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On the evening of July 27, 1967, my wife and I were gathered with a couple of friends in front of a television in our living room, waiting for President Lyndon Johnson’s nationwide broadcast during which he was expected to announce the appointment of a blue-ribbon citizens commission— what became the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (called the Kerner Commission after its dedicated chairman, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois). The presidential broadcast was announced in the wake of the riots and violent protests that had exploded in the black sections of many of America’s cities during the “long, hot summer of 1967”—with great loss of life, awful human injury, and enormous property destruction— which caused great shock, fear, alarm, bewilderment, and anxiety throughout the country. The worst of them, in Newark and Detroit, were not quelled until President Johnson dispatched U.S. Army troops.
On that night in July 1967, as we were gathered around the television, my youngest daughter, Laura—who was in second grade at the time—came running in from the kitchen not more than ten minutes before the President was supposed to come on the screen. She said, “Daddy, President Johnson is on the phone for you.” That caused a little stir in the living room. I went into the kitchen, and, standing at attention, picked the phone and said, “Yes sir, Mr. President!” He said, “Fred, I hope you’re going to watch the television tonight.” I said I was. He said, “I’m going to appoint that commission you’ve been talking about.”
I was a United States Senator at the time, and just three days earlier, at the height of the Detroit riots, I introduced a resolution in the Senate to create a blue-ribbon citizens commission to look into the riots—not just from a law and order standpoint, but also to get at fundamental causes and to come up with recommendations “to make good the promise of America for all Americans immediately.” I had the resolution sent to the subcommittee I chaired, and I held hearings on it the very next morning, my witnesses being Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not then a senator, and Whitney Young, head of the Urban League. But it dawned on me that we didn’t have to wait for Congressional action, that President Johnson could himself name the commission by executive order. I called Douglas Cater, of the White House Staff, and urged such presidential action, following up the call, as Cater asked, with a hand-delivered formal letter to the President.
Three days later, and I was in my kitchen, hearing President Johnson say through the phone, “I’m going to appoint that commission you’ve been talking about.”
said I was glad to hear it.
He said, “I’m going to put you on it.”
I said I didn’t expect that but I’d do my best. He said—all this is word for word— “Now, don’t you be like some of your colleagues, I appoint them to things, and they don’t show up.”
I said I’d show up.
“And another thing, Fred,” President Johnson said.
I said, “Yes sir, Mr. President!”
He said, “I want you to remember that you’re a Johnson man.”
I said, “Yes sir, I am a Johnson man.”
Sadly, by the time our report came out, the President thought I had forgotten I was a Johnson man.
Only July 29, 1967, the eleven members of the commission were called together by telegram. We met in the White House cabinet room with President Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Budget Director Charles Shultze, and Cyrus Vance, the man Johnson had put in charge of the U.S. Army troops which he’d sent to Newark and Detroit.
After calling on Vance to give us an up-to-date report on the situation in Detroit, the President gave us our marching orders. He charged us—the Kerner Commission—to investigate the riots and recommend action, again, not only from a law and order standpoint, but also in regard to their deeper causes.
“Let your search be free,” the President told the commission members. “Find the truth and express it in your report.”
And that is exactly what the commission famously did, which, as it turned out, not only shocked the conscience of the nation, but greatly upset President Johnson, as well.
A highly competent and caring Washington attorney, David Ginsburg, was named as the commission’s executive director. He rapidly hired an outstanding staff, including Vic Palmieri and John Koskinen, as well as Mayor John Lindsay’s chief of staff, Jay Kriegle, all of whom it was my great honor to work with. And the Commission set to work. In the Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, we held 20 days of hearings—from August to December 1967—with 130 witnesses, ranging from civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Contracts were let for serious academic and other studies. Staff members and consultants began to conduct field surveys in 23 cities, including more than 1200 interviews, attitude and opinion surveys, and other serious studies of conditions and causes.
Commission members broke into teams for site visits to riot cities—and personally observed there, close up, the human cost of wretched poverty and harsh racism. I teamed up with John Lindsay, the Mayor of New York City at the time. Mayor Lindsay and I went to Cincinnati for a closed—no press—meeting with a well-educated and successful group of young male and female black militants. When we arrived, we found that none of these young men and women wanted to be there. None would even shake hands with us. One young man expressed the view of all of them when he said he couldn’t stand to look at white people any more. One way or another, all of them said they didn’t trust white politicians, like us, to do anything about racism and poverty.
As a mayor and as a senator, respectively, John Lindsay and I already were aware that such alienation and hostility existed. Still, however, this experience affected us greatly.
With a local anti-poverty worker, Lindsay and I walked the streets of Cincinnati where the riot and disorders had occurred. We came upon a group of young black men, idling on a street corner.
They instantly gathered around us. “Who are you? FBI?” one asked. We told them who we were and what we were doing there. They all began to say, in a chorus, “Get us a job, baby!” “We need jobs, baby!”
One young man said, “Mr. Johnson got me a job last summer, but it ran out,” in reference to the President’s summer work program.
For John Lindsay and me, as well as for the rest of the commission, “jobs” was to become a central theme in our findings and recommendations.
Mayor Lindsay and I went to Milwaukee next. I spent the better part of a morning in a black barbershop, talking with young black men as they came in. Most were from the South, having come to Milwaukee looking for work, just as local jobs were disappearing or being moved away. I asked some of the men who had just moved whether they faced more racial discrimination in Milwaukee or in Birmingham, or wherever it was in the South that they’d come from. The question puzzled them. They didn’t know how to answer because in Milwaukee, they didn’t see any white people. That was how rigid the local segregation was in that Northern city.
