Fifty years ago, the Kerner Commission, President Lyndon Johnson’s blue-ribbon committee, diagnosed the racial problem of America and offered a carefully considered prescription. But the patient (the United States) did not take the medicine.
After precisely answering President Johnson’s first two questions about the riots of the mid-1960’s—What happened? Why did it happen?—the Commission considered the third question, “What can be done to keep it from happening again?” The Kerner Commission said the country had 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.
Thus, the Kerner Commission described the institutional racism that produced the “ghetto time-bomb” and made a compelling case for the kinds of remedial actions needed. This started a national discussion.
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, e.g., 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.
Further, the Kerner Commission Report was released on March 1, 1968. Just over a month later, as people began to sink their teeth into the challenge of the 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.
The racial code words “law and order” became the political watchwords. 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.