Kerner @ 50 Looking Forward; Looking Back

Abstract

In March 1968, following a year of violent urban rebellions, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders concluded that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one Black, one White—separate and unequal.” With a team of researchers, the 11-member Kerner Commission, named for its chairman Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, had spent a year studying the causes of the “1967 riots” in 23 cities. Segregation and discrimination had long been part of American life, and the resulting poverty had created urban ghettos completely unknown to most Americans, the Kerner Report said. Though the commission’s work had been comprehensive in examining causes, it would lay blame for national ignorance at the feet of the news media for their unbalanced coverage and hiring practices. This article focuses on media reactions to the report’s publication, as well as media attention related to the present day 50^th anniversary of the its release to assess its historical impact as well as its relevance today and tomorrow in light of political, social and other shifts. Among the issues that arose in the original reporting was the stance that President Lyndon B. Johnson took toward the findings by the commission he had appointed.

Keywords:

• Kerner Commission
• Kerner Report
• 1967 riots
• media
• Lyndon B. Johnson

Notes

1 Members of the commission included Otto Kerner, chair, governor of Illinois; John V. Lindsay, mayor of New York City; Fred R. Harris, U.S. senator, Oklahoma; Edward W. Brooke, U.S. senator, Massachusetts; James C. Corman, U. S. representative, 22^nd District, California; William M. McCulloch, U. S. representative, 4^th District, Ohio; I. W. Abel, president, United Steelworkers of America; Charles B. Thornton, chairman and chief executive officer, Litton Industries, Inc.; Roy Wilkins, executive director, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Katherine Graham Peden, commissioner of commerce, Kentucky; and Herbert Jenkins, chief of police, Atlanta, Georgia.

2 Rebellions were of several kinds, with the largest being antiwar and racial justice movements, the latter including protests in poverty-ridden inner cities and the formation of race-based resistance groups like the Young Lords and Black Panthers.

3 The Black leaders cited in this passage include Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist and key adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; H. Rap Brown, aka Jamil Abdullah Al-Ami, chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee from 1967 to 1968; and James Farmer, co-founder and chairman of the Congress for Racial Equality, who helped to launch the Freedom Rides in 1961.