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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: My fellow Americans: We have endured a week such as no nation should live through...
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: The summer of 1967 was really a crucible. You see in city after city, these uprisings—in a broad enough way that it can't be simply dismissed as coincidental.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Conditions were such in every one of these cities that almost any spark could set them off.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: You had Newark, you had Detroit, you had cities all across the country up in flames… people were wondering, can we actually have a country?
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I am tonight appointing a Special Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders…
PRESIDENT JOHNSON continues: the commission will investigate the origins of the recent disorders in our cities. It will make recommendations to me, to the Congress, to the state governors and to the mayors for measures to prevent or contain such disasters in the future.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: He said, answer three questions:
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JOHNSON: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The commission held 20 days of hearings. We heard from a lot of witnesses.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: They really were trying to get a baseline of knowledge about why American cities were on fire.
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ADDONIZIO: We had members of the president's commission on civil disorders here in our city today.
VESLA WEAVER, POLITICAL SCIENTIST: The Kerner Commission avoided this tendency to listen only to certain sections of society.
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HARRIS: We can learn a good deal more out over the country, talking to people, than we can sitting in a building in Washington.
LINDSAY: I trust that the report will be completely honest. That being the case, it will describe undoubtedly a very serious condition in the country.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The commission told the truth, but it was a harsh truth.
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Young guy: Buy your books on the Riot commission! On the Riot commission!
Reporter: (throughout the neighborhood) more than 2000 copies of the riot report were sold in less than a week
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: It really becomes a centerpiece of conversation. You see civic groups, churches, libraries, even police departments buying the book in bulk.
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REASONER: These are the major proposals. A form of guaranteed annual income, 6 million new low and middle income units, 2 million new jobs in government and private business. The cost has been estimated at $2 billion a month. Something like the cost of the war in Vietnam.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: Once it became clear what a political bombshell this might represent, Lyndon Johnson wants to take the legs out from under it.
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Anyone out at Third Precinct to check condition on Symphony Hall? A large crowd gathering.
At 94 7th Avenue, they’re shooting from the roofs.
All cars in the Second Precinct, get down around Broad Street-Clay Street Bridge, a white van going to be loaded with ammunition and guns––and colored people. That’s at the Clay Street Bridge.
Any First Precinct car can check a man who was shot? He’s laying in the gutter in front of 69 South Orange Avenue.
Fifth Precinct car. Shoe store at Bergen and Leonard. Looting.
498 Clinton Avenue. Looting.
Newark, NJ
July 12-17, 1967
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Ladies and gentleman, ladies and gentleman, let me have your attention, please. Governor Hughes and the Newark city officials have earlier issued a proclamation. There will be a curfew upon pedestrians starting at 11 o’clock.
HUGHES: The city in those sections is apparently still in what can only be classified as open rebellion. And Mayor Addonizio and I have determined that the line between jungle assault on law and order might as well be drawn here as any place in America.
REPORTER: Governor Richard Hughes says that the situation in Newark is under control with the exception of sniper fire. And he says there is no way to control sniper fire.
REPORTER: There are about 22 blocks of Newark’s Springfield Avenue here in the ghetto area. And this Friday, they all look pretty much like this, one massive sea of devastation as far as the eye can see in both directions.
Debris, broken glass, all that's left after a night of violent rioting.
REPORTER: How much did you lose?
SHOP OWNER: About 15 to $20,000. But it isn't that. It's all my life that I put in here for 18 years to build up a little business, and now I'm forced out. Why? Because of these professional no-goodniks, bums, and what have you?
MAN: Can I say something? Listen, all we want is a equal right. That's all we're asking for. And as long as they keep this up, we goin' burn the white out.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The civil disorders, violent protests, that erupted in so many of America's cities during the hot summer of 1967 were just sensational frontpage, big-type news, and the same was true on television. They just dominated the television news: the fires, the looting, the sniping.
Detroit, MI
July 23-28, 1967
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ROMNEY: The difficulty late yesterday was on the west side of the city, but its spread pretty well across the city now, so you're dealing with––what is it, 139 square miles, something like that?
CAVANAUGH: Yes, that’s correct, yes.
ROMNEY: As governor of the state of Michigan, I do hereby request the immediate deployment of federal troops into Michigan to assist state and local authorities in reestablishing law and order in the city of Detroit.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: It caused enormous fear and anger, puzzlement.
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MCGEE: 43 Americans died in these streets. 386 were injured. 477 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Something like it happened in 76 American cities this summer.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The question was, is this some kind of organized thing? How long is it gonna last? What can be done to stop it?
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MCGEE: Next summer it could look like this in the downtown sections of our cities. It could look like this in the neighborhood where you live. The simple fact is this: we are in the worst crisis we have known since the Civil War.
MUDD: Since Newark and Detroit, law and order have become obsessions on Capitol Hill. And the main direction of congressional movement is toward investigating committees, anti-riot bills, gun control legislation, more police support.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: At the height of the Detroit riots, I introduced a resolution in the Senate. I said, we ought to have a blue ribbon citizen's commission to look into these civil disorders––not just on a law and order basis, but getting at deeper causes. That was on July the 25th of 1967. On the 27th, it was announced by the White House that President Johnson was going to have a nationwide telecast.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: And he called me that evening, not very much before he was to go on the air. And he said to me, Fred, I’m going to appoint that commission you’ve been talking about, and I’m going to put you on it. And I said, well, I’ll do the best I can. And he said, another thing, Fred, I want you to remember you’re a Johnson man. And I said, yes, sir, I am a Johnson man. And he said, if you forget it, I’ll take my pocket knife and cut your blank off. He did not say "blank."
July 27, 1967
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: My fellow Americans: We have endured a week such as no nation should live through: a time of violence and tragedy. For a few minutes tonight, I want to talk about that tragedy—and I want to talk about the deeper questions that it raises for us all. I am tonight appointing a special Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois has agreed….
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: I think he just wanted to be sure that he would get all the credit for what he had been doing in regard to race and poverty. And I should say that Lyndon Johnson did more against racism and against poverty than any president before or since, with the sole exception of probably Abraham Lincoln.
August 28, 1963
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MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
CRONKITE: They called it the March on Washington for jobs and freedom. More than 200,000 of them came to Washington this morning in a kind of climax to an historic spring and summer in the struggle for equal rights.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Johnson took up the mantle of John Kennedy. President Kennedy had recommended civil rights legislation, but had no chance to pass it.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for a hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Johnson made that really a major thing, and I think felt very deeply about it.
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HUNTLEY/BRINKLEY: Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Great Society. Two weeks before he took the oath of office for the first time as president in his own right, Mr. Johnson spelled out to Congress what he wanted for the Great Society.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: First, to keep our economy growing. To open for all Americans the opportunity that is now enjoyed by most Americans. And to improve the quality of life for all.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: In the first two or three years of Johnson's administration, owing to large democratic majorities in Congress and, uh, a well of goodwill, uh, following the Kennedy assassination, Johnson was able to pass a sweeping domestic agenda. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which desegregated all public accommodations. Passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which essentially desegregated the voting process throughout the entire U.S. South.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any that has been won on any battlefield. Today, the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: Johnson also initiated the War on Poverty, and authorizes nearly a billion dollars to specifically target the places and institutions where poverty is created and re-created in education, in employment. It is an actual good faith effort to move the needle some on what American poverty looks like, particularly in disenfranchised communities.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. And this is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: Lyndon Johnson had made the calculation about what investment in civil rights would mean politically. He is aware that every significant step he takes simultaneously feeds this growing backlash, or what people have called "whitelash," to the civil rights movement. The idea that Johnson had set in motion a kind of government overreach.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: You saw that manifest itself as early as 1964, when Barry Goldwater entered the presidential race and challenged Johnson. It was very clear that he was tapping into a reserve of white anger, a belief that somehow the Great Society and Johnson's civil rights agenda were going to be threatening to their communities, uh, to their jobs and to their safety.
