August 25, 2021 • 42 mins
Half a century ago, a commission established by President Lyndon Johnson wrote a report that concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.” The reported listed widespread social programs and reforms to counter the problem, and Johnson refused to accept it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Back. In
early our colleague Christopher Hasiotis sent an email around to
(00:22):
a bunch of us at work suggesting that one of
us cover the Kerner Commission Report. At that point, the
reports fiftieth anniversary was just a few weeks away. But
the basic conclusion of this report, which is probably the
most widely quoted thing out of it that still felt
really relevant, that was quote, our nation is moving towards
(00:45):
two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal um.
So at that point, all of our episodes between getting
this email from Christopher and the anniversary of the report
coming out, uh, those were already spoken for. So it
didn't make it into the calendar. And then last year
the report made headlines again in the wake of the
(01:07):
international protests against racism and police brutality that followed the
murder of George Floyd, and for various reasons, it just
didn't get into the calendar at that point either. Uh.
In this July though, just this past July, listener Taylor
sent us a note after seeing a very brief, as
in three paragraphs post about this on Instagram, and Taylor
(01:29):
noted once again that this report as just ongoing relevance,
this time in the context of the backlash against what
some people are calling critical race theory. To be clear,
the backlash is not against actual critical race theory. It's
become just like catch all descriptor for any conversations about
racism that somebody doesn't like. A new condensed version of
(01:52):
this report also came out just last month, so there's
been some talk around it in that context. So it
seemed like finally, finally, time I'm getting it into the
calendar for real after three years of people asking about it.
The Kerner Commission was formally known as the National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders. It was established by President Lyndon
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Johnson during a period of widespread unrest in the United
States beginning in the early nineteen sixties. Between nineteen sixty
five and nineteen sixty seven, there were more than three
hundred incidents in more than two hundred fifty cities. They
varied in how long and how severe they were, but
they were mostly described as riots. Today, they are sometimes
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characterized more as uprisings because they developed in response to
ongoing racism and oppression. To quote from the report, the
civil disorders of nineteen sixty seven involved Negroes acting against
local symbols of white American society, authority, and property in
Negro neighborhoods, rather than against white persons. One of the
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most well known incidents from the beginning of this period
of time time took place in the Watts neighborhood of
Los Angeles from August eleven through sixteenth, nineteen sixty five.
This started after the arrest of twenty one year old
Marquette Fry for suspected drunk driving. A crowd gathered during
this arrest, and Fry and police physically struggled. Accounts on
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exactly what happened during this struggle are really contradictory. During
the commotion that followed, rumors also spread that police had
assaulted a pregnant woman. The details of this are also contradictory,
although many accounts described one woman being arrested while wearing
a billowing smock that made her appear pregnant. Regardless, these
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arrests and the rumors surrounding them tipped off multiple days
of violence and arson in Watts At least thirty four
people died and more than a thousand were injured, most
of them Black residents of the neighborhood. Hundreds of buildings
burned to the ground. Incidents like this really seemed to
reach a peak. In the summer of nine seen sixties seven,
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which was nicknamed the Long Hot Summer. Violence broke out
in predominantly black neighborhoods of multiple cities in the US,
and sometimes this violence went on for days, escalating in
intensity from things like looting and throwing rocks and bottles
and vandalism to arson and gunfire, including sniper fire. The
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National Guard was called out in cities like Tampa, Cincinnati,
in Atlanta to try to restore order. These uprisings were
national news, part of an ongoing developing story that characterized
the whole country as being nearly consumed by rioting. It
was during this period that Miami Police Chief Walter Headley
used the phrase quote when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
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But in July twelfth, in Newark, New Jersey, a black
cab driver named John Smith was pulled over for a
traffic violation and was beaten by police. Later, witnesses saw
him being pulled from a police car and basically dragged
into the precinct headquarters. He apparently was not able to
walk on his own. Rumors spread that he had been
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beaten nearly to death or even killed. When civil rights
leaders were allowed to see Smith and jail, they felt
that his injuries called for a medical exam, and they
demanded that he'd be taken to a hospital. Tensions between
the black residents of New Work and the predominantly white
police force escalated rapidly, with residents marches and demonstrations being
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met by increasing numbers of officers. This progressed to looting, fires, gunshots,
with police implementing roadblocks and mass arrests, and the National
Guard being called out to try to restore order. At
least twenty six people were killed in Newark between July
twelfth and seventeenth, including one white detective, one white fireman,
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and at least twenty four black residents. Several of them
were children or teenagers. Some of the people who were
killed were shot by police eats, or by the National
Guard while they were in their own homes or vehicles.
In some cases, these were stray bullets and in others,
they were shooting at places they thought snipers were hiding.
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Somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand people were injured
during all of this, and hundreds of fires and other
destruction around the city caused roughly ten million dollars in damage. Then,
in Detroit, Michigan, on July, police rated several after hours
drinking clubs, which were known as blind pigs. That nickname
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probably comes from the Prohibition era, when proprietors would charge
money to see an animal like a pig, and then
throw in the alcohol for free to skirt the law.
We're not selling alcohol, We're selling viewings of pigs. Police
arrested roughly eighty people in these raids. Most of those
people were black. Some of them had been celebrating the
return of two veterans from the Vietnam War, much like
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what had happened in Newark less than two weeks earlier.
These arrests set off increasing confrontations between residents and police,
progressing to vandalism, looting, and arson. Civilian snipers fired from
rooftops and the thefts of large numbers of firearms from
looted stores made this whole situation seem even more threatening
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police started making mass arrests. The National Guard was called
out once again, and President Johnson actually sent in army troops.
Between July July, at least forty three people were killed
in Detroit, thirty three of them black and ten white.
Some of the civilians killed were by standards or were
in their own homes or vehicles, but many were either
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looting or fleeing from looting. Later analysis has suggested that
law enforcement's use of deadly force in response to looting
became increasingly indiscriminate and random as the uprising went on,
with reports characterizing the deaths as overwhelmingly needless. More than
drid buildings were also burned down during those six days.
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In Detroit, firefighters had to withdraw repeatedly as they were
attacked or caught in crossfire or pinned down by snipers
while they were trying to fight the fires. About five
thousand Detroit residents were left homeless. These uprisings in both
Newark and Detroit also sparked similar incidents in surrounding cities
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in New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio. By this point, the
president was under huge pressure to take action. On the
morning of July ninety seven, Johnson told his staff that
that night he would be announcing a commission to investigate
these incidents. The members of this commission were selected and
contacted over roughly the next ten hours, with the commission's
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funding coming from the President's Emergency Fund. The following day,
he issued Executive Order one one three six five establishing
a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which specified that
the Commission would issue an interim report by March first,
nine eight, with a final report do not later than
one year from the date of the order. The commission
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had eleven members, intentionally selected to be bipartisan and to
represent multiple viewpoints for we're members of Congress to Republicans
and two Democrats. Business leader Charles B. Thornton, known as
Tex was on the commission, as was labor leader I
w Abel, who was president of the United steel Workers
of America. Since many of the questions that the commission
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was trying to answer were related to policing, one of
its members was Atlanta Chief of Police Herbert Jenkins. The
commission had only two black members, Roy Wilkins, executive director
of the nub A c P, and Edward W. Brook,
Republican Senator from Massachusetts. It also had only one woman,
Kentucky Commissioner of Commerce, Catherine Graham Paton. The commission's chair
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was Otto Kerner, Junior Governor of Illinois, and his name,
of course, is the one that became most associated with
the commission and its work. But the vice chair, New
York City Mayor John Lindsay, became far more involved in
setting the commission's direction and its scope. And we're going
to talk more about the committee itself after we pause
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for a sponsor break. Establishing the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders was a strategic move for President Lyndon Johnson.
