Kerner Commission Report

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(WX13) WASHINGTON, Aug. 2-Hearing the Secretary--Sec. of Labor Willard Wirtz, foreground, testifies before members of President Johnson's Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders today. Identifiable, from left around table, are: Police Chief Herbert Jenkins of Atlanta, GA, Charles Thornton, Los Angeles businessman; Rap. James Corman, D-Calif.; Mayor John Lindsay of New York, vice chairman; Gov. Otto Kerner of Illinois, chairman: David Ginsburg, executive director; Roy Wilkins, executive secretary, NAACP (head turned away) and I.W. Abel, president AFL-CIO United Steel Workers.

The Kerner Commission Report was funded by taxpayers via Lyndon Baines Johnson's Executive Order 11365. The report blamed poverty and white people for riots in 1967. The solution, according to the report, was "unprecedented levels of funding" for government programs.

About

The Kerner report, officially known as the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was a study commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 following a series of race riots in the United States. The 11-member commission, chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, Jr., was tasked with investigating the causes of the riots and recommending solutions to prevent future violence.
The report, released in February 1968, concluded that the riots were the result of deep-seated racial inequality and segregation in American society. It identified racism as the primary cause of the riots and warned that the United States was moving toward two separate and unequal societies, one black and one white. The report called for significant investments in education, employment, housing, and welfare to address the root causes of racial inequality.

From the report:

"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 society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

The Solution

From the report:

"Our recommendations embrace three basic principles:
  • To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems;
  • To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance;
  • To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society.
These programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the Nation's conscience."

Members of Commission

Kerner Commission Report Screenshot of Foreword

From the Kerner Commission Report:[1]

Also acknowledged: To our staff, headed by David Ginsburg, Executive Director, to his deputy, Victor H. Palmieri...

National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas

Advisory Panel on Private Enterprise

Professional Staff

Special Assistants to Commissioners

Personal Assistants

Student Assistants

Horace Seldon's 'Epiphany'

Horace Seldon was inspired to found Community Change Inc. after learning about the "White Problem" as described in the Kerner Commission Report. Profile excerpt from the blog "Spare Change News" posted December 20, 2018 by Claire Barliant:[2]

But in 1968 Horace had an epiphany that changed the course of his life while driving on the Mass. Turnpike, near the Chicopee marker, of all places. It was a week after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a few months after the release of the Kerner Report, the results of an investigation initiated by President Lyndon Johnson that detailed the ways racism and economic disparity led to civil unrest.
“I knew that I was to use the next years of my life to work on the ‘white problem,’” Horace wrote of this moment in his autobiography “No Longer At Ease Here: Trapped In A History. “I had no idea what that meant practically,” he wrote. “I knew only that I must do whatever was required.”

References

  1. ↑ Kerner Commission Report (accessed June 6, 2024)
  2. ↑ Horace Seldon: Fighting Injustice, Celebrating Civil Disobedience (accessed June 6, 2024)
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