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[cheering]
GOLDWATER: While the President of the United States speaks of the Great Society, our cities and suburbs are turning into the lawless society.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: Goldwater is making the argument that the doctrine of non-violent civil disobedience that is promoted by Dr. King and other civil rights leaders is fundamentally encouraging a disrespect for authority and for law.
VESLA WEAVER, POLITICAL SCIENTIST: This is a claim that had been articulated before. Southern segregationists are famous, in the congressional record and on the floor of Congress, for saying that civil rights agitation is breeding crime. So you've got, on the one hand, one of the largest political struggles for racial justice in our nation's history happening. And at that time, legislators are actively arguing that we ought to- to treat protestors as ordinary thugs.
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GOLDWATER: Nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: He’s the making the argument that not only has the federal government expanded too much, not only is it spending too many tax dollars on too wide a range of social programs, but those social programs themselves are fueling the troubles that are beginning to appear in America's cities.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: In the 1960s, the U.S. begins to witness massive demographic changes that resulted from the Great Migrationof rural black Americans in the southern states to northern and western cities. Cities were becoming blacker. Washington D.C. had come into a black majority by 1960. In Detroit and Cleveland, black people were edging majorities.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: This was alarming to federal policymakers because as black populations and cities are growing, there are fewer and fewer jobs. De-industrialization is already happening.
VESLA WEAVER, POLITICAL SCIENTIST: For white Americans, there's a sense that society is breaking down. And it was breaking down. Black people were saying, like, "Enough!”
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: Social scientists and policy makers in the early 1960s start to label black youth as "social dynamite." Given this co*cktail of population change and continued inequality, this group of social dynamite, these youth of color, would explode. And that's exactly what happened.
Watts
Los Angeles, CA
August 11, 1965
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REPORTER: There's looting at this moment at 88th and Broadway. At 103rd and Compton, a Molotov co*cktail was thrown a short time ago and in that area are about three or four thousand rioters.
REPORTER: A bloody rampage in a crowded Negro neighborhood called Watts. Absolutely incredible scene. A gun battle in the middle of Broadway, the main business streets of Los Angeles.Small army of policemen, most of them carrying shotguns. National Guardsmen with 30 caliber machine guns, bodies of several negroes who have been shot already in this battle.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: Johnson is at his ranch in Texas, and Joe Califano his domestic policy chief, spent two days trying to get the president on the phone and couldn't. Johnson simply shut down.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: This is just days after he's cashed in all of his political chips to shepherd the Voting Rights Act through Congress. It's kind of indignation, almost a sense of being slapped in the face.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: We just had this, the most massive legislation in U.S. history, certainly since the Civil War, extending the rights to African Americans. Why aren't you happy?
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STOUT: With no reason at all, bottles and rocks and broken windows. Almost a mad, holiday atmosphere. People laughing, cheering on those who find things to take home. Stores broken into. The one directly across the street, a pawn shop.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: These reporters might as well have been foreign correspondents.
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REPORTER: Can I talk with you just a moment?
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: Overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly middle, upper class. They were covering a different nation.
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STOUT: The burning and looting, the shooting and beating went on for nearly a week. In the background, there's a long chronicle of defeat and disappointment, of discrimination and negro grievances, of pure hate for the white man.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: The news coverage was lurid. The tone was, big cities in America are exploding and, um, we should all be afraid
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: For Johnson, there's a real fear that this violence is somehow going to undercut the War on Poverty. He's put in this position where he's got to maintain his commitment to addressing racial discrimination, but also his commitment to restore law and order.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: A rioter with a Molotov co*cktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them: law breakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties, and would ultimately destroy a free America.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: On the heels of Watts, Congress passes, by unanimous vote, the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, and that's really the point at which we can mark the beginnings of the War on Crime.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: In theory, this War on Crime coexists with this War on Poverty, almost as a kind of stick and carrot. And it funnels millions of dollars into increasing numbers of police and experimental crime control projects that were being enacted, by and large, in low-income communities of color.
VESLA WEAVER, POLITICAL SCIENTIST: This is the first moment that we see the federal government actually sending money to help support crime control. Crime is no longer a state and local issue. The federal government's gonna get involved. It's setting up a precedent for ever more investment.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: But the War on Crime in no way quelled the uprisings. You have even more of those kind of conflicts in 1966. Uprisings in 38 American cities––from San Francisco to Providence, Rhode Island.
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MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: I think America must see riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: The image of civil rights in many white Americans' minds had been of African Americans beseeching the nation for decent treatment, for equality, asking white America to just accord them their basic humanity. The images of well-dressed sit-in demonstrators being beaten, being spat upon are so important to understanding white Americans' sympathetic attitudes towards civil rights.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: And then you see a fundamental transition where media simply can't resist the spectacle of urban disorder. The camera simply cannot look away. And as much as it unsettles white viewers there's also this sort of fixation. In some ways it's confirming their darkest prejudices about black Americans. Now they're seeing a more menacing face of black America and they emphatically do not like what they're seeing.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN:What you start to see is this phrase "we're rewarding the rioters." We're creating a climate where people understand that through uprisings, through rioting, through looting, they can gain the support of liberals who will then shower communities with new and expensive social programs subsidized by angry and anxious white voters outside of urban America.
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WALLACE: Louis Harris is one of this nation's foremost public opinion analysts, in years gone by, and again this summer. Mr. Harris, how much of a change has there been in the northern white man's attitudes toward the black man during the summer of 1966?
HARRIS: The fear that whites have over Negroes moving into their neighborhoods is, without question, the deepest fear that abounds in white society today.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was fairly uncontroversial in the North. Same with the Voting Rights Act. Where it got tricky for Johnson was when the administration began to attempt to address systemic racism and systemic inequality outside of the South.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: Open Housing pushed all sorts of buttons with white Americans, in the North, in the Midwest, places where whites simply were not accustomed to living in the same geographies with black neighbors.
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WOMAN: We want freedom!
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: That is when whites seem to say this far, but no further.
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MAN: I’m sure he’s only coming here for one reason, that’s to bust the neighborhood down, discourage the white person, stop the whites from moving into the area and hope it will be converted to a Negro, integrated development.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: A lot of that was driven by fear, fear of what they saw in neighborhoods that were predominantly African American. Those neighborhoods were heavily blighted. Those neighborhoods were dangerous. There was a fair amount of crime.
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I really envy you out here on the northwest side of the city of Chicago, because you are very, very far removed from the real problems that exist. You don’t have slums within a block or two of you.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: If you're one of these white voters, you're thinking like, I don't want this in my neighborhood. You're not seeing what's behind it. You just see something that scares you.
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Every taxpayer in the United States has donated money to these people. For what?
We can be sociable with 'em in work. We can get along with them and joke with them. But when we leave our job, close the door and are on our way home, we want them to go in their direction and we can go in ours.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: Whites were saying things like, why can't you wait? Even whites who were supportive. It's like, we support the idea that blacks need to, to have a different life, but you're pushing too fast.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: In the 1966 election, you now see conservative white politicians across the country sort of borrowing from the Goldwater playbook, and using law and order in races for Congress. And Democrats in general and liberals in particular suffer serious, serious losses.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: If you are a Republican-elected official in 1966, you see this as a mandate to, one, do more of the same, and two, increasingly to roll back the War on Poverty, Great Society initiatives that have been the centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson's presidency.