The commission's stated purpose was to determine what happened, why
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it happened, and what could be done to prevent it
from happening again. But beyond that, establishing a commission let
the President look like he was taking action without actually
having to take any specific action yet, especially without having
to take any action that might jeopardize or pull focus
from his existing at agenda. After all, this commission's deadline
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for preliminary findings was months away when he announced it,
so it was possible, maybe not likely, but possible, that
by that point things would no longer seem so urgent.
Even though the Commission was pulled together over a single day,
Its members had also been chosen very strategically. Nobody on
it was seen as particularly radical. Although Roy Wilkins was
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executive director of the Double a c P. The a
CP was seen as far more conservative than organizations that
had arisen along with the Black Power movement. There were
no academics, There were no black nationalists, no militants. There
were also no young people. On average, the civilians who
had participated in violence or vandalism in these uprisings were
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between the ages of fifteen and twenty five, but the
youngest member of the Commission was in his late thirties,
and most were decades older than that. Otto Kerner, Jr.
Was also a strategic choice to chair the commission. He
was hoping that the President would appoint him to a
federal judge ship, so Johnson thought Kerner would lead the
commission towards findings that praised his existing initiatives and programs
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that included things like the Civil Rights Act that Johnson
had signed into law in nineteen sixty four and the
set of reform programs known as the Great Society, which
also connected to Johnson's War on Poverty. So he's hoping
that he's going to get a report that praises things
like the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, the Food Stamp
Act of nineteen sixty four, the Economic Opportunity Act of
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nineteen sixty four, Project head Start, the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of nineteen sixty five, and the Housing and
Urban Development Act of nineteen sixty five. This did not
work out according to Johnson's plan, though. Although the Commission
was named for Kerner, as we said, New York City
Mayor John Lindsay took a far bigger role in setting
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its direction. And while the President had hoped the Commission
would basically rubber stamp his existing agent death, the Commission
instead did what the President had actually directed it to do.
It examined what had happened, why it had happened, and
what steps could be taken to prevent it from happening again.
Members of the Commission personally toward cities where riots had
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taken place. They spoke directly to people who were involved
and affected. They heard witness testimony. They hired investigators, and
built out a field team that worked under the guidance
of Social scientists, including about twenty graduate student researchers. Advisory
panels provided knowledge on insurance in riot affected areas and
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on private enterprise. While the members of the Commission were
mostly in their forties and up, the field team included
a lot of young activists. A lot of them had
been trained through or had otherwise participated in the civil
rights movement. This work yielded hundreds and hundreds of pages
of supplemental studies that were related to specific issues, which
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the Commission than had to work to distill down into
one report that would be unanimously acceptable to all of them.
It was critically important to the Commission that like they
have something they could all sign off on, Otherwise they
thought it would just be doomed to failure. Even though
they were all generally mainstream figures, they definitely did not
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all agree on everything, so creating a document that they
were all willing to sign off on took a huge
amount of revision and compromise. A big part of this
process was David Ginsburg, the Commission's executive director, who was
head of the Commission's staff. He used the skills that
he had honed as a lawyer to try to mediate
between commissioners, for example, between Text Thornton, who came from
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a law and order mindset and thought the basic answer
to civil unrest was more policing, and John Lindsay, who
was more focused on improved social services to address those
underlying factors that had contributed to the unrest. So along
those lines, the Commission identified some common traits in most
of the cities that they studied. Most of them had
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seen an influx of black residents in the first half
of the twentieth century, and then especially in the years
after World War two, white residents had moved from these
cities into the suburbs. By the nineteen sixties, about a
third of the total black population of the United States
was living in the nation's twelve biggest central cities. Often,
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the people who had moved into these cities had moved
from really impoverished rural areas, so they were arriving without
a lot of money, looking for work that sometimes just
did not exist there. The resulting predominantly black neighborhoods were
desperately underserved. In the report, they're referred to almost exclusively
as ghettos. Residents of these neighborhoods had ongoing serious grievances
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related to things like unemployment and the inadequate housing, poor schools,
a lack of recreation facilities and other program discrimination, and
problems with police practices. Often residents had tried to address
those issues through the city's grievance procedures and they have
been ignored. These cities also had overwhelmingly white governments and
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police forces, so a lot of black residents felt like
their interests were not being represented and that they were
being excluded from participating in the government. They also felt
like they had no recourse when they faced racist treatment
from police, and every person the commissioners talked to who
had participated in the rioting had either experienced or witnessed
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police brutality. This report really didn't put a lot of
focus on organizations that were working from within these communities
to try to make improvements. But many of the issues
at work also just weren't things that citizens could fix themselves,
Like community groups could distribute breakfast to school children or
provide job training and literacy programs to their neighbors, but
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they couldn't fixe were systems that were literally crumbling and
backing up waste into their homes, so the result of
all of this together was just a years long sense
of futility and intense frustration from cities black residents, and then,
in a pattern that repeated itself over and over again
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in the nineteen sixties, some kind of incident triggered a
mass uprising. Sometimes these precipitating events were major, like an
uprising in Harlem, New York in nineteen sixty four that
started after an off duty police lieutenant named Thomas Gilligan
shot and killed fifteen year old James Powell in front
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of witnesses. But in other cases, the precipitating incident seemed
random and almost trivial, like on a particularly hot day
in July of nineteen sixty six, police in Chicago turned
off some illegally opened fire hydrants in a black neighborhood,
and then rumors started to spread that police were leaving
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the high rents alone in white neighborhoods. Regardless of the
scale of that initial incident, it typically followed months or
years of building tensions, and it also typically happened during
hot weather. Most of the homes in these neighborhoods had
no air conditioning, so residents would spend their free time
on stoops and in the streets just to try to
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get a little relief from the heat. That meant that
when something happened, whether it was large or small, people
were already outside, so angry crowds of already hot and
frustrated people gathered very quickly. The Commission also noted that
of the one hundred sixty four incidents they reviewed, eight
of them were major. Those are ones that they described
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as lasting for more than two days, with fires, looting,
reports of sniper fire, and the use of the National
Guard or even the army to try to restore order.
They described twenty three of the incidents as serious. So
there was some looting, some throwing rocks and bottle some fires,
but not nearly as many as in those eight major incidents,
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and those serious incidents lasted a day or two. But
then they described the remaining one hundred thirty three incidents
as minor. Only a few people were involved, they lasted
for less than a day, with local police being the
only law enforcement who were involved, although sometimes with the
help of police from a neighboring town. In the Commission's view,
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these minor incidents only became national news because the nation
had already primed with this idea that there was an
overwhelming tide of violence in American cities. One of the
President's directives to the Commission had been to study whether
there was a national organization or conspiracy at work, some
kind of outside agitators who were stirring up trouble in
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cities all around the country, and the Commission found that
while some people in organizations did use violent rhetoric or
even called for violence, there was no conspiracy and no
organized national campaign for violence. The Commission also reported that
in each of these cities, the vast majority of the
residents hadn't participated in the rioting, and that in almost
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all cases there were other residents who had tried to
discourage violence or to quote, cool things down. In some places,
these efforts became an organized, official or semi official effort.
For example, counter riot squads made up of local residents
in Dayton, Ohio and Sampa, Florida were nicknamed the white
Hats because of the white protective helmets they were issued.
