Book Talk with Bench Ansfield: Born in Flames
We are thrilled to host historian and educator Bench Ansfield. Their new release, Born in Flames, highlights the destructive insurance practices that led to landlords setting fire to the still-inhabited homes of Black and Brown residents as well as the tenant-led resistance movements that arose in response. Bench will be in conversation with professor Elizabeth Hinton. Join us to learn about how this history came to light and its lasting legacy.
More about the book:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color.
Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the vast majority of the fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords.
Ansfield’s book, based on a decade of research, introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress. Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate— eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit. At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as “Disco Inferno.”
Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks.
More about Bench:
Bench Ansfield is a historian of racial capitalism, the carceral state, and twentieth-century U.S. cities. They hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, and they are an Assistant Professor of History at Temple University. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, they were an ACLS and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and an American Democracy Fellow at Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.
More about Elizabeth:
Elizabeth Hinton is an associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and professor of law at Yale Law School. The author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, Hinton lives in New Haven, Connecticut.