Hinton begins America on Fire during the years immediately following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which, along with the passing of the Civil Rights Act, marked the end of the civil rights movement in the US. The civil rights movement was a period of nonviolent protest that took place across America from 1954 to 1968. Its primary goal was to end racial segregation in America and gain equal rights for Black Americans, who had for decades suffered from underfunded schools, low employment, voter suppression, poverty, discrimination and white supremacist violence.

The movement began with the landmark judicial case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. White Americans all over the country were fiercely resistant to the idea of integration, and tensions began to rise. In 1955, Rosa Parks, who was already actively involved in the movement for civil rights, protested racial segregation by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, setting off the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1960, Black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, conducted peaceful sit-ins to protest segregated restaurants. These and many more events led to the growth of the movement all around the nation.