“Can you hear me? … I’m Screaming from way down here below!” – Hugh Masekela
I. INTRODUCTION
“Chief Blame for Riots Put on White Racism,” read the first first published headline 50 years ago today about the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and suggests why the story was largely the result of a leak and the study itself largely ignored by the man who initially called it into being. Despite being his desire less than a year earlier, first looks at the commission’s publication had president Lyndon Baines Johnson shook to his political core and had he had his way the report would have never been seen or heard from at all.
Commonly known by its eponym, the Kerner Commission or Kerner Report or simply Kerner, named after appointed head Otto Kerner Governor of Illinois, it said mostly all the president had not wanted it to. Its conclusions, in fact, would likely not be welcomed by any president, even the most popular, before or since. First, the report condemned the country’s history of structural racism and economic inequality. Secondly, called into being to assess the origins of Black anger and “riots,” the report concluded that there would likely be more unrest, in part due to embedded public policy, concepts of anti-Black policing and a media/press environment which had locked out honest discussion of Black life. And thirdly, perhaps most damning of all, the report argued that the liberal social programs, like the Great Society variety proposed by Johnson, would be insufficient in addressing problems which themselves spoke to the very nature of the state itself.
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