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The Commission pulled all of this information together and came
to a striking conclusion. Quote segregation and poverty have created
in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to
most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood,
but what the negro can never forget, is that white
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society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White instituteations created it,
white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. It
is time now to turn, with all the purpose at
our command, to the major unfinished business of this nation.
It is time to adopt strategies for action that will
produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make
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good the promises of American democracy to all citizens, urban
and rural, White and black, Spanish surname American, Indian, and
every minority group. At another point, the report read quote
race prejudice has shaped our history decisively. It now threatens
to affect our future. White racism is essentially responsible for
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the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities
since the end of World War Two. This report called
the state of affairs in cities black neighborhoods a failure
of all levels of government, and it called for a
quote commitment to national action, compassionate, massive, and sustained, backed
by the resources of the most powerful and the richest
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nation on earth. Those resources would include, if necessary, new taxes.
We'll talk more about the commitment that the report was
calling for. After a quick sponsor break, the full report
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of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders walked through
multiple uprisings that had taken place in the early to
mid nineteen sixties, focusing primarily on the summer of ninety seven.
It documented ongoing inequity, crime, poor housing, crumbling infrastructure, pay disparities, racism,
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and other issues that had been affecting these communities, as
well as the city's either inability or refusal to address
those issues. It established that it's and uprisings had developed
after months or years of ongoing, escalating tensions, including long
term social issues and serious underlying grievances. The report also said,
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quote the events of the summer of nineteen sixty seven
are in large part the culmination of three hundred years
of racial prejudice, and then it walked through an overview
of that three hundred year history. It called for broad,
sweeping changes to try to address all of this. This
included seventy pages of specific recommendations based on three core objectives.
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Those objectives were quote opening up all opportunities for those
who are restricted by racial segregation and discrimination, and eliminating
all barriers to their choice of jobs, education, and housing,
Removing the frustration of powerlessness among the disadvantaged by providing
the means to deal with the problems that affect their
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own lives, and by increasing the capacity of our public
and private institutions to respond to those problems. Increasing communication
across racial lines, to destroy stereotypes, halt polarization and distressed
and hostility, and create common ground for efforts towards common
goals of public order and social justice. The cost of
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all of these proposed efforts was estimated at thirty billion dollars.
It included the creation of two million new jobs over
the course of three years, along with job training programs
and educational improvements. There's educational improvements included ending school segregation,
which was still persisting more than a decade after the
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Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education, and
frankly still exists today. There were also early childhood educational proposals,
adult literacy programs, housing reforms, and welfare programs, including a
call to quote establish uniform national standards assistants at least
as high as the annual poverty level of income. Welfare
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reforms also included removing requirements that were forcing the mothers
of young children to work. Some of the recommendations related
to policing in the criminal justice system. Recommended court reforms
included plans to administer justice during riots and other emergencies,
both making emergency provisions to deal with increased numbers of
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arrests and trials and seeking alternatives to making mass arrests.
The report also made a lot of recommendations that were
related to policing itself. To quote from the report, quote,
the police are not merely a spark factor to some negroes.
Police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and
white repression. And the fact is that many police do
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reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility
and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes
in the existence of police brutality and in a quote
double standard of justice and protection, one for Negroes and
one for whites. Later on the report, read quote, the
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abrasive relationship between the police and the minority communities has
been a major and explosive source of grievance, tension, and disorder.
The blame must be shared by the total society. The
police are faced with demands for increased protection and service
in the ghetto, yet the aggressive patrol practices thought necessary
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to meet these demands themselves create tension and hostility. The
resulting grievances have been further aggravated by the lack of
effective mechanisms for handling complaints against the police. Special programs
for bettering police community relations have been instituted, but these
alone are not enough. Police administrators, with the guidance of
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public officials and the support of the entire community, must
take vigorous action to improve law enforcement and to decrease
the potential for disorder. So the Commission's recommendations related to
police included things like eliminating abrasive practices, establishing fair standards
for dealing with citizens grievances, recruiting more black people to
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the police force, and developing programs meant to encourage community
support of law enforcement. The Commission also made recommendations specifically
about policing during periods of disorder, including making sure police
were trained in riot response, which many responding officers and
National Guard who were called out during these incidents were
not The Commission also recommended establishing methods to dispel rumors
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and spread accurate information, and provide alternatives to lethal weapons
for police to use in the field. The report also
argued against the militarization of police quote the Commission believes
that there is a grave danger that some communities may
resort to the indiscriminate and excessive use of force. The
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harm full effects of overreaction are incalculable. The Commission condemns
moves to equit police departments with mass destruction weapons such
as automatic rifles, machine guns, and tanks. Weapons which are
designed to destroy, not to control, have no place in
densely populated urban communities. The Commission's recommendations also related to
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the news media. It found that much of the news
reporting of the uprisings had been generally accurate, though sometimes sensationalized,
but it had also focused mostly on violence without exploring
the cause of the violence, and often the only news
being reported about black neighborhoods was about violence. The report
called for media outlets to have reporters on permanent assignment
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to cover issues related to black communities and urban areas,
and to make this coverage a standard part of reporting.
The report also recommended recruiting more black journalists at every
level of news organizations. So the Commission's final report, including
that seventy plus page list of recommendations, which of course
we have not read all of the recommendations here seventy
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pages as a whole lot, uh, this total report was
more than four hundred pages long. And even though the
Commission's goal was to produce a document that they could
all agree to, and they planned to sign that document
in a public ceremony, that almost did not happen. Text
Thornton threatened not to sign it because he felt that
the document was anti police, and at that point John
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Lindsay said he would not sign it either, because he
had made a lot of concessions to make that final
report acceptable to Thornton. In the end, though they did
present their unanimously approved report to the President at the
end of February. You may remember that the Commission's preliminary
findings were due by March first, ninety eight, but the
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deadline for the final report wasn't until the end of July.
But this was the Commission's only report. President Johnson had
realized that its work was not going the way that
he had hoped, and he had eventually cut its funding.
The Commission had reduced its staff to a skeleton crew
just so it could finish a report with what it
had left. The Kerner Commission report was dramatically different in
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its scope and its tone from other reports that had
been produced in the nineteen sixties related to some of
the same topics. So, for example, the Maccone Commission had
investigated the nineteen sixty five Watts riots, and while it's
report did note the existence of issues like unemployment and
complaints about police brutality, it concluded that the riots were
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essentially meaningless outbursts started by quote riff Raff Lyndon. Johnson's
assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Monahan, had also produced
The Negro Family, the Case for National Action in nineteen
sixty five. This report had put a huge focus on
black families, specific offically how many black families had a
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single mother as the head of the household, and it
had framed this as an almost pathological root of the problem,
the problem kind of in quotation marks within black communities.
So with precedents like those in mind, Johnson did not
expect the Kerner Commission to produce the kind of report
that it did, one that did not praise his initiatives
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in programs and in fact barely even mentioned them, and
instead called for massive new programs that would require huge
amounts of money, while also repeatedly citing white racism as
an urgent problem. It did not help that the report
came out as Johnson was facing increasing backlash over the
US role in the Vietnam War, which had its own
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massive price tag. So johnasan refused to accept this report.