January 10, 1967
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: At home, the question is whether we will continue working for better opportunities for all Americans, when most Americans are already living better than any people in history. Abroad, the question is whether we have the staying power to fight a very costly war, when the objective is limited and the danger to us is seemingly remote.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: Johnson is painfully aware that the war in Vietnam is consuming $30 billion a year, while the expenditures on the Great Society are about a billion dollars a year. And conservatives in Congress are going after even that small amount.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Johnson had said that "We can have guns and butter. We don't have to choose between domestic programs and the war. We can do both." But in 1967, it was becoming increasingly clear that was not true. Then came these terrible disorders all around the country.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: You had Newark. You had Detroit. You had cities all across the country up in flames and people were wondering, can we actually have a country?
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: Johnson's being faced with a good deal of pressure to do something. But he's really incapable of governing in the way that he had been accustomed to before.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Last week in Congress, a small but important plan for action in the cities was voted down in the House of Representatives. The members of that body rejected my request for 20 million dollars to fight the pestilence of rats—rats which prowl in dark alleys and tenements, and attack thousands of city children.
MUDD: Moderates who pride themselves on their civil rights voting record because they survived the dangers of the political backlash back home are now becoming backlashers themselves. Many of them seem to be saying, "If Newark and Detroit and Plainfield and Toledo are the thanks we get, here is our answer."
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: Lyndon Johnson is a political animal. He understands exactly what is happening. He sees the political trap that he is in, and he's desperately trying to find a way out.
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: Creating a presidential commission was for Johnson the best option, because it allows him to show presidential leadership that he's aware of the disturbances that are taking place, that he's doing something about it, but it also allows him to kick the can down the road. He can say, well, I've done my part. I've set up this distinguished commission. Let's wait for the recommendations.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: I was in Mississippi doing civil rights work, and I remember watching a black and white television set, and Johnson speaking about this terrible crisis that was occurring in America. And he announced that he was forming this commission. We laughed, and we thought, oh my God, you know, commissions are appointed to make problems go away, not to deal with them, right?
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: The Commission will investigate the origins of the recent disorders in our cities. It will make recommendations—to me, to the Congress, to the state governors, and to the mayors—for measures to prevent or contain such disasters in the future.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: President Johnson called us together by telegram after he had appointed us.
July 29, 1967
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER:We met in a cabinet room. He signed the executive order and gave each of us a pen.
JOHN KOSKINEN, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: The president really was a conciliator who would put a lot of different people from different backgrounds together and say, come let us reason together. And they covered the political spectrum.
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: They had to have supported some aspect of his Great Society, especially the Civil Rights Act of 64, Voting Rights Act. Also, just as important, they had to have been supporting the Vietnam War. He would not appoint anyone who was a skeptic of the Vietnam War.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: It's meant to give him the political leeway to maneuver. You anticipate him being able to pull the strings and move this commission in a direction that's most politically beneficial for him.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: There were eleven members. The chair was Otto Kerner who was Governor of Illinois.
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KERNER: I was contacted with a telephone call day before yesterday.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I want nothing but competence. And I want nothing but compassion. And I want nothing but patriotism.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: John Lindsay, the Mayor of New York…
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: John.
LINDSAY: Hello, Mr. President.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON:: I want you to be Vice Chairman, and I don't want you to even consider thinking about it, I just want you to say yes sir.
LINDSAY: Yes, sir.
JOHN KOSKINEN, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: Lindsay at that time was still a registered Republican. He was a very liberal Republican, back in the old days where there were such things as liberal Republicans.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: There were two United States senators.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Fred Harris, a young man who’d been interested in this field in the Senate. I haven’t asked him yet, but I’m hoping I get Senator Brooke from Massachusetts…
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: Ed Brooke, the first and the only, then, black senator since Reconstruction; a businessman…
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I want to ask Tex Thornton, the head of Lytton Industries, California, to be on it.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: ...two members of the House, McCulloch and Corman, a Republican and a Democrat; Herb Jenkins, the Chief of Police of Atlanta; the Secretary of Commerce of the state of Kentucky, Katherine Ann Peden; Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP; and I.W. Abel, the head of the steelworkers. Many very well known people. And establishment people.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: The only activist voice is that of Roy Wilkins who by the standards of 1967, is a fairly moderate figure. Edward Brooke was the only other Black person on the commission and he was a Republican. Time Magazine had given him the really questionable honorific of NASP, or Negro Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: People looking at this group, a lot of people thought that nothing really was going to come of it. And that had been true of a lot of commissions. But I think Johnson really wanted a deep and full report. As he said, answer three questions.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Johnson said Charlie Schultze, the budget director here, will take care of whatever your needs are to do what needs to be done. In effect, money won’t be any problem for you.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: So Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice Chairman, let your search be free. Let us be untrammeled by what has been called the conventional wisdom. As best you can, find the truth, the whole truth, and express it in your report.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: I didn't know John Lindsay earlier. But in our first meeting, John spoke out about how important he thought it was that we not just deal with the question of law and order, but that we get at deeper causes.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: I, from earliest time, was very interested in the plight of poor people. I grew up in a little town in Oklahoma. I started to work in the fields when I was five years old. We lived in an area where Comanche Indians were all amongst us and that, I think, had some effect on me. No Negroes lived in my town and, at one time, I think were prevented from doing so. But I knew how they were treated generally.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: John Lindsay was probably more knowledgeable about these issues than anybody in America at that time. He was living with this problem as a big-city mayor. He saw the desperate conditions in which so many black people lived. And I was convinced from the very first moment he spoke that he and I were on the same wavelength exactly.
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: That first day, the very first meeting, it’s clear John Lindsay and Fred Harris wanted to push the committee into dealing with the root causes of racial unrest, which they believed was poverty and a sense of powerlessness. Tex Thornton sees the commission's purpose solely to help law enforcement to crush future uprisings. And in every debate, just about those two on opposite sides.
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REPORTER: Governor, what is the feeling of urgency among the commission members on this first day?
KERNER: Great urgency. As a matter of fact, if we could have continued on, I think we would've done so. But we felt we had to take a little breathing spell here, review our charge, obtain an executive director, look at staff opportunities and places for us to operate.
HACKEL: The group decided to begin hearings in Washington next Tuesday and Wednesday with government officials. The commission will ask for subpoena powers.
RATHER: The president wants an interim report from his new commission no later than March 1st of next year. He wants a final report, at the latest, one year from today.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: This is not the group of people that you would generally expect to be a kind of fount of wisdom on a subject as intractable as race. And that is the foremost challenge that confronts them the minute they walk through the door. What can they possibly say that can, one, lend insight into questions of race, and two, be instructive as to how the society can move forward?
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REPORTER: Senator Thurmond, there's been some suggestions that there may be a Communist conspiracy or a conspiracy involved in these riots. Do you have any information on this or do you…
THURMOND: I don't think there's any question about it. There's no doubt in my mind that these riots are organized and there's no doubt in my mind that the Communists are behind these riots.
[Singing] We gonna walk that walk…
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: "Outside agitator" was the phrase that people use in the South. Whenever anything happened that people didn't like, "this couldn't be our Negroes. These must be outside agitators ‘cause our Negroes wouldn't behave this way." And in the North, it went one step further. It was to say that communists were behind it.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: Surely, blacks of their own accord wouldn't be torching their own neighborhoods, so there must be some hidden hand here.
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CARMICHAEL: Don't be afraid. Don't be ashamed. We want Black Power.
CROWD: Black Power.
CARMICHAEL: We want Black Power.
CROWD: We want Black Power.
WALLACE: Stokely Carmichael, a 25 year old revolutionary, a college graduate with a degree in philosophy. It was here in Mississippi this summer that Carmichael, with his cry for Black Power, first became a national figure, and to many, a frightening one.
CARMICHAEL: You gonna sit in front of your television set and listen to LBJ tell you that violence never accomplishes anything, my fellow Americans.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: The face of the civil rights movement has changed by the summer of 1967.
