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The Report on Race That Shook
America
It came out in 1968—yet little has changed since the Kerner
Commission denounced “white racism.”
JUSTIN DRIVER
MAY 2018 ISSUE
THE ATLANTIC
IN JULY 1967, when President Lyndon B. Johnson formed a
commission to analyze the riots then engulfing several major
American cities, the radical wing of the civil-rights movement eyed his
appointees with grave skepticism. Not only did the 11-person
commission abound with the most conventional of politicians—
including its chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner—but a mere two
of them were black. Racial militants might have tolerated that paltry
number of seats had they been occupied by firebrands such as Stokely
Carmichael, who popularized the term black power, or H. Rap Brown,
who routinely railed against “the honkies.” These brazen embodiments
of the new generation of civil-rights activism would have reliably
conveyed the concerns and frustrations of black youth—a presumably
vital task for the commission, given that most rioters ranged from 15
to 24 years old.
Instead of black insurgents, however, Johnson tapped the longtime
NAACP doyen Roy Wilkins and Senator Edward Brooke of
Massachusetts, two men broadly regarded as more acquainted with
executive suites than with edgy streets. Detractors viewed Wilkins as
so fearful of bucking the Johnson administration that they branded
him “Roy Weak-knees.” Although Brooke had recently become the
first black person popularly elected to the Senate, national media
observed that his time as state attorney general and his personal
attributes hardly endeared him to black radicals, who stopped just shy
of labeling him an Uncle Tom. “Because of his pale skin, his
Episcopalian faith, his reserved New England
manner,” Time magazine noted, Brooke “is looked upon as what might
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be described as a ‘NASP’—the Negro equivalent of the White AngloSaxon Protestant.” Both Wilkins and Brooke, moreover, had sharply
repudiated the nascent black-power movement, going so far as to
equate it with white supremacy. Whereas Brooke called Carmichael
and the arch-segregationist Lester Maddox “extremists of black power
and white power,” Wilkins termed Carmichael’s ethos “a reverse
Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.”
With these pillars of the establishment speaking on behalf of African
Americans, black-power advocates were convinced that the National
Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—as the body was officially
named—would sanitize America’s ugly racial realities. A few months
before the commission’s findings appeared in a document typically
called the Kerner Report, the journalist Elizabeth Drew confirmed in
these pages that “the word has gone out among the militant Negroes
that the commission is a fink operation … and is not to be cooperated
with.” She added: “No one here is betting … that the commission’s
product will differ radically from one that [LBJ] wants.”
Surprisingly, when the Kerner Report surfaced, in February 1968,
black-power supporters felt cheered, and President Johnson was
chagrined. H. Rap Brown, who was in a Louisiana jail cell for inciting a
crowd, released an exultant statement: “The members of the
commission should be put in jail under $100,000 bail each because
they’re saying essentially what I’ve been saying.” For his part, an
infuriated LBJ canceled the White House ceremony where he had
been scheduled to accept a bound copy of the report, avoided public
commentary on the eagerly anticipated document, and refused to sign
customary letters recognizing the commissioners for their service. But
Johnson’s effort to ignore the report failed utterly. The Kerner
Report became an instant publishing phenomenon; Bantam sold
almost 1 million paperbacks in the first two weeks. Public appetite ran
so strong that Marlon Brando read aloud excerpts of the volume on a
late-night television talk show.
Fifty years have now elapsed since the Kerner Report appeared, but
even in our current age of woke-ness, the document stands out for its
unvarnished, unflinching identification of “white racism” as the
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fundamental cause of urban unrest. Works written by committees
(especially government committees) have a well-deserved reputation
for inducing somnolence, but the Kerner Report somehow managed to
frame its indictment of racial oppression in several stirring
formulations that have endured. “What white Americans have never
fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white
society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the commission stated.
“White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white
society condones it.” The report warned, in perhaps its most
celebrated passage: “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one
black, one white—separate and unequal.”
Some aspects of the report may resonate even more loudly today than
they did in the late 1960s. For example, the commission’s repeated
emphasis on the role of police brutality in alienating black citizens and
sowing the seeds of urban discontent now assumes added significance,
given the many images of unarmed black men whose deaths at the
hands of the state have been seared into the national psyche. Indeed,
some of the report’s assessments could—eerily and depressingly—have
been written yesterday to describe America’s recent racial
disturbances, in locales ranging from Ferguson, Missouri, to
Baltimore, Maryland: “Almost invariably the incident that ignites
disorder arises from police action.” Apart from its sharply phrased
critique of the riots’ origins, the report promoted an ambitious policy
agenda, including major measures in the domains of education,
employment, housing, and welfare.
document that black radicals anticipated
would be a whitewash end up instead denouncing “white racism”?
This improbable turn of events animates Steven M. Gillon’s deft,
incisive, and altogether absorbing history of the Kerner Commission,
which he convincingly depicts as “the last gasp of 1960s liberalism—
the last full-throated declaration that the federal government should
play a leading role in solving deeply embedded problems such as
racism and poverty.”
HOW DID A GOVERNMENT
The puzzle of the commission’s severe assessment of the conditions
plaguing urban America only intensifies when one considers that
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Johnson held leverage over its chairman. It was widely understood
that the Illinois governor hoped LBJ would nominate him to a federal
judgeship. But Gillon, a history professor at the University of
Oklahoma, makes clear that Kerner served merely as a figurehead. The
commission’s executive director, David Ginsburg—a fixture of liberal
legal circles since the New Deal—shaped the report’s general
approach, tenor, and language more than any official commissioner
did, helping forge a fragile consensus among its members. Yet
identifying the report’s central force also fails to explain its bracing
conclusions. After all, LBJ chose Ginsburg for the important, if underthe-radar, senior staff position precisely because he was a Johnson
loyalist, one who, as Elizabeth Drew put it, enjoyed a reputation as
“the insider’s insider.”
