Born in Flames

A rally organized by the Committee Against Fort Apache takes over a New York Street, with a multiracial group of protestors holding signs including, 'Stop the Racist Film Fort Apache."

During the 1970s, a wave of arson coursed through cities across the United States, destroying large portions of neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Popular memory confuses the arson wave with the 1960s uprisings, yet these fires were lit not for protest, but for profit, most of which flowed into the ironically named FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate. By asking why cities went up in flames in these years, how their fires were extinguished, and what arose in their ashes, my book project, Born in Flames: Racial Finance and the Underwriting of Incendiary Cities, casts new light on the restructuring of U.S. cities since 1968. The answers hinge not on insurrection, but rather indemnification, and at the center of the project is the untold history of the racially-stratified property insurance market, a key force in the making of U.S. urban inequality. Through a case study of the Bronx, I examine how the rise of the FIRE industries, which eclipsed manufacturing as the engines of urban economies in the 1970s, reshaped neighborhoods of color in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

Researcher: Bench Ansfield

Fort Apache, The Bronx and the Struggle Over the Celluloid City

Bench Ansfield | Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative | August 2022

In the early 1980s, when Paul Newman filmed the police drama Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), he was struggling to revive his sagging career. Shot in the urban-western mode, the film projects the regenerative powers of the U.S. frontier onto the post-Fordist city. Fort Apache chronicles the Bronx’s 41st police precinct in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when officers’ sense of being under siege prompted the nickname “Fort Apache.” As a cavalry film, Fort Apache transposed the nation’s frontier from John Ford’s Monument Valley to the nation’s newest monument of dispossession, Charlotte Street. Operating within the settler colonial conventions of the western, the film projects savagery not just onto the racialized masses of the Bronx, but specifically onto Black and Brown radical formations of the late 1960s and early 1970s like the Young Lords Party. The film's production and the controversy it stirred illuminate how the Bronx became fodder for a law-and-order politics articulated in a liberal grammar.

For Newman’s career, the filmic frontier did its work, delivering the comeback he was seeking. But the film was far from a smashing success, and its middling ticket sales and reams of bad press were a direct result of its organized critics. Before production had even commenced, a grassroots, ad-hoc organization called the Committee Against Fort Apache (CAFA) formed in the Bronx, and it soon spread nationwide (its archives are held by Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños). CAFA rose from the ashes of the Young Lords, and though its mandate was more circumscribed than the Lords, it would resurrect many of the hardball, theatrical methods and movement building strategies that had defined its predecessor. From its founding at Lincoln Hospital, CAFA used its campaign against the film as a strategy for linking Hollywood stereotyping to police violence, racialized austerity, and the false promises of liberalism. In the words of one member, “You cannot separate the movie from the cuts in the hospital system, the cuts in housing facilities, the cuts in the school system.”

When CAFA condemned the film as an apologetics of austerity and racist police violence, Newman and the filmmakers, including producer David Susskind, invoked their liberal bona fides and their dedication to progressive causes. What ensued was a battle over the causes of the city’s plight, the place of the police and culture industries in addressing them, and, as ever, what tactics were fair game for a movement of the criminalized.

Keywords: racial capitalism, urban crisis, racial justice, urban westerns