He canceled the ceremony where he was supposed to accept
a specially bound copy of it. He had established roughly
twenty different commissions during his presidency, and for each of
them he had personally signed letters of thanks to the
commission's members, but he refused to do that for the
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members of the Kurner Commission. He did a point otto
Kerner to the Federal Court of Appeals, but he blamed
Lindsay for the direction the Commission had taken. And then,
just as a side note, Karner's career came to an
end in nineteen seventy four thanks to a corruption scandal
his way outside the scope of this episode. But I thought,
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if we didn't mention it. People would say, why didn't
you mention Auto Kurner's massive corruption scandal. Johnson had announced
the creation of the Commission on National Television in nineteen
sixty seven, but when its report came out in ninety eight,
he essentially buried it. The only piece of legislation that's
generally connected to the report is the Civil Rights Act
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of nineteen sixty eight, also called the Fair Housing Act
of ninety eight, and that was revived after the report
came out. The public response to the report was also divided.
Bantom Book published the full report, and it became an
immediate bestseller, selling seven hundred and fifty thousand copies in
the first week and one point six million copies by
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June of nine. That is an enormous number of copies
of books for any book, but especially for a government report.
And also though faced a huge backlash because of its
focus on white racism and its findings related to policing.
Beyond that, though critics noted that it mirrored parts of
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the Moynihan Report, it sort of framed single motherhood among
black women is almost pathological. In fact, women were barely
mentioned in the report aside from being the victims of
violence or mentioned as being single mothers. Another criticism was
that the future goal of the report was really envisioning quote,
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a single society and a single American identity, So in
other words, this report was proposing that black communities assimilate
with and conform to white norms, which the report just
took for granted as the one acceptable standard. The report
also focused only on cities that had experienced some kind
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of civil disturbance, and not on the ones that didn't,
so there was no examination of why those cities didn't
see similar disturbances, even if they had similar underlying factors
at work. Similarly, this report was focused almost exclusively on
disturbances in which the civilians committing crimes were black. The
chapter of the report that summarized three hundred years of
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US history mentioned various incidents of violence that white mobs
enacted against black communities, but there was really no suggestion
that that violence needed a thorough investigation into its causes
and what could be done to prevent that in the future.
Since Johnson didn't accept this report or specifically add its
recommendations to his administration's goals in his final months and off,
(35:00):
this sometimes the Kerner Reports impact is summed up as
kind of None of its recommendations were ever enacted. It
is absolutely true that there was no massive bill that
tried to put all of these recommendations into play at once,
but over the decades, some of its recommendations did come
to pass through other legislation. For example, this report had
(35:22):
a big focus on job training programs and the creation
of new jobs. The Comprehensive Employment Training Act the c
e t A was enacted in nineteen seventy three, and
tax credits were passed in the nineteen seventies and eighties
that led to the creation of about seven hundred thousand
new jobs. The report also called for things like more
(35:43):
funding and power for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and
that did get a bigger budget and more oversight. There
were also changes to policing which started long before the
report was finalized. Johnson had declared a war on crime
in nineteen sixty five and had established the Commission on
Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice also called the Katzenbach Commission,
(36:06):
whose report was delivered in nineteen sixty seven. Johnson had
established an Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, which became the
Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in night, and in June of
that year, Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe
Streets Act of nineteen sixty eight. So it's hard to
trace a one to one path from the Currenter Commission
(36:29):
report to the way policing has evolved because there were
so many other laws and programs already in the works
before and during the time that the Commission was working.
None of its recommendations about police reform were really all
that radical either, but the Commission's argument against the increasing
(36:50):
militarization of police was obviously not heated at all. One
note about the Commission's recommendations about law enforcement. The Commission
insulted numerous members of law enforcement when doing its work,
three of whom were big enough contributors that the Commission
thanked them by name. One was Darryl Gates, Deputy chief
of the Los Angeles Police Department, who had been one
(37:12):
of the commanders in the field during the Watson Uprising.
Gates later became chief of the l a p D,
and his tenure was incredibly controversial, everything from founding the
ubiquitous but ineffective drug Abuse Resistance Education program to making
racist comments about black people's physiology to how he led
the l A p D and its response to the
(37:34):
uprising in Los Angeles. Who's precipitating factors included the acquittal
of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Yeah,
it's it's it's weird that somebody who wound up being
that notorious is one of the people UH personally thanked
Uh in the footnotes of this report. About a month
(37:56):
after the Coroner Commission report was released, the assassination of
Mark and Luther King Jr. Sparked a wave of riots
and other unrest all across the United States, and then
in November of nineteen sixty eight, Richard Nixon won the
presidential election. He had run on a law and order platform,
focusing on increased policing and a restoration of order rather
(38:17):
than the types of widespread social programs and reforms that
the Kurner Report had really been advocating. Nixon took office
in nineteen sixty nine. So even if Johnson had really
tried to push all this very hard in the last
few months of his presidency, full pessimistic that that would
have been continued into the next presidential administration. Every ten
(38:38):
years since nineteen sixty eight. Various organizations and institutions have
done retrospectives on the Kerner Report, looking back at what's
changed and what hasn't, and of those changes, what worked
and what didn't. And generally those reports have been mixed
both in terms of the changes and whether those changes
led to overall positive or negative outcomes. But we're are
(39:00):
less of the details. They generally note how much inequality
and how many of these social conditions outlined in the
report still exist today. Yeah, there there are definitely aspects
that you can see some improvement, Like, uh, A lot
of the communities that were looked at are not as
heavily segregated as they were um A lot of times,
(39:23):
though it is still a community of uh, like it
has become instead of an almost exclusively black community, it
has become us um a community of like black and
Hispanic and Latino people, still under a city government that
is overwhelmingly white. So it's it's a lot of the
changes that these reports look into have like that degree
(39:46):
of nuance, like here is a here is a change
that has happened, not necessarily something that that addressed core
issues that were at work. Do you have a bit
of listener mail for us I do. It's about something
completely different from all of this. Uh. This is from Sonia,
who says, Hi, tracing Holly, I recently listened to the
Swill Milk scandal episode and was tickled and how you
(40:09):
kept trying to reassure the audience how spent beer grains
being fed to cows was safe. I thought you might
be interested to know that spent beer grain is not
only a great nutrition source for cows, but also humans.
Companies like Regrained are part of the growing up cycled
food movement, specializing in creating delicious and nutritious food products
from spent beer grains. Up Cycled feed uses ingredients that
(40:32):
otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured
and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive
impact on the environment. The Regrain Supergrain plus has three
point four times the amount of fiber than wheat flour
and two times the protein of oats, so it's a
highly nutritious ingredient and keeps this low carbon food source
(40:53):
from ending up in landfills. Sonia talks about knowing the
owners of Regrain when they were developing their product. Um.
I wanted to read this particular email because I just
completely forgot about how when we were doing more brewing
at home, we were using our spent grains to make
all kinds of stuff. We were having spent grain pancakes
(41:16):
and spent grain bread and spent grain muffins. Um, it's
been a while since we brewed anything. I don't know
why that is. We have the stuff to do it,
but yes, spent grains can be delicious for people as
well as for non human animals. Um. Yeah, So we'd
(41:39):
like to send us an email right to us about
this or any other podcast where History podcast at i
heart radio dot com. We're all over social media ad
missed in History. That's where we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
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(42:01):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Back. In
early our colleague Christopher Hasiotis sent an email around to
(00:22):
a bunch of us at work suggesting that one of
us cover the Kerner Commission Report. At that point, the
reports fiftieth anniversary was just a few weeks away. But
the basic conclusion of this report, which is probably the
most widely quoted thing out of it that still felt
really relevant, that was quote, our nation is moving towards
(00:45):
two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal um.