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CARMICHAEL: But you see the real problem with violence is that we have never been violent. We have been too nonviolent, too nonviolent.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: Dr. King remains the preeminent leader, but there is a sense among white Americans that Dr. King is no longer in charge.
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BROWN: You better quit running around here talking about loving these honkeys of death. During rebellions brother, you got stop looting and start shooting. Black Power, brother.
DAVID BOESEL, COMMISSION STAFFER: Of course it alarms white people, it alarmed the government. The FBI was all over these guys.
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HOOVER: The Communists in this country have organized, very intensely, a drive to infiltrate into the racial discord and discontent in this country.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: Running the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover had been a key opponent of civil rights, had collapsed civil rights with communism. He understood that any form of civil rights did pose, to some degree, a legitimate, uh, challenge to the way the nation functioned. Black people had literally been raw material for wealth creation. And so Hoover’s holding the line against the threat of black people being at the vanguard of a communist takeover of the United States.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: Hoover is consistently playing up these possibilities, sending wildly inaccurate, unvetted, raw intelligence information to the White House. Because where there's smoke, there must be some fire.
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: This issue of conspiracy was very important to the commission.
August 1, 1967
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: Their first major witness was J. Edgar Hoover. He puts all of these charts up around the room. And shows you know, Stokely Carmichael was in Maryland on this day and the next day there was a disturbance. He's trying to create a connection between these advocates of Black Power and the racial unrest.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: If you pressed him, J. Edgar Hoover, he said, "No, there was not any national conspiracy behind the riots." But then he talked about outside agitators and so forth and really made you think, and made Lyndon Johnson think that there was a conspiracy.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: Johnson believes Hoover and listens to Hoover. They are neighbors in Washington. Johnson is also extraordinarily thin-skinned. He takes criticism really, really personally. He is attracted to the idea that the only reason all of this violence is taking place is because people are being provoked, incited, and agitated.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: If the rebellions were about underlying racial inequalities, then that was an indictment of the War on Poverty. Perhaps it hadn't gone far enough. Perhaps it wasn't sufficient to address historical racism and inequality.
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REPORTER: Dr. King, what were the major points discussed before the commission today?
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: Well, we discussed many points concerning the civil disorders taking place. My major point was that the time has come for a massive program on the part of the federal government that will make jobs or income a reality for every American citizen.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The commission held a long series of hearings about civil disturbances and violent protests. Twenty days of hearings. We heard from a lot of witnesses.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: The commission called upon people who had varying perspectives and insights into the pertinent questions of race. Historians, sociologists, economists, law enforcement figures, activists. And they really were trying to get a kind of baseline of knowledge about why American cities were on fire.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: One of the witnesses, the renowned Black psychologist Kenneth Clark, voiced a real degree of skepticism about what they were doing. He ticks off all of the inquiries that have happened in response to other uprisings––1935, 1943, 1965––and says, "Each of them produced a report. None of those reports actually made any difference," and raises the question about whether this inquiry will make any difference either.
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KERNER: So far as we can find and of course we've had only a small amount of material before us as to the various riots that have occurred, there seems to be no common plan. There doesn't seem to be a plan at all. Something happens, it may be rumor, it may be an arrest, but suddenly it triggers the riots.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The president told us to state the facts. And one of the facts that we said straight out was that there was a great deal of overreaction by the police and by the National Guard. The great majority of people who were killed were black people.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: We looked, for example, at sniping reports.
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MCGEE: Sniping was organized. They were mobile and able to tie up large forces.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: There was a consistent refrain that a sniper was shooting at or had shot law enforcement or members of the National Guard or fire departments. No one to this day will ever know in all instances what did happen or didn't happen. What we do know is that a lot of the instances of the shooting or deaths of members of the National Guard, of the fire department, the police were by friendly fire. That being said, it didn't really matter. The notion of a fictionalized, larger-than-life sniper problem meant that law enforcement could use the most aggressive, militarized weaponry and tactics to put down their own citizens.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: When we could trace down a sniper incident report, here’s the kind of thing we found. A young National Guard guy with live ammunition was stationed under a streetlight. And he was scared to death in this black neighborhood. High rise apartment nearby. And he shot out the streetlight. And that gave rise to all sorts of reports, everywhere, on the radio and everywhere else, there’s snipers. They pulled up some kind of vehicle with a machine gun on it and sprayed that apartment.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: As a result of what we thought was an overreaction by the National Guard, virtually all of whom were white and young, with no training whatsoever of how to deal with any civil disturbances, I suggested we make an announcement early, separate from our final report, calling for integration of the National Guard.
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: African Americans made up less than 2% of National Guard members. Lindsay and Harris both thought that it was important to make that statement. Tex Thornton doesn't want to do it. This is the first big battle. And Tex Thornton argues vehemently against the commission making any kind of a statement.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: We were such different people, and there were a lot of different views and a lot of argument from the first. I worried that we wouldn't be able to come up with a good report. So I made a deal with a publisher to write a book myself.
Newark, NJ
August 16, 1967
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ADDONIZIO: We've had members of the president's commission on civil disorders here in our city today. We hope that they have been able to walk through our city, and find out for themselves exactly what exists out there.
LINDSAY: There isn’t anybody that you talk to in a community that’s under stress in any city of the country who’s not a valuable person to talk to.
VESLA WEAVER, POLITICAL SCIENTIST: The Kerner Commission avoided this tendency to listen only to certain sections of society. And they go out and they scour trying to understand the patterns and the common features and what it is that people are saying.
Milwaukee, WI
August 29, 1967
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HARRIS: We can learn a good deal more out over the country, talking to people, than we can sitting in a building in Washington. So we're going to a good many cities around the country. Milwaukee is one of them. We just wanna kinda get the sense and feel of some of these tremendous urban problems that we have in America.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: In Milwaukee, I spent a morning in a Black barbershop. Young men coming in, 25 to 30. And the first question I asked each of them as they came into the barbershop puzzled them, and I finally figured out why. My question was, "Is there greater discrimination here in, uh, Milwaukee than where you came from in Jackson or—or Memphis or wherever?" And the reason it puzzled 'em was, as I found out in Milwaukee, they didn't see any white people. There was more segregation in Milwaukee—that's a northern city—than those southern cities that they'd come from.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: And to see the terrible conditions: three and four families living in a one-family house; grocery store with day-old bread and wilted vegetables; criminally inferior schools. There wasn’t any transportation system. The jobs had left moved out to the suburbs or had disappeared altogether.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: In Cincinnati, John Lindsay and I ran onto some young men that were shooting craps on the street, in broad daylight. When they found out we were from Washington, they all, just in a chorus almost, said, "Jobs, baby. We need jobs, baby."
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MAN: The only thing we CAN do is stand around and stand on the corner all the time. See, we don't have anything to do so, not no purpose.
JOHN KOSKINEN, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: It was an eye-opener. These weren't outsiders, these weren't conspirators, these weren't political radicals. These were people who had legitimate and great, long-standing grievances about the nature of their life and the limited opportunities they were provided.
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MAN: Everybody's so all fired up about these riots and this here racial disorder and Black Power, and nobody's figuring out that half of these cats want to get out here and make it for themselves. You think they want to stay like this all their lives?
WILKINS: The resentment is of the same kind. The conviction that something must be done quickly, outside of the routine channels, is very widespread.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: It really put faces on these problems.And I know that it had the same effect on other members of the commission. Tex Thornton said himself, after going out to riot cities and talking to people there, I have moved about 90 degrees to the left.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: We also had these copious reports from our survey teams.
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: The commission staff included social scientists who were in Washington at the headquarters.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: And the commission sent out these teams of six peopleto twenty-three cities to learn exactly what had happened.
