spent a large amount of money to build a corporate-backed “National Underground Railroad Freedom Center,” as a way to cover up the city’s history of racial inequality.

Although tentative police reforms had been adopted, it did not put an end to the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement. In 2014, rebellion broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, after the murder of Michael Brown, and activists such as Reverend Damon Lynch, who had worked on the Cincinnati Coalition, went to Ferguson to offer “a way forward” (284) for Ferguson. In 2015, a Black man named Samuel DuBose was murdered by an officer in Cincinnati after being pulled over for not having a front license plate, and the only reason the city did not erupt into rebellion again was because of the reforms that had taken place years earlier. Nevertheless, while DuBose’s community hoped to see justice, his murderer was allowed to go free, just as so many other officers had before.

Hinton argues that as difficult as police reform is, it is still not enough to address the systemic issues that lead to death and violent rebellion. Only a deep change in the culture itself will prevent such situations from happening again.