So at that point, all of our episodes between getting
this email from Christopher and the anniversary of the report
coming out, uh, those were already spoken for. So it
didn't make it into the calendar. And then last year
the report made headlines again in the wake of the
(01:07):
international protests against racism and police brutality that followed the
murder of George Floyd, and for various reasons, it just
didn't get into the calendar at that point either. Uh.
In this July though, just this past July, listener Taylor
sent us a note after seeing a very brief, as
in three paragraphs post about this on Instagram, and Taylor
(01:29):
noted once again that this report as just ongoing relevance,
this time in the context of the backlash against what
some people are calling critical race theory. To be clear,
the backlash is not against actual critical race theory. It's
become just like catch all descriptor for any conversations about
racism that somebody doesn't like. A new condensed version of
(01:52):
this report also came out just last month, so there's
been some talk around it in that context. So it
seemed like finally, finally, time I'm getting it into the
calendar for real after three years of people asking about it.
The Kerner Commission was formally known as the National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders. It was established by President Lyndon
(02:13):
Johnson during a period of widespread unrest in the United
States beginning in the early nineteen sixties. Between nineteen sixty
five and nineteen sixty seven, there were more than three
hundred incidents in more than two hundred fifty cities. They
varied in how long and how severe they were, but
they were mostly described as riots. Today, they are sometimes
(02:34):
characterized more as uprisings because they developed in response to
ongoing racism and oppression. To quote from the report, the
civil disorders of nineteen sixty seven involved Negroes acting against
local symbols of white American society, authority, and property in
Negro neighborhoods, rather than against white persons. One of the
(02:56):
most well known incidents from the beginning of this period
of time time took place in the Watts neighborhood of
Los Angeles from August eleven through sixteenth, nineteen sixty five.
This started after the arrest of twenty one year old
Marquette Fry for suspected drunk driving. A crowd gathered during
this arrest, and Fry and police physically struggled. Accounts on
(03:19):
exactly what happened during this struggle are really contradictory. During
the commotion that followed, rumors also spread that police had
assaulted a pregnant woman. The details of this are also contradictory,
although many accounts described one woman being arrested while wearing
a billowing smock that made her appear pregnant. Regardless, these
(03:40):
arrests and the rumors surrounding them tipped off multiple days
of violence and arson in Watts At least thirty four
people died and more than a thousand were injured, most
of them Black residents of the neighborhood. Hundreds of buildings
burned to the ground. Incidents like this really seemed to
reach a peak. In the summer of nine seen sixties seven,
(04:01):
which was nicknamed the Long Hot Summer. Violence broke out
in predominantly black neighborhoods of multiple cities in the US,
and sometimes this violence went on for days, escalating in
intensity from things like looting and throwing rocks and bottles
and vandalism to arson and gunfire, including sniper fire. The
(04:22):
National Guard was called out in cities like Tampa, Cincinnati,
in Atlanta to try to restore order. These uprisings were
national news, part of an ongoing developing story that characterized
the whole country as being nearly consumed by rioting. It
was during this period that Miami Police Chief Walter Headley
used the phrase quote when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
(04:45):
But in July twelfth, in Newark, New Jersey, a black
cab driver named John Smith was pulled over for a
traffic violation and was beaten by police. Later, witnesses saw
him being pulled from a police car and basically dragged
into the precinct headquarters. He apparently was not able to
walk on his own. Rumors spread that he had been
(05:07):
beaten nearly to death or even killed. When civil rights
leaders were allowed to see Smith and jail, they felt
that his injuries called for a medical exam, and they
demanded that he'd be taken to a hospital. Tensions between
the black residents of New Work and the predominantly white
police force escalated rapidly, with residents marches and demonstrations being
(05:28):
met by increasing numbers of officers. This progressed to looting, fires, gunshots,
with police implementing roadblocks and mass arrests, and the National
Guard being called out to try to restore order. At
least twenty six people were killed in Newark between July
twelfth and seventeenth, including one white detective, one white fireman,
(05:51):
and at least twenty four black residents. Several of them
were children or teenagers. Some of the people who were
killed were shot by police eats, or by the National
Guard while they were in their own homes or vehicles.
In some cases, these were stray bullets and in others,
they were shooting at places they thought snipers were hiding.
(06:13):
Somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand people were injured
during all of this, and hundreds of fires and other
destruction around the city caused roughly ten million dollars in damage. Then,
in Detroit, Michigan, on July, police rated several after hours
drinking clubs, which were known as blind pigs. That nickname
(06:33):
probably comes from the Prohibition era, when proprietors would charge
money to see an animal like a pig, and then
throw in the alcohol for free to skirt the law.
We're not selling alcohol, We're selling viewings of pigs. Police
arrested roughly eighty people in these raids. Most of those
people were black. Some of them had been celebrating the
return of two veterans from the Vietnam War, much like
(06:56):
what had happened in Newark less than two weeks earlier.
These arrests set off increasing confrontations between residents and police,
progressing to vandalism, looting, and arson. Civilian snipers fired from
rooftops and the thefts of large numbers of firearms from
looted stores made this whole situation seem even more threatening
(07:18):
police started making mass arrests. The National Guard was called
out once again, and President Johnson actually sent in army troops.
Between July July, at least forty three people were killed
in Detroit, thirty three of them black and ten white.
Some of the civilians killed were by standards or were
in their own homes or vehicles, but many were either
(07:41):
looting or fleeing from looting. Later analysis has suggested that
law enforcement's use of deadly force in response to looting
became increasingly indiscriminate and random as the uprising went on,
with reports characterizing the deaths as overwhelmingly needless. More than
drid buildings were also burned down during those six days.
(08:03):
In Detroit, firefighters had to withdraw repeatedly as they were
attacked or caught in crossfire or pinned down by snipers
while they were trying to fight the fires. About five
thousand Detroit residents were left homeless. These uprisings in both
Newark and Detroit also sparked similar incidents in surrounding cities
(08:24):
in New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio. By this point, the
president was under huge pressure to take action. On the
morning of July ninety seven, Johnson told his staff that
that night he would be announcing a commission to investigate
these incidents. The members of this commission were selected and
contacted over roughly the next ten hours, with the commission's
(08:46):
funding coming from the President's Emergency Fund. The following day,
he issued Executive Order one one three six five establishing
a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which specified that
the Commission would issue an interim report by March first,
nine eight, with a final report do not later than
one year from the date of the order. The commission
(09:09):
had eleven members, intentionally selected to be bipartisan and to
represent multiple viewpoints for we're members of Congress to Republicans
and two Democrats. Business leader Charles B. Thornton, known as
Tex was on the commission, as was labor leader I
w Abel, who was president of the United steel Workers
of America. Since many of the questions that the commission
(09:32):
was trying to answer were related to policing, one of
its members was Atlanta Chief of Police Herbert Jenkins. The
commission had only two black members, Roy Wilkins, executive director
of the nub A c P, and Edward W. Brook,
Republican Senator from Massachusetts. It also had only one woman,
Kentucky Commissioner of Commerce, Catherine Graham Paton. The commission's chair
(09:56):
was Otto Kerner, Junior Governor of Illinois, and his name,
of course, is the one that became most associated with
the commission and its work. But the vice chair, New
York City Mayor John Lindsay, became far more involved in
setting the commission's direction and its scope. And we're going
to talk more about the committee itself after we pause
(10:17):
for a sponsor break. Establishing the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders was a strategic move for President Lyndon Johnson.
