Kerner Commission

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member Presidential Commission established in July 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson in Executive Order 11365 to investigate the causes of over 150 race riots throughout the United States in the summer of 1967. The Commission sought to provide recommendations that would prevent the riots from reoccurring. The 426-page Kerner Report concluded that the direct cause of the riots was rooted in the social consequences of white racism, such as disparities in housing, employment, education and policing. However, the Johnson administration did not directly address the report's recommendations, as they were perceived to be unpopular with conservatives.

The report was released in 1968 after seven months of investigation. Rather than attributing the rioting to a small group of outsiders or trouble-makers ("riffraff") as many prior riot investigations had done or to radicals or a foreign conspiracy as almost three-fourths of white America believed, the Commission concluded that the rioting was a response to decades of "pervasive discrimination and segregation." Said the Commission, "White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II . . . What white Americans have never fully understood--but what the Black can never forget, is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

The Commission's 426-page report is regarded as "the touchstone for race relations" and as "one of the two seminal works" on race in this country. It was also a bestseller, outselling even the Warren Report which dealt with President Kennedy's assassination.

President Johnson appointed the Commission on July 28, 1967, while rioting was still underway in Detroit. There had been mounting civil unrest in a few predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods since 1965, but what happened in 1967 shocked and terrified much of America as the evening news seemed to regularly show National Guardsmen and police crouching behind parked cars, tanks rumbling down dark streets, towering fires, and blocks and blocks of rubble and broken windows.

In his remarks upon signing the order to establish the Commission, Johnson asked for answers to three basic questions about the riots: "What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?"

David Ginsburg was selected by President Johnson to serve as the Commission's executive director within two days of the Commission's official creation. Victor Palmieri was then hired by Ginsburg several weeks later to serve as the Commission's deputy executive director. A staff of approximately 200 was quickly hired and an elaborate, multi-faceted strategy for investigating the rioting, determining who had rioted and why, and for developing recommendations was developed. This methodology featured examining the characteristics of 13,000 people who had been arrested for rioting, sending six-member field teams to over twenty cities, interviewing state and local law enforcement personnel, using FBI reports, studying census bureau data, and talking to and conducting public opinion polling of riot area residents.

The Commission was also aided by the work of the National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas, which was appointed by President Johnson and by an advisory panel on private enterprise that the Commission itself created. The insurance committee, which became known as the Hughes Panel after its chairman, New Jersey governor Richard Hughes, was created because of the concern that insurance companies, which had already begun abandoning minority areas in the years before 1967, would only accelerate this trend now that massive property damage had occurred in cities like Newark and Detroit. This committee's recommendations were summarized and included as Chapter 14 in the Kerner Report. The Commission's private enterprise panel was created to identify what incentives might encourage businesses to hire low-income workers or expand or relocate to low-income/minority areas. Its recommendations were included in the "employment" subsection of Chapter 17 in the Kerner Report.

The Commission's final work, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders or Kerner Report, was issued on February 29, 1968. The Report became an instant bestseller, and more than two million Americans bought copies of the 426-page document. Its primary finding was that the riots resulted from Black frustration at the lack of economic opportunity and the manner in which they were treated by white society, especially by the police. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced the report a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life."