The 1968 Kerner Report was a watershed document on race in America—and it did very little
After the urban unrest of the Long Hot Summer, a commission was formed
In 1970, a bright but troubled University of Michigan student wrote a memoir. Bill Scott had to cop to something. Three years earlier, angered and fed up, he threw a bottle. That one action, he wrote, set in motion Detroit’s 12th Street Riot, the city’s most widespread racial rebellion since 1943.
Scott’s father, William, was the director of the United Community League for Civic Action. Their headquarters were located on the second floor of the Economy Printing Company plant on 12th Street. He also ran a “blind pig,” or illegal bar, from the same location. During the early morning of July 23, undercover cops raided the speakeasy during a party for returning Vietnam veterans. As his arrested father was being led away, Scott, 19 at the time, got agitated. “You don’t have to treat them that way,” Scott reportedly yelled at the officers. “They can walk. Let them walk, you white sons of bitches.” He climbed atop the hood of a car and began to address an increasingly frenzied crowd. “Are we going to let these peckerwood motherfuckers come down here any time they want and mess us around?” Then he threw the bottle, he wrote, hoping to hit a police officer. It smashed on the ground, then everything went to hell. Over the next five days, black Detroit revolted. Forty-three people died.
Out of that cataclysm came the Kerner Report, which had a mandate to decipher African American outrage for the masses. As the 12th Street Riot raged on, President Lyndon Baines Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to answer three questions about racial unrest in Detroit, Newark, and Watts before them: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” Its key conclusions, however, went well beyond the procedural responses to such questions. “This is our basic conclusion,” the commission wrote in its introduction to the report. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” That oft-quoted passage may sound profound, but it is easy to imagine most black Americans at the time reading that and saying, “Is moving toward? We’re already there!” This spotlights a key truth about the commission and its findings, which is that they were never meant for black consumption. Most black Americans were intimately familiar with the conditions and problems it was introducing to its intended readership. The Kerner Commission book became an instant bestseller and it was viewed by many as a watershed moment in America’s long-standing racial strife. And yet looking back, it doesn’t appear to have been the racial panacea many thought it would be. The conditions it describes — police brutality, economic strife, hopelessness among African American urban communities — have continued, and in many ways become more entrenched. And on top of that, America’s internal struggle with race has only become more virulent and deadly. The Kerner Commission reported on serious issues. But because of a variety of political factors it seems to have stopped short of actually effecting change.
Expected to diagnose African American anger, the 11 members, with the help of a knowledgeable staff of social scientists, turned their focus onto white complicity in the diseased state of American racial relations. Rather than indicting the violent protesters as the architects of the chaos—men and women like Bill Scott—the commissioners instead actually recognized the real problem at hand, seizing its mandate in a serious manner. They detailed the unrest and recommended specific social programs to address the concerns raised, initiatives that fit well with the vision of a Great Society Johnson furthered with his own pivotal civil rights legislation. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” they wrote. “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro 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.” That is language that few politicians in our present day would dare use. Castigating angry black folks is easy. Getting white folks to understand their privilege and role in exacerbating the problem of American racial discrimination is much more difficult.
The notion that white folks are responsible for fixing this mess is one Johnson, who had signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law by that time, should have embraced. The year 1967, though, was a tough time for him. Beleaguered near the end of his presidency by both “law and order” Republicans who saw violent racial protest as the main problem and black militants who felt that he wasn’t doing nearly enough, the president wasn’t prepared to tell his fellow white Americans that racism was their problem to fix. He had his own problems. His Vietnam misadventure was already political gangrene, so he insured that the commission would ignore the war’s budgetary impact and inherent contradictions with the mission of social justice. The president needed a big win, and fast. Politically speaking, the race riots were a considerable inconvenience to him, and this report didn’t give him a quick fix. Instead, outside of the landmark housing act he signed the following year, the report recommended solutions that he no longer had the political willpower or wherewithal to enact.
It may sound cynical to talk about the commission this way. However, though its final report provided a scathing indictment of white America and the systemic racism that it enabled, both the commission and the report must first be understood as instruments of politics. The commission was loaded with politicians loyal to the president, and light on people doing the work of civil rights. Though bipartisan, Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, was the only activist among the 11 in the group. Most were chosen because Johnson felt that he could count on them to deliver him a final result that would be politically palatable. According to historian Julian Zelizer, the entire commission had an “establishment feel,” and included loyalists like Litton Industries head Charles “Tex” Thornton, a conservative. The man who was leading the group, former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, was hoping that Johnson would appoint him to the federal bench. In a further exercise of control, Johnson severely restricted the funding for the group — so much so that, as Zelizer notes, the commissioners lacked adequate meeting space to stage their own hearings.
However, a lack of money can’t adequately explain some of the report’s shortsightedness. Historian Daniel Geary, writing last year in the Boston Review, observed that “the Kerner report neglected that police were not simply careless with black lives; they deliberately sought to punish African Americans with deadly force.” The Algiers Motel incident during the Detroit riot, dramatized in a new motion picture, is a perfect example of wanton police power run amok, fueled by racism. Cops not only murdered three black teens, but tortured nine others. Moreover, while the report sought to change police behavior, it did little to address the structural loopholes through which officers typically escape any legal accountability. (The officers involved in the Algiers Motel deaths and torture were all found not guilty on charges including murder, felonious assault, and conspiracy to commit civil rights abuses.)
It was swell that, in the wake of the report’s release in March of 1968, both white and black poll respondents could agree that police needed to do more to enhance community relations. But as Geary observed, the report relied upon poor framing, arguing “that African American rioters were the main source of violence and disorder in American society.” In our time, we’ve heard these kinds of sentiments before, both from well-meaning liberals as well as the enemies of civil rights. And it is questionable how, if at all, “community policing” can address the inherent inequalities in the American criminal justice apparatus that empowers agents of the state to terrorize communities, then expects exoneration in the courts.
Just as post-Ferguson and post-Baltimore assessments of police violence and racial unrest fell short of making all of the fundamental changes required to ensure racial equality and harmony, the Kerner Report failed to really change public policy. It excelled at confronting white Americans with their responsibility for the racial situation at hand, but it offered few constructive steps that went beyond government power, largely out of the common citizen’s reach. To boot, Johnson rebuked the commission and ignored its findings, which helps make the report more historically irrelevant than perhaps it should be. Within a month of the report’s release, Johnson had declared that he would not seek re-election.
Times have certainly changed, and improved, even as we have seen throughout the decades repetitions of racial unrest that evoke 1967 Detroit. The Kerner Report speaks to the necessity for white Americans to tell themselves the truth about their role in perpetuating racial inequality and the rebellions against it, violent or not. That is good and all, but its faults reveal what more needs to be done to ensure we don’t see more calamitous uprisings in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and other cities that have yet to experience them. American racism is a problem created and exacerbated primarily by white people, and a sequel to the Kerner Report can’t make that point more effectively. The method by which that can become accepted fact amongst white citizens who haven’t yet grasped that responsibility is unknown. However, it should now be clear that any real solution likely lies outside of the scope of government mandate and fleeting political convenience.