VESLA WEAVER, POLITICAL SCIENTIST: They do an extraordinary field investigation. They interviewed business leaders, civic leaders, on down to black police officers. They sat in people's living rooms and barber shops. They heard their stories.
DAVID BOESEL, COMMISSION STAFFER: I was one of four analysts in charge of conducting analyses of those reports. There were mountains of material that we had to go through––news reports, some FBI reports, boxes and piles of documents. Our job was to take that information and all the statistics that we could find, put them together in an analysis that answered the question, why did it happen?
JOHN KOSKINEN, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: After having done that through about fifteen cities, a common pattern began to emerge, which was, these were people protesting.
DAVID BOESEL, COMMISSION STAFFER: In the South, you had the Jim Crow system, organized legal segregation. There were lines that you couldn't cross. If you crossed them, you knew what the consequences would be. So it was possible to use civil disobedience tactics to move toward a goal. In the North, the causes of oppression and disadvantage were more opaque. You were a lot freer in many ways, but one thing that you couldn't do was move out of your constricted neighborhood, your ghetto.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: The six million African Americans who've moved north since World War I find that they're facing a wall of opposition. Unions discriminate against them. They're not able to get the same high paying high benefits union jobs that many white people did. Realtors and home sellers are discriminating against them. They're consigned to some of the worst rental properties in cities.
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MAN: The least little thing you do, it upset, it unbalance the cart, and once the cart is tipped, the apples began to roll out, they just keep rolling and you can't pick 'em on back up.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: The federal government underwrote the suburbanization of America through agencies that insured mortgages. It did so through the GI Bill of Rights. But African Americans who were helping to fund these programs through their taxes did not get to take part in them because of discrimination among realtors and home sellers.
DAVID BOESEL, COMMISSION STAFFER: You had a generation of young people, politically conscious. Black Power and black nationalism were in the air at the time. They rejected the gradualism of traditional civil rights organizations. They wanted control, control of their own communities. They wanted action. There were long histories of efforts by black leaders to pressure city governments to address a wide variety of problems. But it never resulted in much. They're gonna have to find some other way to bring about change. Not going through the system anymore, but turning out in the streets.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: Many of the young people who participated had spent their childhoods witnessing the civil rights movement unfold. Yet they were still living with roaches and rats running around. In public schools that didn't have up-to-date books or resources. When nonviolent direct action protests haven't worked to change your conditions, then the next step is violent, direct action.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: The word riot has a connotation to it. The idea of riot being people destroying property, almost irrational. It doesn't suggest there's any underlying cause other than bad actors, if you will. But I was back in Detroit visiting my parents. Detroit was burning. And I remember someone pointing, I think it was an M-16, at me, and saying "go back where you were." I was just pissed at America. That James Brown song comes to mind. We'd rather die on our feet than keep living on our knees. And to me, I felt that way, I felt like, okay, yeah, there's a risk involved, but we gotta do something.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Conditions were such in every one of these cities, that almost any spark could set them off, and the sparks we found were the police department.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: For African American migrants who began to leave the South in first thousands and then tens of thousands, and over time, hundreds of thousands, they were leaving the South one step ahead, often, of racial terrors, whether it came from a southern sheriff or a lynch mob. And they came to these northern cities in hopes the freedom they found there would provide safety and security, in addition to economic mobility. Too often, what they found, however, was that the police, by and large, were there to protect the interest of white residents.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: When I was researching black people moving into New York City in the 1930s, one of the things that surprised me was the number of complaints from white residents about black children playing on playgrounds with their white children, and they wanted the city administrators to use the police to keep those black kids off those playgrounds. This is the kind of pressure that police officers are not only getting, but they're responding to, they're doing this work.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: The white community treats every black person on their block, in their store, on their playground as a would-be suspect. Rhetoric around black criminality was the most elastic and most durable way of justifying segregation.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: Police behave differently essentially interrogating black people at every turn.
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POLICEMAN: Why didn’t you pull over and let her get out? And what did you do?
MAN: I pull around…[CROSSTALK] She live right here!
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: Setting up virtual checkpoints on the borders of these communities, doing hostile drives through black neighborhoods, as a show of force for black people to so-called stay in their place. They're policing the boundaries of black life.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Very often, African Americans in these central cities, the contact with the police––that was the only contact they had with the government. And that was a contact which was really very, very dangerous for them. Police brutality was a real thing.But on top of that, there was really no kind of procedure for grievance or for complaints. That, I think, is a perfect situation waiting for an explosion.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: So when you see legislation like the Law Enforcement Assistance Act coming out in 1965, it effectively pours gasoline on the very problem that is at the core of these uprisings in the first place.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: As rebellion escalates, we see a real merger happening between social welfare programs, programs specifically targeting black youth and police programs, crime control programs that are also targeting black youth. Police officers are running after-school recreation programs. Police started giving toys and delivering turkeys to families on Thanksgiving, and to essentially cast a layer of surveillance.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: It was about making sure that you could identify people in the black community who posed a potential threat to the neighboring white communities, taking down the names of potential delinquents.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: The police also supported tactical patrol units who walked the streets in order to prevent crime before it occurred. Essentially subjecting people of color to a set of laws that people in middle-class suburban and white communities would never be subjected to.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: They would actually stop people for bumping the tires against the curb when they're parking, spitting. Part of it is sending a message. It’s sending a message that we're in control. You're supposed to be afraid of us. And we can stop you for any reason.
DAVID BOESEL, COMMISSION STAFFER: They're out on the street all the time. There are these young people on the street. The police are trying to keep them moving, keep them off balance by all of these harassing tactics––stop and frisk, make arbitrary arrests and then they'd be released without charges. There's this constant conflict, constant daily, rubbing conflict, between police and young people in the streets.
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MAN: I have more fear for the police than I have for the criminal, because the policeman can do it and get away with it. I can fight the criminal back.
DAVID BOESEL, COMMISSION STAFFER: There often comes a conspicuous incident of police brutality, an outrageous act by police. In Detroit, it was a raid on an after-hours social club. People were partying to celebrate the return of one veteran from Vietnam and console another guy who was gonna head to Vietnam. In Newark, it was the beating of a cab driver.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: When residents observe what's happening they decide enough is enough. Time and time again somewhere in that story is this moment of exchange, this interaction between a white police officer and a black person.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: There was an endless cycle, a wave of urban violence followed by calls for law and order. Law and order would then express itself in a heavy-handed way. And this was often the spark behind the next wave of violence.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: When Detroit and Newark erupt in ‘67, two years into the War on Crime that should have been taken as a moment for policy makers to rethink these strategies. But policymakers responded by militarizing police, so that when and if rebellion comes police departments will be ready to suppress the disorder on their own.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: We begin to see local police getting armored tanks, getting M-1 and M-14 carbine rifles, using helicopters, all techniques and devices that had been used in Vietnam.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER:We very much were opposed to the military giving military hardware and vehicles to the police. We thought that the police ought to be civilians. They should look like and be a part of the communities where they served.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Lyndon Johnson himself once had said, "If I were one of these people and mistreated the way some of them are by the police, I might pick up a gun myself." Later on, I'm sure he was sorry he had said that. But that's the way we felt.
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MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: It is estimated that we spend 322,000 dollars for each enemy we kill in Vietnam, while we spend in the so-called War on Poverty in America only about 53 dollars for each person classified as poor.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: Absent the conflict in Southeast Asia, Lyndon Johnson would go down as an extraordinarily gifted leader. But Vietnam is the albatross that will always hang over Lyndon Johnson's legacy
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I report to you that our country is challenged, at home and abroad––that it is our will that is being tried and not our strength.
PROTESTORS: Hell no, we won’t go! Hell no, we won’t go!!
