The Kerner Commission, Spatial Deconcentration, and Urban Counterinsurgency

This is an excerpt of a longer piece written for Volume 15 of Critical Planning in 2008. I’m posting it here as people reflect on the legacy of the Kerner Commission fifty years later. While I think the material in this excerpt in particular holds up well, I do think in retrospect that graduate student me probably should have read, at a minimum, Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis and Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto before even trying to write about 20th century housing policy! If I was rewriting this today, I would connect the narrative of racialized counterinsurgency to the account of deindustrialization as a weapon in the former, and to the critique of liberalism in the latter (especially the chapter on Hyde Park). On liberalism, I am also fairly certain that Naomi Murakawa’s First Civil Right provides the theoretical scaffolding I was clearly grasping for here, especially in the parts of the article that I’ve chosen to leave out of this short excerpt. And finally, my experiences during and after the Baltimore Uprising make me believe that this narrative could be productively, if not automatically, brought up to the present day.

[…] Is it unreasonable to suggest that the exigencies of military action and national security played a significant role in American urban planning during the Cold War? One of the major determinants of the character of contemporary American cities was at least rhetorically linked to such concerns: the national highway system, officially known as “The National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.” In his 1955 address to Congress seeking funding for the project, Eisenhower outlined four reasons why the system had to be built, the third of which ran as follows: “In case of an atomic attack on our key cities, the road net must permit quick evacuation of target areas, mobilization of defense forces and maintenance of every essential economic function. But the present system in critical areas would be the breeder of a deadly congestion within hours of an attack.”

This preoccupation with the defensibility of a population concentrated in urban centers was not unique to Eisenhower. As Jennifer Light points out in her excellent survey of defense intellectuals’ involvement in domestic planning, a broad consensus quickly emerged in the post-World War II period within the national security knowledge/power nexus (including think tanks like RAND) that densely populated urban cores, with the concomitant concentration of economic activity, presented too easy a target in an age where city-leveling nuclear attacks were possible. The 1950s equivalent of “strategic embellishment” was the dissolution of urban areas through “defensive dispersal,” a vision, which, if never quite implemented as such, remained available to overcode and legitimate (through politically expedient reference to the imperatives of national security) parallel developments on the ground, including the penetration of cities by the highway system and the wholesale clearance tactics of urban renewal:

As dispersal planning provided for the national defense, simultaneously it seemed to promise solutions to many city problems that urban leaders had identified in the prewar period including traffic, congestion, and slums. Defense rationales for dispersal offered strategic rhetorical backing to bolster political support for comprehensive postwar planning, for increased federal aid to cities, for the continuing professionalization of planning and urban administration, and for increased funding to urban research. […] in these conversations about dispersal, a new approach to city planning and management, dedicating military expertise to the nation’s urban needs, began to take shape. The military-industrial-academic complex that infil- trated so many aspects of life in the cold war would also guide American approaches to approaching urban problems.

Light goes on to highlight the peculiar ambiguity characteristic of this intersection between military logic and the lives of cities: “City planners developed robust arguments that along with reducing a population’s vulnerability to urban attack, their proposed city designs would improve the quality of urban life.”This double justification, where the imperatives of national security and quality of life seem to coincide, as if by accident, reappears in much of the planning which addresses itself to the urban crisis erupting in the riots of the 1960s, so much so that it often becomes difficult to disentangle the two. What is particularly dangerous about the way in which these two very different imperatives (the logic of total war and the rationalized reconstruction of the urban environment) are made coincident is how this conjunction allows the war being fought to become hidden, reduced to a matter of taste and good design. If this was problematic enough in the period when the city was being reworked (at least on the think tanks’ drafting boards) to fight the cold war, it became disastrous when the enemy began to become identified with the populations of the cities themselves.

Like Benjamin tracking the strange moments of language in which the topology of the city at war folds in on itself, Light discovers similar metaphoric moves equating the total terror of the atomic attack with “the urban crisis.” According to Light, such rhetoric, deployed sporadically in the preceding decades, erupted in the years following 1964, with such comments as “unless someone comes up with some jolly good solutions, the problem facing cities may become more lethal than the bomb” (Barbara Ward in 1964) and “the dark ghettos now represent a nuclear stockpile which can annihilate the very foundations of America” (Kenneth Clark in 1965). This rhetoric occasionally went beyond convenient utilization of cold war metaphoric resources — in 1948, city planner Tracy Augur made the connection between the internal and external threats explicit: “It is not to be expected that people who are forced to live in slums will give unquestioned allegiance to the system that keeps them there.” The police commissioner of New York City in 1964 gave this answer to charges of police misconduct during a riot: “Sure we make mistakes. You do in any war.”