The commission's stated purpose was to determine what happened, why
(10:39):
it happened, and what could be done to prevent it
from happening again. But beyond that, establishing a commission let
the President look like he was taking action without actually
having to take any specific action yet, especially without having
to take any action that might jeopardize or pull focus
from his existing at agenda. After all, this commission's deadline
(11:03):
for preliminary findings was months away when he announced it,
so it was possible, maybe not likely, but possible, that
by that point things would no longer seem so urgent.
Even though the Commission was pulled together over a single day,
Its members had also been chosen very strategically. Nobody on
it was seen as particularly radical. Although Roy Wilkins was
(11:25):
executive director of the Double a c P. The a
CP was seen as far more conservative than organizations that
had arisen along with the Black Power movement. There were
no academics, There were no black nationalists, no militants. There
were also no young people. On average, the civilians who
had participated in violence or vandalism in these uprisings were
(11:47):
between the ages of fifteen and twenty five, but the
youngest member of the Commission was in his late thirties,
and most were decades older than that. Otto Kerner, Jr.
Was also a strategic choice to chair the commission. He
was hoping that the President would appoint him to a
federal judge ship, so Johnson thought Kerner would lead the
commission towards findings that praised his existing initiatives and programs
(12:11):
that included things like the Civil Rights Act that Johnson
had signed into law in nineteen sixty four and the
set of reform programs known as the Great Society, which
also connected to Johnson's War on Poverty. So he's hoping
that he's going to get a report that praises things
like the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, the Food Stamp
Act of nineteen sixty four, the Economic Opportunity Act of
(12:34):
nineteen sixty four, Project head Start, the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of nineteen sixty five, and the Housing and
Urban Development Act of nineteen sixty five. This did not
work out according to Johnson's plan, though. Although the Commission
was named for Kerner, as we said, New York City
Mayor John Lindsay took a far bigger role in setting
(12:54):
its direction. And while the President had hoped the Commission
would basically rubber stamp his existing agent death, the Commission
instead did what the President had actually directed it to do.
It examined what had happened, why it had happened, and
what steps could be taken to prevent it from happening again.
Members of the Commission personally toward cities where riots had
(13:15):
taken place. They spoke directly to people who were involved
and affected. They heard witness testimony. They hired investigators, and
built out a field team that worked under the guidance
of Social scientists, including about twenty graduate student researchers. Advisory
panels provided knowledge on insurance in riot affected areas and
(13:36):
on private enterprise. While the members of the Commission were
mostly in their forties and up, the field team included
a lot of young activists. A lot of them had
been trained through or had otherwise participated in the civil
rights movement. This work yielded hundreds and hundreds of pages
of supplemental studies that were related to specific issues, which
(13:59):
the Commission than had to work to distill down into
one report that would be unanimously acceptable to all of them.
It was critically important to the Commission that like they
have something they could all sign off on, Otherwise they
thought it would just be doomed to failure. Even though
they were all generally mainstream figures, they definitely did not
(14:20):
all agree on everything, so creating a document that they
were all willing to sign off on took a huge
amount of revision and compromise. A big part of this
process was David Ginsburg, the Commission's executive director, who was
head of the Commission's staff. He used the skills that
he had honed as a lawyer to try to mediate
between commissioners, for example, between Text Thornton, who came from
(14:44):
a law and order mindset and thought the basic answer
to civil unrest was more policing, and John Lindsay, who
was more focused on improved social services to address those
underlying factors that had contributed to the unrest. So along
those lines, the Commission identified some common traits in most
of the cities that they studied. Most of them had
(15:06):
seen an influx of black residents in the first half
of the twentieth century, and then especially in the years
after World War two, white residents had moved from these
cities into the suburbs. By the nineteen sixties, about a
third of the total black population of the United States
was living in the nation's twelve biggest central cities. Often,
(15:26):
the people who had moved into these cities had moved
from really impoverished rural areas, so they were arriving without
a lot of money, looking for work that sometimes just
did not exist there. The resulting predominantly black neighborhoods were
desperately underserved. In the report, they're referred to almost exclusively
as ghettos. Residents of these neighborhoods had ongoing serious grievances
(15:51):
related to things like unemployment and the inadequate housing, poor schools,
a lack of recreation facilities and other program discrimination, and
problems with police practices. Often residents had tried to address
those issues through the city's grievance procedures and they have
been ignored. These cities also had overwhelmingly white governments and
(16:14):
police forces, so a lot of black residents felt like
their interests were not being represented and that they were
being excluded from participating in the government. They also felt
like they had no recourse when they faced racist treatment
from police, and every person the commissioners talked to who
had participated in the rioting had either experienced or witnessed
(16:36):
police brutality. This report really didn't put a lot of
focus on organizations that were working from within these communities
to try to make improvements. But many of the issues
at work also just weren't things that citizens could fix themselves,
Like community groups could distribute breakfast to school children or
provide job training and literacy programs to their neighbors, but
(16:59):
they couldn't fixe were systems that were literally crumbling and
backing up waste into their homes, so the result of
all of this together was just a years long sense
of futility and intense frustration from cities black residents, and then,
in a pattern that repeated itself over and over again
(17:19):
in the nineteen sixties, some kind of incident triggered a
mass uprising. Sometimes these precipitating events were major, like an
uprising in Harlem, New York in nineteen sixty four that
started after an off duty police lieutenant named Thomas Gilligan
shot and killed fifteen year old James Powell in front
(17:39):
of witnesses. But in other cases, the precipitating incident seemed
random and almost trivial, like on a particularly hot day
in July of nineteen sixty six, police in Chicago turned
off some illegally opened fire hydrants in a black neighborhood,
and then rumors started to spread that police were leaving
(17:59):
the high rents alone in white neighborhoods. Regardless of the
scale of that initial incident, it typically followed months or
years of building tensions, and it also typically happened during
hot weather. Most of the homes in these neighborhoods had
no air conditioning, so residents would spend their free time
on stoops and in the streets just to try to
(18:20):
get a little relief from the heat. That meant that
when something happened, whether it was large or small, people
were already outside, so angry crowds of already hot and
frustrated people gathered very quickly. The Commission also noted that
of the one hundred sixty four incidents they reviewed, eight
of them were major. Those are ones that they described
(18:43):
as lasting for more than two days, with fires, looting,
reports of sniper fire, and the use of the National
Guard or even the army to try to restore order.
They described twenty three of the incidents as serious. So
there was some looting, some throwing rocks and bottle some fires,
but not nearly as many as in those eight major incidents,
(19:04):
and those serious incidents lasted a day or two. But
then they described the remaining one hundred thirty three incidents
as minor. Only a few people were involved, they lasted
for less than a day, with local police being the
only law enforcement who were involved, although sometimes with the
help of police from a neighboring town. In the Commission's view,
(19:27):
these minor incidents only became national news because the nation
had already primed with this idea that there was an
overwhelming tide of violence in American cities. One of the
President's directives to the Commission had been to study whether
there was a national organization or conspiracy at work, some
kind of outside agitators who were stirring up trouble in
(19:49):
cities all around the country, and the Commission found that
while some people in organizations did use violent rhetoric or
even called for violence, there was no conspiracy and no
organized national campaign for violence. The Commission also reported that
in each of these cities, the vast majority of the
residents hadn't participated in the rioting, and that in almost
(20:12):
all cases there were other residents who had tried to
discourage violence or to quote, cool things down. In some places,
these efforts became an organized, official or semi official effort.
For example, counter riot squads made up of local residents
in Dayton, Ohio and Sampa, Florida were nicknamed the white
Hats because of the white protective helmets they were issued.