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: As he began to lose the hearts and minds of young people, of people on college campuses, as, as the war became a divisive factor in American life he was loathe to admit how deeply involved the United States was in Vietnam.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I wish––with all of my heart––that the expenditures that are necessary to build and to protect our power could all be devoted to the programs of peace.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: He remembered other Democratic presidents who saw their domestic policy ambitions cut short by wars that ultimately made it impossible for them to continue to pursue those goals. He didn't want that to happen to the Great Society.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: Johnson is also hoping desperately that the Kerner Commission will acknowledge that his Great Society is actually making a difference and improving the lives of black Americans across the country. But the Kerner Commission quickly becomes a runaway commission.
October 6, 1967
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KERNER: Certainly, in speaking to people, sociologists, who've been at this thing much longer than I have and who make it their specialty, have all pointed out the fact that there is a feeling of deep inferiority among these people. They've been rejected as to housing, as to job, and after job, as to improving the status of the job. And I do have a feeling myself––and again, I’m speaking personally––that the white community of the United States is not aware of the existence of this problem. I'm afraid many aren't. And many who are aware of it are not aware as to how deep and sensitive this is.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Johnson was getting all the time inside reports, some from some of the members of the commission itself, who thought that John Lindsay and I were going too far. And that we were going to recommend huge new federal programs and not put any money figures on ‘em. And that angered him a great deal, I was later to find out.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: That's when Lyndon Johnson becomes acutely aware of what a political bombshell this might represent. And as soon as the Kerner Commission becomes perceived as a potential threat to him politically, I think he wants to take the legs out from under it.
JOHN KOSKINEN, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: My assumption was this was a national crisis, this was the federal government. Money was not gonna be the problem.
JOHN KOSKINEN, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: My role on the commission was to be the assistant to Victor Palmieri, the deputy executive director, who was responsible for the day-to-day operations. In early December, we're invited to the White House to meet with Charlie Schultze, who was then the director of the Bureau of the Budget, who had the task of informing us that we were gonna have to close the commission down as quickly as we could. Victor and I, a couple weeks before Christmas, had to have a meeting with, by then, 200 members of our staff to advise them that most of them were not gonna be on the payroll after January 1st.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: David Ginsburg, for whom I worked, was the director. He tried very much to protect Johnson, even though he knew the truth, by saying that the commission's work was so important that we were going to get out a report months, months earlier in order to have our views before the American people, before the hot weather of the next summer. Well, that was baloney.
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REPORTER: Governor some of the ex-staff members of the commission are all over the Hill complaining to congressmen that the president or some of the White House people are torpedoing the work of the commission.
KERNER: Well, let me say, there is absolutely not an iota of truth in that.
LINDSAY: This March 1 deadline is a self-imposed deadline by the commission. And the reason the commission came to that conclusion was because of the urgency of the problem. But it's a very difficult timetable to live with because of the mountains of material that we're working with.
JOHN KOSKINEN, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: What we had to do was start drafting. We had eight or ten different people, some people working on the introduction, others working on various programmatic sections, and all of that had to be put into readable form within a matter of days.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: David Ginsburg and Vic Palmieri were primarily responsible for writing these drafts. And we discussed, and then actually voted, on each draft. All of us were people of very strong opinions, and so our meetings were quite contentious.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: The commissioners argued over the significance of social conditions in creating the uprisings, how forcefully to condemn the police, how strongly to support open housing. And as each of those is resolved, it sends the commission further down the path toward its ultimate conclusions.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: Probably the most significant chapter was the fourth chapter. That was drafted by David Ginsburg himself after sensing a consensus among the commissioners that the central theme of the report should be the impacts of white racism on black people. And that was the subject of a whole day's commissioner's meeting. I remember the commission spending well over an hour haggling over two sentences.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: I thought, and so did John Lindsay, that it was highly important to use the word "racism." To say "white racism." We thought we really needed to shock people by the use of that term. And to get people to have, make people have to think about that and talk about it, and size up history in terms of racism as it had existed from the first. We also wanted to say to young black people, particularly, you’re not crazy. There is systematic racism that you’re a victim of.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The word "racism" didn't sit well with some members of the commission Some thought it was too harsh, that we ought to use softer words like "intolerance" or "discrimination" or whatever. And we had a vote. It was a six-to-five vote within the commission in favor of saying "racism."
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REPORTER: Governor, are there any measures that won't cost any money?
KERNER: Yes. There are recommendations in there would not cost any money. And there are the measures that would do away with racism, we believe, by actually setting forth to the American people that there is this problem. Let's not sweep it under the rug. That there is segregation, that if we can change people's attitudes, this will not cost a penny.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: On a lot of tough questions, we voted six to five. But when we got down to the final report, we eventually adopted it unanimously.David Ginsburg said once that this is the only unanimous report that was adopted by a vote of six to five.There was a lot of compromise involved. We thought, if we can’t come together, there’s no hope the country can.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: Only if those who were most conservative on the commission endorsed the strong findings that we had made would it have an effect on white America in general. And the report was written for white America. Black people didn't need to be told that racism was a central problem in their lives.
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LINDSAY: I trust that the report will be thoroughly readable, and I expect that it will be completely honest. That being the case, it will describe undoubtedly a very serious condition in the country. And the commission's view undoubtedly will be that no one can turn their back on that, it's too serious.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: We had, well in advance, decided that we wanted to try to get this out popularly to as many people as possible. And David Ginsburg, our executive director, was very prescient about this. And so made arrangements with Bantam Press that as we finished one chapter, we would turn that over, so that they could get it out exactly when the report was finished.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The other thing we did was to put the report out with an embargo for the AMs on the morning of March 3rd. We wanted time to background the reporters, journalists, and opinion leaders. But Alan Spivak, our press secretary, got word from a Washington Post reporter that the Washington Post had a copy of the summary of the report and they intended to turn it loose for February 29.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: So David Ginsburg talked to Ben Bradlee of the Post, said to him, if you do this, we are going to turn loose the summary ourselves. So that you won’t have an exclusive on it.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: There was just chaos. Reporters here, they’re looking at all this and don’t have time to digest it. I got a call from an AP reporter who said, "I have a 30-minute deadline. Can you sort of capsulize the report for me?"
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The headlines were very shocking headlines, particularly if you had not thought about this before or known anything about it, as most people didn’t know much about it. The headlines were something like, "White Racism Cause of Black Riots, Commission Says."
March 3, 1968
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Good evening. This is Harry Reasoner. For the last few days, this country has lived under indictment, a charge of white racism, national in scale, terrible in its effects. The evidence to support that charge has now been presented, more than 1,400 pages of testimony, findings, conclusions, the full text of a report released just last night.
KERNER: This is our basic conclusion. Our nation is moving toward two societies. One black, one white. Separate and unequal.
LINDSAY: The commission found that the country is at a crossroads, and that a choice can be made and must be made.
JOHN KOSKINEN, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: You had to really be hibernating somewhere, not to see the media coverage in the press and on television. But if you wanted to know more in detail, the fact that you could go to a store and buy the paperback allowed a million and a half people within a month to have the actual report in their hand.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: We said that white racism has created these black ghettos, as we said in those days, and it's white racism that sustains it.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: This is shocking to the sensibilities in 1968. There had been large-scale studies that indicted American racism prior to this. W. E. B. Du Bois had done one, um, you know, nearly seventy years earlier. What we had not seen was this kind of argument being echoed in the highest echelons of American power.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: Nowhere in the report, do they exactly define what they mean. But it was very important to the commission that people in the United States understand that more was going on than that just some of us individuals didn't like black people. It was that the kind of change that was necessary involved the changing of whole institutions.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: You're looking at a report that's basically identifying a whole range of public and private actors who have been responsible for perpetuating racism, from the banks to the mortgage providers and the realtors, to public and private sector unions, to municipal police forces and municipal governments more broadly.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: This is the first time you had the government saying these problems are systemic. Certain people have benefited from the system, certain people have perpetuated the system, and other people have been disadvantaged. And to fix it, we are probably going to have to rebalance the books.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: Whites were saying things like, what's wrong with the Negro in the country, what's wrong with black people in the country? How do we fix them? What the Kerner Commission did was say, mmmmm it's not, the problem is not so much with them. The problem is with us.