Faced with such claims, a simple reading of the articulation of the city-as-battleground is possible: the people in control of American cities during the Cold War were vehemently racist and rabidly anti-communist and tended to conflate the two threats (with some justification, as many black militants were, after all, trying to link the demands opened up by the civil rights movement with the worldwide wave of national liberation struggles). This reading however fails to account for the naturalization and persistence of the militarized American city. Consider the Kenneth Clark quote above: Clark’s Dark Ghetto is an important moment in the development of an anti-racist sociology and a genuine attempt on the part of an African-American scholar to address the problems facing the ghetto. Along with the Kerner Commission report, it is often cited as one of the turning points in American public discourse regarding the devastating consequences of urban segregation. But it is not Clark’s suggestions for change, nor solely his uncompromising depiction of the horrors of life in the ghetto, that proved most influential in Dark Ghetto’s reception, but rather the way in which the twin horrors of objective deprivation and subjective disempowerment form a self-perpetuating cycle. My claim is that this conclusion — that the self-reinforcing ghetto would thwart any efforts to ameliorate it and, therefore, that the only way to help those trapped in the ghetto would be to destroy the ghetto — was precisely the vector by which a logic of war came to be internalized in seemingly credible and sincere efforts to address problems of urban economic inequality and racial segregation.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Kerner Commission report (officially titled the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders). The report is broken into three sections: “What Happened?”, “Why Did it Happen?”, and “What Can Be Done?” The first section does a fair job tracing out the particulars of the urban riots during the long hot summer of 1967. The second section essentially redeploys the argument of Dark Ghetto, using a sociological analysis of ghetto conditions to provide a psychological explanation of the riots, fleshing out the “basic conclusion” of the report (“Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal”). Like Clark’s book, this section contains many absolutely valid insights. I am, however, suspicious of its tendency to argue for a model of an essentially unorganized black lumpenproletariat reacting with uncoordinated rage against the system, with riots spontaneously erupting whenever a suitable trigger (an incident of police brutality or a media report propagating a rumor) happened to light the fuse on the psychological powderkeg. One could argue that the Kerner report systematically tries to minimize the importance of autonomous African-American organizing in favor of a smooth integration into the existing American political system — for instance in the section in which the Black Power movement is cast as the futile expression of the ultimately powerless (see especially pp. 232–36). Michael Lipsky and David Olson offer a very interesting reading of the Kerner report along these lines, analyzing what they term the “elaborate processing of racial crisis,” wherein the specially convened commission is deployed over and over again in the aftermath of American racial violence as a strategy for managing and defusing the immediate crisis without making any serious concessions towards social transformation. Here “elite activities contribute to depoliticizing the riots and returning the political system to a status quo where previously dominant groups continue to prevail — through reducing the sense of crisis and minimizing the impact of crisis.”

The riot commission functions to “depoliticize” urban rebellion by integrating a fundamentally anti-systemic demand rejecting the legitimacy of the political order back into that very same order:

… riot commissions reflect the pluralist observation that political activity that is not directed toward governmental authorities or representational structures is illegitimate and hence not, in fact, political. Even when commissions in the sixties were sympathetic to black aspirations, they specifically condemned the behavior of the rioters that brought attention to their needs. Beyond condemning violence in general, American political elites reject rioters as political actors.

If the rhetoric of pluralist reconciliation in the Kerner report is, as Commission Politics suggests, a technique for shoring up elite dominance in the face of anti- systemic agitation and revolt, it would be expected that the concrete recommendations contained in the report would reflect this strategy. The sections dealing with housing policy fit this interpretation most closely. Consider the recommendation which closes Chapter 17 of the Report: “We believe that federally aided low and moderate income housing programs must be reoriented so that the major thrust is in nonghetto areas. Public housing programs should emphasize scattered site construction, rent supplements should, wherever possible, be used in nonghetto areas […]”

Working backwards through the logic leading up to this recommendation, one learns that spending public money in the places where poor African Americans actually live would be counterproductive, since the ghetto’s singular and self-reinforcing intractability means that any plan addressing racial and economic injustice which did not take as its major premise the elimination of concentrated African American populations in the urban core could only have the consequence that “the Negro society will be permanently relegated to its current status, possibly even if we expend great amounts of money and effort in trying to ‘gild’ the ghetto.” Similarly, we learn that ceding political sovereignty to urban African-American populations, while a noble goal consonant with the grand narrative of American political life, would only condemn these populations to the ravages of the inescapable ghetto more completely: “such Negro political development would also involve virtually complete racial segregation and virtually complete spatial separation.” What the Kerner report does is take the military notion of urban dispersal, developed to defend cities against atomic attack, and redeploy it within the context of addressing the problems of the ghetto. The political content of ghetto revolt is neutralized with the same stroke that naturalizes the conditions of poverty and brutality that have brought forth that revolt. Thus, the only “solution” is to eliminate the ghetto by dispersing its inhabitants.

