The Kerner Report

As Professor McKinney mentioned in class yesterday, the Kerner Report was released fifty years ago this week (Feb. 29, 1968). I listened to an NPR update on the Kerner Report yesterday morning and I wanted to give a little extra information on the topic, its effects, and its importance today.

The Kerner Report was commissioned by Lyndon B. Johnson in the wake of several riots and fires across the U.S. Forty-three people died in these riots, a majority of them were black folks. According to the NPR article the goal of the commission (called the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders) was “to discover what happened, why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again.” The report -- written by the nearly all white, and all male committee --  concluded that the riots were a response to the damages of systematic racism. But, I would argue report was not the radical, transparent statement on race that it seems to be. Although the report was published as book and became a national bestseller, little was done to combat the issues outlined in the report. Johnson did not publicly support or endorse the report after it was published. Racial violence continued and police brutality continued. As it does today. Fred Harris, the last living member of the Kerner Commission helped to edit a follow-up report that was released this week and he lamented: “Whoever thought that 50 years later, we’d still be talking about the same things? That’s kinda sad.” I agree with Harris, it is deeply saddening and completely unacceptable that we are facing the same issues within our society that we began publicly illuminating fifty years ago; however, I am not surprised given the lack of political response following the report. A related article in the Washington Post examined the minimal economic and social gains that African Americans have made in the U.S. since 1968. Spending on poverty-stricken areas increased for the decade following the report, but decreased again after that, and the race-based wealth gap has only widened since then. The evidence from the Kerner report and the follow-up report, suggest decreasing racial disparity through investments in public schooling, job training, and increasing minimum wage. The authors of the latest report believe such efforts would help narrow the large socioeconomic gap and direct the country towards greater equality. With fifty years of time to make changes, yet very few adjustments being made to a system founded on racial inequality, there is little reason to suspect that this new report will spark any federal policy changes or substantial investments in predominately minority areas.

https://www.npr.org/2018/02/27/589351779/report-updates-landmark-1968-racism-study-finds-more-poverty-more-segregation

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/02/26/fifty-years-after-the-kerner-commission-a-new-report-cites-some-of-the-same-concerns-about-race-and-poverty/?utm_term=.dbc451b4d4ab