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Here in the populous Central Ward, a Negro district, the special commission's report was greeted as an acknowledgement of what Negroes themselves have been saying in Newark for several years.
VESLA WEAVER, POLITICAL SCIENTIST: The Kerner Commission united the political and economic abandonment of a group of people with the cause of American democracy. They say this forthrightly. They say, our collective future is in peril.
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KERNER:To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and ultimately the destruction of basic democratic values. The alternative will require a commitment to national action–– compassionate, massive, and sustained––backed by the resources of the most powerful and richest nation on the earth. From every American, it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and above all, new will.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: The Kerner Commission comes down and says we don't have to be two Americas. We can't be two Americas. We can fix this, but first of all, we have to acknowledge it.
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HARRIS: What we've tried to do in this report is to let people see this thing through our eyes and to feel it in the pit of their stomachs like we do. And then if they see what a crisis this really is, what a terribly serious crisis this is for our country, I think there'll be a great deal more willingness to try to move to do something about it.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: We called for massive new federal programs, jobs in particular, but also in education and in housing and in transportation, and we called for changes in the media, and in police.
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An integrated police force is a must, says the commission, a visible symbol for the ghetto that the police are not just the agents of repression put there by the white majority. [TKR_2080}
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: The commission suggested all sorts of measures to promote police-community relations, to increase trust between residents and police, and to kind of scale back some of the more aggressive enforcement approaches that had led to the rebellions in the first place.
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REASONER: These are the major proposals. On welfare, a new approach, a form of guaranteed annual income based on the idea that even in good times, some people can't get jobs or can't make enough to support their families. On housing, a national Open Housing Law, 6 million new low and middle income units. On jobs, 2 million new jobs in government and private business. The cost has been estimated at $2 billion a month. Something like the cost of the war in Vietnam.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: The Kerner Commission recognized that the War on Poverty had not gone far enough, that what was needed was a massive structural transformation to address the underlying causes of the rebellions. The report in many ways is a really bold and exciting vision, uh, for what U.S. domestic policy could be.
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MAN: Buy your books on the Riot Commission! On the Riot Commission!
REPORTER: This is Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that's half black and half white. At PS 151, where the pupils are mostly Negro or Puerto Rican, the school's book fair was enlarged to include a table full of the paper bound reports. Sixth graders were not the best customers, but throughout the neighborhood in various ways, more than 2000 copies of the Riot Report were sold in less than a week.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: It was a New York Times bestseller. And it's a tome. It's not light reading, it's not a comic book, so there was interest.
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WOMAN: Bought it already.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: It really becomes a centerpiece of conversation. You see civic groups, churches, libraries, even police departments buying the book in bulk. At one point, Marlon Brando, who was then an A-list figure in Hollywood, made the rounds on talk shows, carrying a copy of the Kerner Commission Report with him.
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BRANDO: This report clearly indicates that the black people have not been able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps because of white feelings against them. And we all of us have to find out, what is that?
REASONER: What's going to be the answer to this report? What answer in the form of action in Washington? Here's Roger Mudd, who covers Congress. Roger, what's the impact down there?
MUDD: Harry, the report has not been accepted on Capitol Hill as gospel as it has been in most of the editorial reaction in the public prints. The mentality of Capitol Hill is not geared to instant reaction to broad programs, broad studies. It's geared to specific legislative proposals. As yet nothing has come from the White House but silence.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: When the report was issued, Johnson already had a good sense of what was in it. His reaction was the most negative of any president who ever received a report from a commission he'd created. He refused to accept a copy. He refused to thank the commissioners. He refused to hold what had already become a custom, receiving it from them and thanking them for it, maybe having everybody appear on the White House lawn.
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REPORTER: Mr. Lindsay, does it seem strange and peculiar that the president would not choose to comment on the findings of the commission that he himself appointed?
LINDSAY: Not necessarily at all. It’s a very large report, very comprehensive, and, uh, needs a lot of review.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: We didn't really think about whether Lyndon Johnson would like what we said or found or recommended. He said, "Find the truth and express it in your report." That's what we did. And we were really disappointed, surprised, that he rejected it.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Every time you appoint one of these committees you get more than you can do anything about. They recommended that I spend 80 million and I got no place to get the 80. I can't borrow it. I can't tax it. I can't get a tax bill of any kind, and they didn't discuss that. That's a detail they didn't get into.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Johnson was just in a mess. The Tet Offensive had happened in January of that year.
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CRONKITE: We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.
PROTESTORS: Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: There were increasing demonstrations all around the country and right outside the White House with people saying, "LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" His own popularity had sunk to 36 percent.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I've not wanted to reflect on Kerner and criticize the commission. At the same time, I couldn't embrace it because I got to have some fiscal solvency, and I can't have it unless I have a tax bill.
LINDSAY: We're not talking about something that is going to kill the country. Over a five year period, we put eighteen billion dollars into highways alone, another eighteen to twenty billion dollars into the space program. Now is this country going to say that it's impossible to correct the cancer that exists in the center of these, of these cities?
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: So it's bad enough that it's a presidential commission and it's Johnson's presidential commission, but it's also populated with leading white, liberal politicians who are effectively telling white America, you're responsible for the racism. You're responsible for the violence. You're responsible for what you see on TV. And this is in the lead up to the 1968 elections.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: Johnson was already conducting a fair amount of public polling. Richard Scammon, who was his pollster, looked at the electorate and came back to him and said, the median voter in 1968 is un-young, un-black, and un-poor. And it fundamentally created a political problem for Johnson.
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: The great irony of the Kerner Commission is that Johnson sets it up as a way of building support for his presidency. But in the end, it puts him in an impossible position. He can't accept the recommendations without alienating the conservative members of Congress. He also can't criticize it without alienating liberals. He can’t please anyone.
JOSHUA ZEITZ, WRITER: There was also a sense that he had run out of steam and run out of capital. He liked being president to do things and it was by no means clear that, were he able to eke out another term, he'd be able to expand on the Great Society or build bigger domestic policy programs. In all likelihood, he would've had to just continue what he was doing, which was managing an unruly nation at home and a war that seemed impossible to get out of abroad.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: I think Johnson sort of felt, increasingly, where are my allies? people are failing to appreciate that in fact I did do more for this country than many other presidents.
March 31, 1968
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: With American sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal, partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office. Accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
April 4, 1968
KENNEDY: Ladies and gentlemen, I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening because I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: So many Americans felt this sense of our last best hope for the prospects of nonviolence has been taken away from us. In the aftermath of King's assassination, when you see a replay of the kind of violence that had taken place in the summer of 1967, it feels as though the Kerner Commission’s prophecies are simply being fulfilled.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: At least a hundred cities erupted in the days and weeks after. Martin Luther King, the king of love, the king of nonviolence and peace, for him to get assassinated really made the entire future of black Americans seem as uncertain as ever.
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: The country is truly in flames. The U.S. military has to send thousands and thousands of troops to the capitol to protect Congress and the White House. You have angry and fearful members of Congress pleading with Johnson to issue, shoot-to-kill orders to the U.S. soldiers who are in Washington, D.C.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: We were all, all of us extremely depressed about the assassination that had just occurred, but I also felt, well, this is, of course, exactly what you expect. Right? And later that night, I went downtown, and as we turned off of 14th Street we were looking straight ahead at a tank coming toward us. And I remember thinking this just can't be the America that we live in.