LBJ was far from inexperienced in the ways of blue-ribbon panels.
During his five years in the Oval Office, he appointed a staggering 20
commissions. This prolific rate prompted at least one source to confer
on Johnson the dubious nickname “the Great Commissioner.” (One
suspects that Abraham Lincoln would not have been tempted to swap
appellations.)
With LBJ’s hand-selected personnel at the helm of a well-oiled
apparatus, the question remains: Why did the Kerner Report assume
its pungent tone and advance bold proposals rather than simply
blessing the Great Society programs in anodyne language? Three
primary reasons emerge from Gillon’s meticulous re-creation of the
proceedings.
First, the commissioners’ visits to riot-torn cities around the country
proved galvanizing. Some members had a vague understanding of life
in ghettos, but the conditions they witnessed firsthand were far more
dire than anything they had imagined. Unemployment was pervasive,
schools had insufficient funds and virtually no white students, and
neighborhoods lacked access to adequate sanitation. More sobering
still was the profound sense of disillusionment and anger that the
commissioners encountered.
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In Detroit, Michigan, and in Newark, New Jersey, where the two
deadliest disturbances of 1967 occurred, many rioters declared that
they would not fight for the United States, even in a major war. During
one particularly unnerving field visit, in Cincinnati, Ohio, a young
Presbyterian minister who held a degree from Columbia University
calmly informed the commission that the recent spate of violence
represented “just the beginning.”
“Look, man, we’re hip to you white people. We know … it’s no good
trying to appeal to your morals; you’ve shown you don’t have any
morals. The only thing you believe in is your property—that’s what this
country is all about, baby—so we are going to burn it down.”
Second, such provocative encounters convinced the commission that
only tough language would reach its dual intended audiences. For
white Americans, the commissioners concluded that firm rhetoric was
necessary to jolt them out of their collective slumber about the
nation’s inner cities. Shortly before the report appeared, one
member—Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma—explained: “I believe that
white people in America are decent people [and that] if they can be
shown the terrible conditions in which other Americans live and how
this threatens our society, they will join together to try to solve these
problems.”
For black Americans, by contrast, tough rhetoric was required to
prevent the black-power movement from gaining more adherents. The
report expressly condemned black-power advocates for retreating
from the integrationist vision and dismissed the self-styled
revolutionaries as mere Booker T. Washingtons with attitudes. But for
those criticisms to seem credible, the report also needed to contain
language excoriating the nation’s racist past and present.
Finally, the Kerner Report was shaped by a desire to avoid the hostile
receptions that had greeted two recent governmental tracts. Following
the Watts riots in 1965, a California report explained the violence by
invoking what came to be known as “the riffraff theory,” the notion
that a group of perpetual misfits (many of whom had migrated from
the South) had plotted the unrest. Scholars immediately assailed this
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view, and the commission’s own profile of the typical rioter in 1967
belied the stereotype: Generally, rioters were educated, lifelong
residents of their city who—crucially—had at least seen or suffered
police brutality. Also in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report
chronicling the increase in single motherhood in black families, with
its emphasis on cultural and psychological factors, drew fierce
criticism for “blaming the victim.” These cautionary tales primed the
Kerner Commission to focus on structural obstacles confronting black
communities, rather than on the supposed personal failings of the
rioters.
HALF A CENTURY LATER , the nation’s racial demographics have
upended the black–white paradigm that prevailed in 1968; no serious
analysis of race could now disregard that increased diversity. Even
more distant from the current national climate, however, is the
commission’s repeated insistence that the fate of inner-city African
Americans stands inextricably connected to that of their fellow
citizens. To take just one example, the report stated:
“This Nation is confronted with the issue of justice for all its people—
white as well as black, rural as well as urban … In speaking of the
Negro, we do not speak of ‘them.’ We speak of us—for the freedoms
and opportunities of all Americans are diminished and imperiled
when they are denied to some Americans.”
Though such sentiments in 1968 may have been more aspirational
than actual, the collective perspective now sounds lamentably alien.
Yet the continuities between the Kerner Commission era and
contemporary realities seem even more pronounced than the ruptures.
In the political realm, a direct line connects Richard Nixon’s successful
campaign for the White House in 1968 to our most recent presidential
election. Nixon disparaged the Kerner Commission’s findings as too
permissive, playing up his promise to restore “law and order” in
America. “I am the law-and-order candidate,” Donald Trump pledged
to a crowd in Virginia Beach in July 2016, and since assuming office he
has practiced a singularly divisive brand of politics, seldom missing a
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chance to pit “them” against “us.” Furthermore, while many African
Americans have made momentous strides in the past five decades,
cities still contain destitute neighborhoods filled with racial minorities,
which—as in the late 1960s—serve as breeding grounds for despair
and alienation. The Fair Housing Act of 1968—the only major tangible
legislative achievement traceable to the Kerner Report—has failed to
address those grim pockets of isolation.
When LBJ spoke briefly to the commissioners at the start of their
undertaking, he tasked them with answering three basic questions
about the recent unrest: “What happened? Why did it happen? What
can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?” On the
Kerner Report’s 50th anniversary, the stubborn persistence of racial
ghettos gives rise to another, deeply disconcerting query: Why hasn’t it
happened more frequently?
JUSTIN DRIVER is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the author
of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the
American Mind.
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