This reading of the Kerner report’s housing policy recommendations as a counterinsurgency program is, of course, at odds with the history of the report’s reception as a landmark in the development of American anti-racist public discourse, but tracing the sources of these recommendations makes this reading more plausible. In particular, we can note that the strategy of dispersal was being discussed in defense-intellectual circles before the public Kerner report. In particular, the RAND corporation, publishing reports like Cities in Trouble: An Agenda for Urban Research and Contributions to the Analysis of Urban Problems, had already written on urban crisis management. Among the most prominent of the RAND intellectuals working on urban housing problems was Anthony Downs, who had previously served as a member of Lyndon Johnson’s “National Commission on Urban Problems,” and who likely wrote (or at least directed) much of the Kerner report’s material on housing policy and the ghetto.

What is interesting about Downs’s work is not just his assertions that “spatial deconcentration,” the program of “deliberate dispersal” which underlies the housing recommendations of the Kerner report and which would become official HUD policy, is objectively the only way to help inner-city African Americans. Downs also makes explicit that a necessary and integral component of this solution is the elimination of the urban poor as a class capable of representing its interests, with a majority at the community level. This neutralization must take place not only in the suburban neighborhoods that will receive the relocated black population, but also in the inner-city regions that will, as a result of “mobility programs,” attract redevelopment on the condition that middle- class (and de facto white) socio-political dominance is (re-) established in these regions. In Downs’s project, the “scientific” prognosis of (white) liberalism regarding the future of the ghetto crystallizes together with the program of total urban war against a subjugated population whose concentration in the inner cities gives them unacceptable and dangerous leverage against the racist status quo and the project of continuing capitalist accumulation, such that the former provides cover for the latter. Superficially, Downs’s intentions seem blameless — he makes a point of addressing racism as a moral problem with deep historical roots. But for Downs, the historical and sociological fact of racism is posited as a given which can then justify deconcentration of the urban poor on the grounds that economic redevelopment could not begin without accommodating the racist attitudes of the middle class. While Downs tries to avoid the inevitable charge of racism by framing his arguments in terms of the effects of class-based cultural attitudes rather than racial prejudice per se, I would argue that this qualification merely reifies the economic rationality of the individual suburban racist. What’s missing is a consideration of the systemic factors tying together race and class.

It is in this context that we can understand per- haps the most infamous passage in Downs’s book Opening up the Suburbs. Downs writes that, “considering economic factors alone, it would be far cheaper to repress future large-scale urban violence through police and military action than to pay for effective programs against remaining urban poverty. This might require abrogating the civil rights of many citizens deplorably. Yet it could be done with little other inconvenience to the middle class.” Cited out of the rhetorical context in which it is situated — an argument in favor of addressing urban poverty through ostensibly civil means like housing policy — the quote is certainly chilling. In the context of Downs’ actual argument, the invocation of the military-police option (as the Kerner report puts it: “apartheid with semi-martial law in many major cities” is certainly still terrifying, especially since it is uncertain whether Downs introduces this option just as a rhetorical flourish or as a real possibility on the table.

More troubling, however, is that the civil project of deconcentration, juxtaposed against the hypothetical imposition of martial law, appears as a military stratagem of dispersal, aimed at the capture of territory from an enemy population excluded from the polis — real estate is war carried out by other means. Downs thus manages to fuse the interests of capital accumulation with the exigencies of the national security response to systemic revolt in the inner cities, using the sociology of the ghetto as a cover to disguise a racist logic of displacement and naturalize the class nature of his presuppositions:

Eventually, if poverty becomes sufficiently deconcentrated, crisis ghettos can be redeveloped with large-scale projects that create entirely new neighborhood environments. Enough non-poor residents and other resources could then be attracted to produce an economically integrated environment with middle-class dominance as required for true viability.