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LINDSAY: Soon after the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders published its report last month, members of the commission received a telegram, which concluded with the following words, "My only hope now is that white America and our national government will heed your warnings and implement your recommendations. By ignoring them, we will sink inevitably into a nightmarish racial doomsday. God grant that your excellent report will educate the nation and lead to action before it is too late." The telegram was signed by Martin Luther King Jr. Now, just six weeks after that telegram was sent, it's too late to answer the martyred Dr. King.
WILKINS: It could be that out of this tragedy, as sorrowful as it has left most of us, would come a jolt, a kind of a realization that we cannot continue, again to quote the report, on the present course.
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: Liberals in Congress had been trying to pass the Fair Housing Act for years. But in the wake of the King assassination and in light of the report's recommendations there's new momentum. So if there's one significant piece of legislation that is the direct result of the Kerner Commission, it's the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: But those who know the Fair Housing Act of 1968 well, know that it is at best a toothless attempt to deal with the worst aspects of housing discrimination. It doesn't begin to address the fundamental things that are keeping blacks from being able to break out of what someone called an encircling noose, these white suburbs around black inner-city areas. It’s too little and too late.
DAVID CHAMBERS, COMMISSION EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT: When I ask myself what the commissioners thought would be the impact of the report and whether it would produce the kind of change that they were calling for, I suspect very few of them were naive enough to believe that "well, goodbye racism. We're gonna have a new world here." I think they just hoped it would be a small nudge in the right direction.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: The report did have its impacts here and there. For instance, the commission had critiqued the media saying they tended to look at these issues through the eyes of white men. And you did see news organizations diversifying their ranks. They did pledge to cover urban issues with more nuance, and more balance. But by and large the political and moral will that the report had hoped to summon, i- it doesn't really come to pass.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: Virtually all of my mail was really mean and hate mail. But a lot of people were kind of puzzled, sort of like my dad. The way he heard the Kerner Report was, "Mr. Harris, out of the goodness of your heart, you ought to pay more taxes to help poor black people who are rioting in Detroit." He said this to me, he said, the hell with that. I’m having a hard enough time myself. I’m already paying too much tax, and not getting anything for it. And that, that was true.
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REASONER: A new white backlash is plainly visible in the country. The lead story in today's Wall Street Journal is headed, "Ghetto violence brings hardening of attitudes toward Negro gains."
MICHAEL FLAMM, HISTORIAN: Law and order broadly defined becomes the most pressing, most powerful political issue for white voters in America by early 1968. urban unrest is the number one concern.
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The sale of firearms has doubled in the last year. The tension of Negro disillusionment is in the air. And so is white anxiety, with both sides fearing an incident that will escalate.
Why buy it? Because I want to be able to shoot through a car at somebody if they bomb my house. I'm going to be prepared. I got food, I got water. Right now, I got about 150 rounds of shells. My whole neighborhood's that way.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: Very little in history is inevitable. It's important to remember, because sometimes, in our more cynical states, we think nothing matters and it's all gonna be bad. And actually we don't know how it's gonna matter, but it matters.
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KENNEDY: I run because it is now unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies only by changing the men who are now making them.
KENNEDY: For the reality of recent events in Vietnam has been glossed over with illusions. Report of the Riot Commission has been largely ignored. The crisis in our cities and in our ghettos have all been met with too little, too late.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: I think Robert Kennedy really cared about the country. And increasingly to him that included marginalized people, including African Americans.
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KENNEDY: So my thanks to all of you and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there.
[CROWD] RFK! RFK! RFK! [gunshots, screams].
YOUNG MAN: What do I think about the future? There ain't no future. That's all there is to it. [Crosstalk] No future at all.
[REPORTER] Why don’t you think there’s a future?
MAN: Kennedy. They killed Kennedy, they killed King, they killed Evers. They killin’ all the people, all the people, yeah, that do somethin’ for the black man, that stood up for ‘em.
JOHN A. POWELL, LEGAL HISTORIAN: I have to believe, maybe 'cuz I wanna believe, that if, um, Kennedy had lived, uh, the Kerner Commission would've lived and the country would be in such a different place. But instead Nixon comes along and says, we're not doing this.
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PRESIDENT NIXON: For the past five years, we have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed, programs for the cities, programs for the poor, and we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence and failure across the land. I say it's time to quit pouring billions of dollars into programs that have failed in the United States of America.
STEVEN GILLON, HISTORIAN: Richard Nixon repeats all the things that the conservatives were saying about the Kerner Commission Report. That it seems to reward rioters, that there needs to be a greater emphasis on law and order. And that becomes the central theme of his, of his campaign in 1968, was law and order.
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[NIXON CAMPAIGN AD] Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.
DAVID C. CARTER, HISTORIAN: Richard Nixon will very skillfully tap into this sense of what about the non protestors? We've lost sight of the fact that many Americans still see America as a land of opportunity. Why all this focus on unhappy people demanding things and worse, burning things down to further their agenda. This is not the American way.
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: Lyndon Johnson had introduced a new punitive element in national policy. Of course, Johnson did this alongside his ambitious social welfare program. But when Richard Nixon took office, he abandoned the social welfare part and really seized on the punitive elements of the Great Society and expanded them.
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PRESIDENT NIXON: I, Richard Millhouse Nixon, do solemnly swear…
ELIZABETH HINTON, HISTORIAN: So we begin to see even more aggressive policing tactics being embraced by national policy makers. We begin to see more draconian laws and sentencing provisions being enacted. And the carceral state continued to expand.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The disturbances unfortunately had a short term effect, if you were going to demagogue about it and was very helpful to Nixon. And to other conservative politicians since then. We began to turn backwards on desegregation and on virtually everything else.
DAVID BOESEL, COMMISSION STAFFER: There was a long period of, social conservatism after the riots, prompted by the riots. They issued in a racially conservative political era in which law and order and repression pretty much prevailed, and that suited most of the white citizenry of the country.
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD, HISTORIAN: I've talked to a lot of people about this and heard, consistently heard, people my age, early fifties say, you know, I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. My parents always said, you can't go to Detroit. It's not safe. Which was just code word for saying black people live there. The ghetto was reinforced.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: The commission told the truth, but it was a harsh truth. The Secretary of Labor back then said, you can capsulize the commission’s report in the words of that great American philosopher, Pogo, who said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: My service on the Kerner Commission and the advocacy which followed it in a way kind of ruined me as a senator. Hubert Humphrey was vice president when I became a senator at age 33 and he said that compromise is the essence of the operations of a legislative body. He said, I don’t mean compromise on principle, but I mean on how we do it or how much we do this year. And I came to a time after the Kerner Report that I, I just … I couldn’t compromise. I knew that’s what we had been doing and that that had got us in the mess we’re in.
SENATOR FRED HARRIS, COMMISSION MEMBER: We had people around the Senate, even, who said, "Well, black people in America are much better off than they are anywhere else in the world," you know, in Zambia or somewhere. And the answer to that is, these are Americans. They're not in Africa. And they're not trying to tear down the system; they want to be a, a part of it. They're trying to get the country to do what it says it believes in, they're try– trying to make democracy work.
JELANI COBB, JOURNALIST: My first serious engagement with the Kerner Report was in 1992, in the aftermath of the Rodney King uprisings in Los Angeles. And you heard the word Kerner again and again and again. And it has remained this touchstone, you know, this vitally important document that unfortunately has retained its relevance over the span of history. The Kerner Commission did not deign to take the easy way out. They told the nation what exactly the problem was, even if it meant that no one was going to listen to them.
