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 in July 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson in to investigate the causes of over 150 race riots throughout the United States in the summer of 1967. The Commission sought to provide recommendations that would prevent the riots from reoccurring. The 426-page Kerner Report concluded that the direct cause of the riots was rooted in the social consequences of white racism, such as disparities in housing, employment, education and policing. However, the Johnson administration did not directly address the report's recommendations, as they were perceived to be unpopular with conservatives.
The report was released in 1968 after seven months of investigation. Rather than attributing the rioting to a small group of outsiders or trouble-makers as many prior riot investigations had done or to radicals or a foreign conspiracy as almost three-fourths of white America believed, the Commission concluded that the rioting was a response to decades of "pervasive discrimination and segregation." Said the Commission, "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 Black 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."
The Commission's 426-page report is regarded as "the touchstone for race relations" and as "one of the two seminal works" on race in this country. It was also a bestseller, outselling even the Warren Report which dealt with President Kennedy's assassination.
Background
appointed the Commission on July 28, 1967, while rioting was still underway in Detroit. There had been mounting civil unrest in a few predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods since 1965, but what happened in 1967 shocked and terrified much of America as the evening news seemed to regularly show National Guardsmen and police crouching behind parked cars, tanks rumbling down dark streets, towering fires, and blocks and blocks of rubble and broken windows.In his remarks upon signing the order to establish 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?"
Operations
was selected by President Johnson to serve as the Commission's executive director within two days of the Commission's official creation. Victor Palmieri was then hired by Ginsburg several weeks later to serve as the Commission's deputy executive director. A staff of approximately 200 was quickly hired and an elaborate, multi-faceted strategy for investigating the rioting, determining who had rioted and why, and for developing recommendations was developed. This methodology featured examining the characteristics of 13,000 people who had been arrested for rioting, sending six-member field teams to over twenty cities, interviewing state and local law enforcement personnel, using FBI reports, studying census bureau data, and talking to and conducting public opinion polling of riot area residents.The Commission was also aided by the work of the National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas, which was appointed by President Johnson and by an advisory panel on private enterprise that the Commission itself created. The insurance committee, which became known as the Hughes Panel after its chairman, New Jersey governor Richard Hughes, was created because of the concern that insurance companies, which had already begun abandoning minority areas in the years before 1967, would only accelerate this trend now that massive property damage had occurred in cities like Newark and Detroit. This committee's recommendations were summarized and included as Chapter 14 in the Kerner Report. The Commission's private enterprise panel was created to identify what incentives might encourage businesses to hire low-income workers or expand or relocate to low-income/minority areas. Its recommendations were included in the "employment" subsection of Chapter 17 in the Kerner Report.
Report summary
The Commission's final work, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders or Kerner Report, was issued on February 29, 1968. The Report became an instant bestseller, and more than two million Americans bought copies of the 426-page document. Its primary finding was that the riots resulted from Black frustration at the lack of economic opportunity and the manner in which they were treated by white society, especially by the police. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced the report a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life."The report was made available through the US Government Printing Office, but it was Bantam Books who published the full report that most people purchased or read. Bantam published it in an inexpensive, mass-market paperback book format with an introduction written by Tom Wicker of The New York Times.
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 combined a detailed description of how eight riots unfolded and ended with governmental statistics that demonstrated the differences in living conditions between America's Black and white populations. It also included a chapter on African American history and a chapter on how the European immigrant experience differed from what Blacks were experiencing and a vast array of recommendations pertaining to the police, the justice system, property insurance, the media, employment, education, welfare, and housing".
The report's best-known passage warned: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."
It concluded that the main cause of the violence was white racism and suggested that white America bore much of the responsibility for Black rioting and rebellion. Its study of arrested rioters found that these individuals were not transients, habitual criminals, or unemployed troublemakers. In fact, these individuals were usually lifelong residents of the city where they rioted, they had actually stayed in school a little longer and had previously been arrested no more than the average person from their neighborhood, and they had a job.
It is also important to note that neither the Commission nor the FBI found any evidence that the rioting was the result of a local, national or foreign conspiracy.
The Report called for an end to de facto segregation, the creation of new jobs, the construction of new housing, major changes to the welfare program, and the diversification of local police and the media.
The Commission further noted that:
- "Unless there are sharp changes in the factors influencing Negro settlement patterns within metropolitan areas, there is little doubt that the trend toward Negro majorities will continue."
- "Providing employment for the swelling Negro ghetto population will require...opening suburban residential areas to Negroes and encouraging them to move closer to industrial centers..."
- "ities will have Negro majorities by 1985 and the suburbs ringing them will remain largely all white unless there are major changes in Negro fertility rates, in migration settlement patterns or public policy."
- "e believe that the emphasis of the program should be changed from traditional publicly built slum based high rise projects to smaller units on scattered sites."
Reception
The report received widespread media coverage and had many mixed responses. Media coverage primarily looked at the recommendations and the report's summary.Conservatives disliked that blame was placed on white institutions and society and thought rioters were "let off the hook." Richard Nixon, then running for president, pointed to the commission’s report to show liberals coddle criminals and don’t understand the frustrations of the middle class. “The major weakness of the presidential weakness of the presidential commission is that it, in effect, blames everybody for the riots except the perpetrators of the riots,” Nixon said in a 1968 radio interview. He argued the real answer to riots is force and ‘retaliation against the perpetrators and planners of violence.” The response of Black news groups was mixed towards the report. Some Black newspapers like the New York Amsterdam News and those they interviewed thought that the report did not have any new findings and was simply mirroring what Black people already knew. Others were happy that the report was simply acknowledging racism.
President Johnson, who had already pushed through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, largely rejected the Commission's report. It is thought that he disliked it because of a number of reasons: that the report did not adequately acknowledge the accomplishments of his Administration, that its call for "unprecedented levels of funding" was unrealistic and only exacerbated the budget problems that he was already having with Congress, and that he felt that a conspiracy had to be involved given the magnitude of the rioting.
A Harris poll taken about a month after the report was released found that only 37% of surveyed whites believed that the riots were mainly caused by racism. However, an earlier poll taken immediately after the Newark and Detroit riots had found that a much smaller amount—16%--had believed this to be true eight months earlier.