Mayor Lindsay and I—and the other commission members—came back from these site visits, sobered and somewhat shaken. The commission then began 44 days of meetings—from December 1967 until nearly the end of February 1968—to actually write the Kerner Report, every word of which was read aloud, then discussed and revised, before being approved by majority vote of commission members.
In our report, we condemned violence and lawlessness in the strongest terms, saying that they “nourish repression, not justice.” Our basic and most famous finding was: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The report stated further: “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” and added, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
Great and sustained national efforts were required, we said, not only to combat racism, but also to greatly expand social programs, including those against unemployment and low wages, poverty, inferior or inadequate education and training, lack of health care, and bad or non-existent housing. The report also made strong recommendations for improving the conduct of the media and the police, and for needed integration of housing and schools. These recommendations applied to all Americans, “rural and urban, white, black, Spanish-surnamed, and American Indians.”
But, misinformed about its contents and distracted by the Vietnam War, President Johnson rejected the Kerner Report (and this is particularly sad because President Johnson did more against poverty and racism than any other president, before or since). Luckily our staff had made an early deal with Bantam Books to publish the whole report on its issuance date, March 1, 1968—so, there was no possibility that it could be suppressed or filed away unread, no matter what. In any event, the report was leaked to the press—before the Commission could, as planned, background reporters so that they would fully understand the reasons for the commission’s findings and recommendations.
This leak resulted in hastily written news stories which appeared throughout the country the next morning and which carried shocking headlines, something like: “White Racism Cause of Black Riots, Commission Says.” Many people never learned “the rest of the story.” Not surprisingly, there was considerable backlash in the country.
Still, many American leaders spoke out in favor of the Kerner Report, including Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Senator Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called it, “A physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” And despite the opposition, America made progress on virtually every aspect of race and poverty for almost a decade after the Kerner Report. The number of African American and Latino elected officials increased, as did their numbers in the middle class and in all aspects of American life. We elected an AfricanAmerican President.
But with jobs alarmingly disappearing through globalization and automation, with conservative political change and, eventually, with unfriendly U.S. Supreme Court decisions as well as congressional cuts in both taxes for the rich and the big corporations and in programs that benefitted poor and middle class Americans, progress was slowed or stopped, and, finally reversed. Some improvement occurred, of course, during each of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, but regression has been the trend since the mid-1970s—and that is true today.
There is still far too much excessive force by police, too often deadly force, especially against African Americans. White supremacists have become bolder and more violent. Housing and schools have been rapidly resegregating, locking too many African Americans and Latinos into slums and their children into inferior schools.
As the nation has grown, our overall poverty rate has stubbornly remained virtually the same, while the total number of poor people has increased from a little over 25 million to a little over 40 million (as of 2016). Ever since the 1970s, the AfricanAmerican unemployment rate has continued to be about double that for whites. Latino unemployment continues to be high as well. Labor union membership has shrunk from about 25 percent of private jobs to about 6 percent. Inequality of income in our country has greatly worsened.
In the 1970s, the richest 1 percent of Americans took home something less than 9 percent of total national income; by 2016, they took home 24 percent. Fifty-two percent of all new income in America has gone to the top 1 percent. Rich people are healthier and live longer. What’s fair about that? They get a better education, too, and a better education produces greater inequality of income. Then, that greater economic power translates into greater political power.
So, where do we go from here?
We know what needs to be done, and we know what works. A more progressive tax system, making rich people and big corporations pay their fair share. Stopping tax and spending subsidies that redistribute wealth and income in the wrong direction. Strengthening unions and eliminating the legal and other barriers which impedes the right of workers to organize. Raising the minimum wage to a living wage, which would be a giant boost to the economy and bump up middle class wages, too. We need more affordable housing, and housing and schools integrated by income and race. We also need re-regulation of big banks and big finance. Better incomes for those who can’t work and who can’t find work. A sound, free public education for all—from early childhood through college. Education and training, with special attention to those put out of work by circumstances beyond their control. Health care for all. The basic American principles of equal rights and equal opportunity for all—whatever a person’s social standing, zip code, religion, gender, or color. Investment in infrastructure, in science, in alternative energy and in technology. Investment in ourselves.
How can we get these things done when present times are so politically tough?
First, we can take heart from the fact that the great civil rights movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis and others, began in a terrible and depressing time of Jim Crow, rigid segregation and harshest racism. The odds were overwhelmingly against them, but still they courageously resisted, persisted and ultimately prevailed.
We can take heart, too, from the fact that the polls show that the majority of Americans support the measures we must now adopt and the steps we must now take.
We can take heart from the fact that we live in a time of unprecedented, growing and powerful people’s activism—with great new efforts and organizations, like the Women’s March, Indivisible, and Black Lives Matter.
Finally, the Reverend William Barber of North Carolina, founder of the rapidly spreading Moral Mondays movement and a new Poor People’s Campaign, is right when he says, “We can’t keep fighting in our silos. No more separating issues—labor over here, voting rights over there. The same people fighting one should have to fight all of us together.” Reverend Barber is pointing the way we must go, showing that white, black, Latino and other Americans can join hands in coalition with each other and with women, millennials, seniors, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and others to work for their common interests—because, as I like to repeat, “Everybody does better when everybody does better!”
Fred Harris is a former U.S. Senator from Oklahoma who was appointed by President Johnson to serve on the Kerner Commission. This article is an abridged version of the remarks delivered at the Kerner @ 50 conference.
