Before the smoke settled from the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, President Lyndon Johnson established the Kerner Commission to examine the outbreaks that had occurred with increasing frequency and to answer the following questions:
- What happened?
- Why did it happen?
- What can be done to keep it from happening again?
Rather than providing the usual whitewashing the Commission offered the most forthright analysis of the racial situation in America that has ever been done by a high-level commission or committee—before or since. Martin Luther King hailed the Kerner Commission Report as a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.”
The Report was published by Bantam Books and sold over 2 million copies, even though it was over 600 pages long. It made headlines all across the country. Many people took it seriously, so much so that my office at IBM in the Wall Street area of New York City devoted an entire weekly sales meeting to a discussion of the Report.
By my reckoning, it is the most important book on race published since the Myrdal report, American Dilemma, in 1944. Some would say, “potentially the most important”—see below.
To answer the first question, “what happened?,” the Commission went in depth—over 200 pages—about the history of white-black race relations, especially the police and the black community, describing white oppression and black rebellions through the decades. They concluded that “To some Negroes, police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression.”
Their description of the civil disorders of 1967 was “Negroes acting against local symbols of white American society, authority, and property in Negro neighborhoods–rather than against white persons.”
Insultingly, there was widespread speculation that the racial disorders of the mid-1960’s were organized by outside forces, i.e., communists—as if African Americans could not possibly be fed up enough with their plight to rebel on their own. The Commission’s response to that issue was “The urban disorders of the summer of 1967 were not caused by, nor were they the consequence of, any organized plan or ‘conspiracy.’”
The following two quotations show how they answered the second question, “Why did it happen?”
- “Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively in the past; it now threatens to do so again. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”
- “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.”
In answering the third question, “What can be done to keep it from happening again?,” the Kerner Commission said there were three options:
- Maintain present policies, which was not desired as they would cause negative consequences for society.
- Adopt a policy of “enrichment” aimed at improving the quality of ghetto life while abandoning integration as a goal. This was also considered unacceptable as it would relegate African Americans to a permanently inferior economic status.
- Or adopt the more desirable policy of ghetto enrichment combined with programs supporting the integration of substantial numbers of African Americans outside the black ghetto.
Under the assumption that the country would pursue policies like option 3, the Commission laid out several policy proposals about such issues as employment, education, and housing, all based on three principles:
- To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems;
- To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance;
- To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society.
The Commission also correctly predicted the future. They argued that African Americans would soon dominate American cities and these cities would tend to have African American mayors. However, those mayors would face even more difficult conditions, mostly because of a shrinking tax base. Thus, concentrated attention was needed to stop this from happening.
Despite considerable attention to the Kerner Commission Report, however, it was doomed from the beginning. First, President Johnson snubbed the report, presumably because he was pitching a hissy fit about not being lauded enough for all that he had done—the Civil Rights Bill, the Voting Rights Act, and Great Society Programs. This was on top of him having to withdraw from his re-election campaign because he was suffering wide-spread criticisms about the Vietnam War, being led by Martin Luther King.
The Kerner Commission Report was released on February 29, 1968. Just over a month later as people began to sink their teeth into the challenge of the Commission’s report, Martin Luther King was assassinated, provoking riots in over a 100 cities nationwide. The Kerner Commission Report was tossed aside as the country reacted violently.
Law and order became the political watchword. Politicians from Richard Nixon on down campaigned on law and order platforms. And they governed by the same mantra.
Police Departments fortified themselves and became more aggressive against African Americans. The country has never recovered from this racial backlash.