It is not difficult to imagine the scene: A troubled community with racially segregated, under-performing schools and high under- and unemployment. A police shooting. A young black man dead. Civil unrest. Millions of dollars in property damage. An anxious mayor orders a curfew and appeals for calm. A reticent governor calls upon the National Guard.
This could have been Ferguson in 2014 or Baltimore in 2015. This and similar scenes have played out repeatedly for a century: Washington, D.C., 1919. Detroit, 1943. Harlem, 1964. Watts, 1965. Boston, 1976. Los Angeles, 1992. Cincinnati, 2001. The underlying conditions and seething resentments. The violent trigger. The polarized public reaction and dueling public narratives.
No time did this scene replay more convulsively than the “long, hot summer” of 1967, when it spread across the country in more than 150 cities. A series of police encounters triggered uprisings in the North and West on a scale never seen before. Shaken by the crescendo of unrest, President Johnson convened a special National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders headed by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner.
President Johnson charged this bipartisan commission with investigating the immediate causes of disorder, as well as the underlying conditions that gave rise to such pent-up anger, and to provide recommendations to prevent such events from happening again.
Fifty years ago this month, the commission issued a dramatic and shocking message to the nation. The Kerner Commission’s report concluded that white society had denied opportunity to African-Americans living in poor urban neighborhoods. In its most famous line, the commission warned that “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
The report presented a comprehensive and wide-ranging set of recommendations. Topics included employment and large-scale job training and creation; education reform, including integrating schools; promoting residential integration by increasing the supply of housing subsidies for poor families; and diversifying local police forces.
However, this ambitious program was dead on arrival. President Johnson’s political capital had been drained by the war in Vietnam and his coalition suffered massive losses in mid-term elections. More dauntingly, Richard Nixon campaigned on racial resentment to civil rights with a message of “law and order” that strategically stoked a backlash to the uprisings.
President Trump campaigned on a similar message that appealed to and stoked racial resentment, describing inner cities as “a living hell.” Under his administration, Trump’s attorney general has stepped back from federal enforcement of the consent decrees negotiated by the Department of Justice under the Obama administration with local police departments.
The warnings of the Kerner report, that “neither existing conditions nor the garrison state offers acceptable alternatives for the future of this country,” seem forgotten.
As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of this report, we would be wise to heed its warnings if we wish to avoid finding ourselves in a similar situation 50 years from now. Anyone reading the Department of Justice’s Ferguson, Baltimore or Chicago reports of recent years cannot avoid the contemporary parallels to the events, causes and contexts found in the Kerner report.
The Kerner report warned that America faced three choices: 1) do nothing, which would risk a repeat of the same violence; 2) policies aimed to “enrich the ghetto,” which they argued would “create a permanently divided country,” or 3) a mixture of short-term policies to strengthen the ghetto with longer term policies to promote integration.”
Only the latter, the report concluded, would produce a “single society in which every citizen will be free to live and work according to his capabilities and desires.”
We face this choice still.
Stephen Menendian is the Assistant Director at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley. The institute will host “Race & Inequality in America: Kerner@50 conference,” examining issues around race, segregation and inequality in the United States, from Feb. 28-March 1 at UC Berkeley. The institute is not affiliated with the Haas School of Business on the same campus.
