Kerner Commission


The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member Presidential Commission established by President Lyndon B. Johnson in to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots in the United States and to provide recommendations for the future.
The report was released in 1968, after seven months of investigation. It cited lack of economic opportunity as the cause of the riots, including failed social service programs. It also criticized the white-oriented media. The 426-page report was a bestseller.

Background

President Johnson appointed the commission on July 28, 1967, while rioting was still underway in Detroit, Michigan. Mounting civil unrest since 1965 had spawned riots in the black and Latino neighborhoods of major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Newark. In his remarks upon signing the order establishing the commission, Johnson asked for answers to three basic questions about the riots: "What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?"

Report summary

The commission's final report, the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders or Kerner Report, was released on February 29, 1968, after seven months of investigation. The report became an instant bestseller, and over two million Americans bought copies of the 426-page document. Its finding was that the riots resulted from black frustration at the lack of economic opportunity. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced the report a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life."
The report berated federal and state governments for failed housing, education and social-service policies. The report also aimed some of its sharpest criticism at the media. "The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and white perspective."
The report's most famous passage warned, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." The report was a strong indictment of white America: "What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."
Its results suggested that one main cause of urban violence was white racism and suggested that white America bore much of the responsibility for black rioting and rebellion. It called to create new jobs, construct new housing, and put a stop to de facto segregation in order to wipe out the destructive ghetto environment. In order to do so, the report recommended for government programs to provide needed services, to hire more diverse and sensitive police forces and, most notably, to invest billions in housing programs aimed at breaking up residential segregation.
Among other points, the commission's suggestions included:
The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration released federal funding for local police forces in response. Appointed by Johnson to serve as the commission's executive director, David Ginsburg played a pivotal role in writing the commission's findings.

Aftermath

President Johnson, who had already pushed through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, ignored the report and rejected the Kerner Commission's recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
To mark the 30th anniversary of the Kerner Report, the Eisenhower Foundation in 1998 sponsored two complementary reports, The Millennium Breach and Locked in the Poorhouse. The Millennium Breach, co-authored by former senator and commission member Fred R. Harris, found the racial divide had grown in the subsequent years with inner city unemployment at crisis levels.
The Millennium Breach found that most of the decade that followed the Kerner Report, America made progress on the principal fronts the report dealt with: race, poverty, and inner cities. Then progress stopped and in some ways reversed by a series of economic shocks and trends and the government's action and inaction.
Harris reported, "Today, thirty years after the Kerner Report, there is more poverty in America, it is deeper, blacker and browner than before, and it is more concentrated in the cities, which have become America's poorhouses."

Criticism

At a 1998 lecture commemorating the 30th anniversary of the report, Stephan Thernstrom, a prominent conservative voice and a professor of history at Harvard University, argued: "Because the commission took for granted that the riots were the fault of white racism, it would have been awkward to have had to confront the question of why liberal Detroit blew up while Birmingham and other Southern cities — where conditions for blacks were infinitely worse — did not. Likewise, if the problem was white racism, why didn't the riots occur in the 1930s, when prevailing white racial attitudes were far more barbaric than they were in the 1960s?"
Others refute this criticism by pointing to the importance of expectations; in Alabama and other states black people could only survive by knowing “their place”, in the North black people expected fair treatment.

Members of the commission