John Metzger charts the development of exactly this devaluation of the black ghetto as objectively beyond repair, arguing that such thinking has its roots in the 1930s and 1940s in the discourses of urban renewal, but finds renewed popularity after the urban insurgencies in the 1960s. The life of cities is, according to Metzger, thought through at the planning level in quasi-biological terms, as a “life-cycle,” with natural periods of growth followed by equally natural periods of decay and death. This terminology naturalizes the process of dispossession and accumulation in policy-level discourse, like the 1972 speech by HUD Secretary George Romney that Metzger highlights: “the process of abandonment and neighborhood decay, and the related out-migration may be the essential step to make available large blocks of cleared central city areas for large-scale redevelopment within the new metropolitan system.” Metzger, citing Downs’s Opening up the Suburbs, notes how the theorization of objectively necessary neighborhood death makes it possible to rationalize and justify cutting off public assistance to those living in the worst conditions: “new means of comprehensively ‘managing’ entire inner-city neighborhoods should be developed to provide a more effective means of withdrawing economic support from housing units that ought to be demolished.” The neighborhood, now a biological entity with a natural life and death, becomes subject to the medical procedure of triage, with the decision to abandon it to die justified with reference to a presumed state of emergency.

Metzger also highlights resistance to such triage policies on the part of community activists who understand the cycle of decay as an effect of political decisions and economic conditions that deny urban black neighborhoods access to locally controlled development capital. Quoting Chicago housing activist Gale Cincotta: “What for so long has been considered a natural phenomenon — change in neighborhoods, deteriorating cities — are not natural. It’s a plan and somebody’s making a lot of money out of changing neighborhoods.” Metzger’s excellent article falls short, however, in failing to track the violence that accompanies the project of displacement and recapture, in other words, the way in which capital accumulation in the inner cities has been coincident with the war made on the populations of these territories in order to dispossess them.

The Midnight Notes collective offers, in 1981, a succinct analysis of the political content of what could, in isolation, be mistaken for purely economic maneuvers, situating “spatial deconcentration” within the project aimed at the removal of the social antagonism present in the black ghetto. In this perspective, the urge to “deconcentrate” is aimed not so much at eliminating poverty as it is at destroying a site of potential resistance, all rhetoric to the contrary:

In Washington, D.C. and other U.S. cities, the blacks since the great southern land expropriations of the 30s and 40s, have held the inner city terrain as “its own” (not in the sense of “ownership” but in the sense of “occupation”). The population density was high and the material wealth in the space was low, nonetheless, this space provided terrain for organization of power — bars, corners, churches, stoops, lots, streets, kitchens. A common politics and struggle could emerge out of this terrain. At first, this massification in a specific space was clearly functional to the place blacks were to occupy in the division of labor in the post-WW II economy, but then this concentration reached critical levels and became dangerous. As the black struggle turned from demonstrations to riots to armed struggle in a space adjacent to high concentrations of capital something had to give, “spatial deconcentration” was clearly called for.

In her article “Spatial Deconcentration,” Yulanda Ward, a housing activist whose work was cut tragically short when she was murdered in 1980, outlines the ghetto-dispersal-as-war thesis in the starkest imaginable terms:

The Philadelphia housing leaders had fought their campaign between 1976 and 1979 under the assumption that their struggle against land speculators and government bureaucracy had an economic base. They understood “gentrification” perfectly, but thought it had developed because the speculators were slowly but steadily viewing the land as some kind of gold mine to be vigorously exploited at any cost. The information uncovered about the mobility program slowly taught them that they were entirely wrong […] It is now clear, in 1980, that instead of being economic, the manifest crises that plague inner-city minorities are founded in a problem of control. The so-called “gentrification” of the inner-cities, the lack of rehabilitation financing for inner-city families, the massive demolition projects which have transformed once-stable neighborhoods into vast wastelands, the diminishing inner-city services, such as recreation, health care, education, jobs and job-training, sanitation, etc. […] are all rooted in an apparent bone-chilling fear that inner-city minorities are uncontrollable.

In her reading, Ward pinpoints the secondary character of the profitable exchanges of property as merely the means by which a military strategy of control is affected. For Ward, federally directed “mobility programs,” with their genesis in the counterinsurgency strategy developed by Anthony Downs and codified in the Kerner report, provide proof that the condition of the inner cities was not the result of a regrettable economic spiral, but a deliberate “master plan” to destroy urban black communities: “Some elements of the black community, for instance, have argued for years that the government had declared a ‘secret war’ on blacks in America. Now evidence exists which makes the point difficult, if not impossible, to defeat.” […]