(20:35):
The Commission pulled all of this information together and came
to a striking conclusion. Quote segregation and poverty have created
in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to
most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood,
but what the negro can never forget, is that white
(20:55):
society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White instituteations created it,
white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. It
is time now to turn, with all the purpose at
our command, to the major unfinished business of this nation.
It is time to adopt strategies for action that will
produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make
(21:18):
good the promises of American democracy to all citizens, urban
and rural, White and black, Spanish surname American, Indian, and
every minority group. At another point, the report read quote
race prejudice has shaped our history decisively. It now threatens
to affect our future. White racism is essentially responsible for
(21:41):
the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities
since the end of World War Two. This report called
the state of affairs in cities black neighborhoods a failure
of all levels of government, and it called for a
quote commitment to national action, compassionate, massive, and sustained, backed
by the resources of the most powerful and the richest
(22:03):
nation on earth. Those resources would include, if necessary, new taxes.
We'll talk more about the commitment that the report was
calling for. After a quick sponsor break, the full report
(22:25):
of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders walked through
multiple uprisings that had taken place in the early to
mid nineteen sixties, focusing primarily on the summer of ninety seven.
It documented ongoing inequity, crime, poor housing, crumbling infrastructure, pay disparities, racism,
(22:49):
and other issues that had been affecting these communities, as
well as the city's either inability or refusal to address
those issues. It established that it's and uprisings had developed
after months or years of ongoing, escalating tensions, including long
term social issues and serious underlying grievances. The report also said,
(23:12):
quote the events of the summer of nineteen sixty seven
are in large part the culmination of three hundred years
of racial prejudice, and then it walked through an overview
of that three hundred year history. It called for broad,
sweeping changes to try to address all of this. This
included seventy pages of specific recommendations based on three core objectives.
(23:36):
Those objectives were quote opening up all opportunities for those
who are restricted by racial segregation and discrimination, and eliminating
all barriers to their choice of jobs, education, and housing,
Removing the frustration of powerlessness among the disadvantaged by providing
the means to deal with the problems that affect their
(23:56):
own lives, and by increasing the capacity of our public
and private institutions to respond to those problems. Increasing communication
across racial lines, to destroy stereotypes, halt polarization and distressed
and hostility, and create common ground for efforts towards common
goals of public order and social justice. The cost of
(24:20):
all of these proposed efforts was estimated at thirty billion dollars.
It included the creation of two million new jobs over
the course of three years, along with job training programs
and educational improvements. There's educational improvements included ending school segregation,
which was still persisting more than a decade after the
(24:41):
Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education, and
frankly still exists today. There were also early childhood educational proposals,
adult literacy programs, housing reforms, and welfare programs, including a
call to quote establish uniform national standards assistants at least
as high as the annual poverty level of income. Welfare
(25:05):
reforms also included removing requirements that were forcing the mothers
of young children to work. Some of the recommendations related
to policing in the criminal justice system. Recommended court reforms
included plans to administer justice during riots and other emergencies,
both making emergency provisions to deal with increased numbers of
(25:26):
arrests and trials and seeking alternatives to making mass arrests.
The report also made a lot of recommendations that were
related to policing itself. To quote from the report, quote,
the police are not merely a spark factor to some negroes.
Police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and
white repression. And the fact is that many police do
(25:49):
reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility
and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes
in the existence of police brutality and in a quote
double standard of justice and protection, one for Negroes and
one for whites. Later on the report, read quote, the
(26:10):
abrasive relationship between the police and the minority communities has
been a major and explosive source of grievance, tension, and disorder.
The blame must be shared by the total society. The
police are faced with demands for increased protection and service
in the ghetto, yet the aggressive patrol practices thought necessary
(26:30):
to meet these demands themselves create tension and hostility. The
resulting grievances have been further aggravated by the lack of
effective mechanisms for handling complaints against the police. Special programs
for bettering police community relations have been instituted, but these
alone are not enough. Police administrators, with the guidance of
(26:51):
public officials and the support of the entire community, must
take vigorous action to improve law enforcement and to decrease
the potential for disorder. So the Commission's recommendations related to
police included things like eliminating abrasive practices, establishing fair standards
for dealing with citizens grievances, recruiting more black people to
(27:14):
the police force, and developing programs meant to encourage community
support of law enforcement. The Commission also made recommendations specifically
about policing during periods of disorder, including making sure police
were trained in riot response, which many responding officers and
National Guard who were called out during these incidents were
not The Commission also recommended establishing methods to dispel rumors
(27:38):
and spread accurate information, and provide alternatives to lethal weapons
for police to use in the field. The report also
argued against the militarization of police quote the Commission believes
that there is a grave danger that some communities may
resort to the indiscriminate and excessive use of force. The
(27:59):
harm full effects of overreaction are incalculable. The Commission condemns
moves to equit police departments with mass destruction weapons such
as automatic rifles, machine guns, and tanks. Weapons which are
designed to destroy, not to control, have no place in
densely populated urban communities. The Commission's recommendations also related to
(28:23):
the news media. It found that much of the news
reporting of the uprisings had been generally accurate, though sometimes sensationalized,
but it had also focused mostly on violence without exploring
the cause of the violence, and often the only news
being reported about black neighborhoods was about violence. The report
called for media outlets to have reporters on permanent assignment
(28:46):
to cover issues related to black communities and urban areas,
and to make this coverage a standard part of reporting.
The report also recommended recruiting more black journalists at every
level of news organizations. So the Commission's final report, including
that seventy plus page list of recommendations, which of course
we have not read all of the recommendations here seventy
(29:09):
pages as a whole lot, uh, this total report was
more than four hundred pages long. And even though the
Commission's goal was to produce a document that they could
all agree to, and they planned to sign that document
in a public ceremony, that almost did not happen. Text
Thornton threatened not to sign it because he felt that
the document was anti police, and at that point John
(29:31):
Lindsay said he would not sign it either, because he
had made a lot of concessions to make that final
report acceptable to Thornton. In the end, though they did
present their unanimously approved report to the President at the
end of February. You may remember that the Commission's preliminary
findings were due by March first, ninety eight, but the
(29:53):
deadline for the final report wasn't until the end of July.
But this was the Commission's only report. President Johnson had
realized that its work was not going the way that
he had hoped, and he had eventually cut its funding.
The Commission had reduced its staff to a skeleton crew
just so it could finish a report with what it
had left. The Kerner Commission report was dramatically different in
(30:17):
its scope and its tone from other reports that had
been produced in the nineteen sixties related to some of
the same topics. So, for example, the Maccone Commission had
investigated the nineteen sixty five Watts riots, and while it's
report did note the existence of issues like unemployment and
complaints about police brutality, it concluded that the riots were
(30:39):
essentially meaningless outbursts started by quote riff Raff Lyndon. Johnson's
assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Monahan, had also produced
The Negro Family, the Case for National Action in nineteen
sixty five. This report had put a huge focus on
black families, specific offically how many black families had a
(31:02):
single mother as the head of the household, and it
had framed this as an almost pathological root of the problem,
the problem kind of in quotation marks within black communities.
So with precedents like those in mind, Johnson did not
expect the Kerner Commission to produce the kind of report
that it did, one that did not praise his initiatives
(31:24):
in programs and in fact barely even mentioned them, and
instead called for massive new programs that would require huge
amounts of money, while also repeatedly citing white racism as
an urgent problem. It did not help that the report
came out as Johnson was facing increasing backlash over the
US role in the Vietnam War, which had its own
(31:45):
massive price tag. So johnasan refused to accept this report.
He canceled the ceremony where he was supposed to accept
a specially bound copy of it. He had established roughly
twenty different commissions during his presidency, and for each of
them he had personally signed letters of thanks to the
commission's members, but he refused to do that for the
(32:05):
members of the Kurner Commission. He did a point otto
Kerner to the Federal Court of Appeals, but he blamed
Lindsay for the direction the Commission had taken. And then,
just as a side note, Karner's career came to an
end in nineteen seventy four thanks to a corruption scandal
his way outside the scope of this episode. But I thought,
(32:26):
if we didn't mention it. People would say, why didn't
you mention Auto Kurner's massive corruption scandal. Johnson had announced
the creation of the Commission on National Television in nineteen
sixty seven, but when its report came out in ninety eight,
he essentially buried it. The only piece of legislation that's
generally connected to the report is the Civil Rights Act
(32:48):
of nineteen sixty eight, also called the Fair Housing Act
of ninety eight, and that was revived after the report
came out. The public response to the report was also divided.
Bantom Book published the full report, and it became an
immediate bestseller, selling seven hundred and fifty thousand copies in
the first week and one point six million copies by
(33:11):
June of nine. That is an enormous number of copies
of books for any book, but especially for a government report.
And also though faced a huge backlash because of its
focus on white racism and its findings related to policing.
Beyond that, though critics noted that it mirrored parts of
(33:32):
the Moynihan Report, it sort of framed single motherhood among
black women is almost pathological. In fact, women were barely
mentioned in the report aside from being the victims of
violence or mentioned as being single mothers. Another criticism was
that the future goal of the report was really envisioning quote,
(33:53):
a single society and a single American identity, So in
other words, this report was proposing that black communities assimilate
with and conform to white norms, which the report just
took for granted as the one acceptable standard. The report
also focused only on cities that had experienced some kind
(34:13):
of civil disturbance, and not on the ones that didn't,
so there was no examination of why those cities didn't
see similar disturbances, even if they had similar underlying factors
at work. Similarly, this report was focused almost exclusively on
disturbances in which the civilians committing crimes were black. The
chapter of the report that summarized three hundred years of
(34:36):
US history mentioned various incidents of violence that white mobs
enacted against black communities, but there was really no suggestion
that that violence needed a thorough investigation into its causes
and what could be done to prevent that in the future.
Since Johnson didn't accept this report or specifically add its
recommendations to his administration's goals in his final months and off,
(35:00):
this sometimes the Kerner Reports impact is summed up as
kind of None of its recommendations were ever enacted. It
is absolutely true that there was no massive bill that
tried to put all of these recommendations into play at once,
but over the decades, some of its recommendations did come
to pass through other legislation. For example, this report had
(35:22):
a big focus on job training programs and the creation
of new jobs. The Comprehensive Employment Training Act the c
e t A was enacted in nineteen seventy three, and
tax credits were passed in the nineteen seventies and eighties
that led to the creation of about seven hundred thousand
new jobs. The report also called for things like more
(35:43):
funding and power for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and
that did get a bigger budget and more oversight. There
were also changes to policing which started long before the
report was finalized. Johnson had declared a war on crime
in nineteen sixty five and had established the Commission on
Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice also called the Katzenbach Commission,
(36:06):
whose report was delivered in nineteen sixty seven. Johnson had
established an Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, which became the
Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in night, and in June of
that year, Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe
Streets Act of nineteen sixty eight. So it's hard to
trace a one to one path from the Currenter Commission
(36:29):
report to the way policing has evolved because there were
so many other laws and programs already in the works
before and during the time that the Commission was working.
None of its recommendations about police reform were really all
that radical either, but the Commission's argument against the increasing
(36:50):
militarization of police was obviously not heated at all. One
note about the Commission's recommendations about law enforcement. The Commission
insulted numerous members of law enforcement when doing its work,
three of whom were big enough contributors that the Commission
thanked them by name. One was Darryl Gates, Deputy chief
of the Los Angeles Police Department, who had been one
(37:12):
of the commanders in the field during the Watson Uprising.
Gates later became chief of the l a p D,
and his tenure was incredibly controversial, everything from founding the
ubiquitous but ineffective drug Abuse Resistance Education program to making
racist comments about black people's physiology to how he led
the l A p D and its response to the
(37:34):
uprising in Los Angeles. Who's precipitating factors included the acquittal
of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Yeah,
it's it's it's weird that somebody who wound up being
that notorious is one of the people UH personally thanked
Uh in the footnotes of this report. About a month
(37:56):
after the Coroner Commission report was released, the assassination of
Mark and Luther King Jr. Sparked a wave of riots
and other unrest all across the United States, and then
in November of nineteen sixty eight, Richard Nixon won the
presidential election. He had run on a law and order platform,
focusing on increased policing and a restoration of order rather
(38:17):
than the types of widespread social programs and reforms that
the Kurner Report had really been advocating. Nixon took office
in nineteen sixty nine. So even if Johnson had really
tried to push all this very hard in the last
few months of his presidency, full pessimistic that that would
have been continued into the next presidential administration. Every ten
(38:38):
years since nineteen sixty eight. Various organizations and institutions have
done retrospectives on the Kerner Report, looking back at what's
changed and what hasn't, and of those changes, what worked
and what didn't. And generally those reports have been mixed
both in terms of the changes and whether those changes
led to overall positive or negative outcomes. But we're are
(39:00):
less of the details. They generally note how much inequality
and how many of these social conditions outlined in the
report still exist today. Yeah, there there are definitely aspects
that you can see some improvement, Like, uh, A lot
of the communities that were looked at are not as
heavily segregated as they were um A lot of times,
(39:23):
though it is still a community of uh, like it
has become instead of an almost exclusively black community, it
has become us um a community of like black and
Hispanic and Latino people, still under a city government that
is overwhelmingly white. So it's it's a lot of the
changes that these reports look into have like that degree
(39:46):
of nuance, like here is a here is a change
that has happened, not necessarily something that that addressed core
issues that were at work. Do you have a bit
of listener mail for us I do. It's about something
completely different from all of this. Uh. This is from Sonia,
who says, Hi, tracing Holly, I recently listened to the
Swill Milk scandal episode and was tickled and how you
(40:09):
kept trying to reassure the audience how spent beer grains
being fed to cows was safe. I thought you might
be interested to know that spent beer grain is not
only a great nutrition source for cows, but also humans.
Companies like Regrained are part of the growing up cycled
food movement, specializing in creating delicious and nutritious food products
from spent beer grains. Up Cycled feed uses ingredients that
(40:32):
otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured
and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive
impact on the environment. The Regrain Supergrain plus has three
point four times the amount of fiber than wheat flour
and two times the protein of oats, so it's a
highly nutritious ingredient and keeps this low carbon food source
(40:53):
from ending up in landfills. Sonia talks about knowing the
owners of Regrain when they were developing their product. Um.
I wanted to read this particular email because I just
completely forgot about how when we were doing more brewing
at home, we were using our spent grains to make
all kinds of stuff. We were having spent grain pancakes
(41:16):
and spent grain bread and spent grain muffins. Um, it's
been a while since we brewed anything. I don't know
why that is. We have the stuff to do it,
but yes, spent grains can be delicious for people as
well as for non human animals. Um. Yeah, So we'd
(41:39):
like to send us an email right to us about
this or any other podcast where History podcast at i
heart radio dot com. We're all over social media ad
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the iHeart radio app and anywhere else to get your podcasts.
(42:01):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
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Tracy Wilson
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