The Kerner Commission Report

From 1998:

The Kerner Commission Report | The Heritage Foundation

"In August 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Kerner Commission, which was named after its chairman, Illinois governor Otto Kerner. Eight months later, in March 1968, the commission submitted a 426-page report that, interestingly, became a best seller with over 2 million copies sold. Looking back on the Kerner Commission, it resembles a Who's Who of liberal elites back then, including New York mayor John Lindsay, Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people, and Oklahoma populist senator Fred Harris.

The Kerner Commission is known best for its conclusion that the United States is moving toward two societies -- one black, one white; separate and unequal. The report looks into the causes of the many urban riots and concludes, "White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture that has been accumulating in our Cities since the end of World War II." The report also concludes that a massive redistribution of income had to take place to remedy this problem. It also suggests the addition of 1 million government-created jobs, the institution of a higher minimum wage, significantly increasing welfare benefits, spending more money on education and housing, and so on.

Three themes emerge from the Kerner Commission Report, which our panelists today are uniquely qualified to address. The first is the condition of race relations and the condition of racial minorities in the United States. The second is the success or failure of the social policies advocated by the commission and other liberals during those years. The third is alternatives to those policies that promised to improve the lives of our poorer citizens and revive our communities -- inner Cities especially...

In the quarter-century between the entry of the United States into World War II and the Voting rights Act of 1965, the position of black people in the United States radically improved more than in any other comparably brief period in U.S. history. The possible exception of this would be the Civil War and Reconstruction years. By the mid-1960s, the civil rights revolution in the United States had accomplished its original goal, the destruction of the legal foundations of the Jim Crow system. The 1964 Civil rights Act and its companion piece, the 1965 Voting rights Act, marked the end of that long road.

These measures applied nationally, but there were no serious barriers to black voting in any northern state; most northern states with significant black populations already had their own laws barring discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations.

Federal law might be enforced more vigorously, but solid majorities of northern whites believed discrimination was wrong and should be illegal. By 1965, a rapidly growing minority of southern whites was coming around to that view as well. Racism and discrimination had not disappeared from the land, obviously, but legal barriers to black advancement had been destroyed, and the remaining obstacles seemed impervious to attack through protest marches and non-violent resistance. That is what the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., meant when he said in early August 1965, "There is no more civil rights movement. President Johnson signed it out of existence when he signed the voting rights bill."

Obviously, the civil rights movement did not go out of existence. Instead, most civil rights leaders redefined their objectives and abandoned their long commitment to the principle that, as John F. Kennedy had put it, "Race has no place in American life and American law." Civil rights leaders began to argue that African-Americans had been denied their "fair share" of income, wealth, good jobs, political offices, and seats in institutions of higher learning, and that the only effective remedies were racially preferential policies. The riots that erupted across the land between 1965 and 1968 were part of the explanation for this transformation...

With so many Cities in flames, many Americans were persuaded that extraordinary measures were necessary to restore civic peace. The official analysis of these disturbances by the body President Johnson appointed to investigate them -- the Kerner Commission -- blamed them on persisting "white racism," and argued that riots would become a regular feature of urban life unless the federal government launched massive programs to ensure black progress. Both the diagnosis and the proposed remedies were highly dubious, but they established the liberal orthodoxy on racial issues for a generation. Even before the pervasive mood of panicked impatience created by the riots and reflected in the Kerner Report, liberal thinking about racial policy had taken a momentous turn. Two Johnson Administration documents that appeared months before the Watts riots -- the March 1965 Moynihan Report and President Johnson's Howard University speech the following June -- departed strikingly from the original civil rights vision.

The Moynihan Report, officially a Department of Labor report on "The Negro family: The Case for National Action," was prescient in identifying the disintegration of the black family as the chief source of the social problems afflicting African-Americans. It was savagely denounced for "blaming the victim," and its author was called a racist by many that should have known better. The assault had the tragic effect of deterring all public discussion of the black family until quite recently, despite steadily mounting evidence that the skyrocketing rate of out-of-wedlock births (now at a horrendous 70 percent) and the prevalence of female-headed households is closely linked to educational failure, crime, and other pathologies.

Despite all the furor over the alleged "conservatism" of the Moynihan Report, it started from radical premises that quickly were echoed by civil rights activists. The opening pages of the report rejected the traditional ideal of equal opportunity as the goal in favor of equality of results for racial and ethnic groups. Now that the "demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights" had been met, Moynihan wrote, the "expectations" of African-Americans inevitably and properly would move "beyond civil rights." "The evolution of American politics" had "added a profoundly significant new dimension" to the "traditional egalitarian ideal." This "new dimension" was the expectation of blacks that "in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups." Without "equality of results," there would be "no social peace in the United States for generations."

Although Moynihan had collaborated with Nathan Glaser in writing Beyond the Melting Pot, published only two years earlier, his report endorses a utopian aim that never could be fully realized in the ethnically complex society portrayed in that volume. Beyond the Melting Pot shows that the Irish, Italians, and Jews of New York all climbed out of poverty and made socioeconomic progress since their initial arrival, but certainly not that all three groups achieved "roughly equal results" in occupations, incomes, rates of college attendance, or any other measure of social status. And the blacks and Puerto Ricans of the city lagged far behind them, and were not on a trajectory that would bring them socioeconomic equality "in the near future."

Moynihan claims that achieving "equal results" is "what ethnic politics are all about in America, and in the main the Negro American demands are being put forth in this now traditional and established framework." (This, of course, is very difficult to reconcile with his insistence that a "profoundly significant new dimension" had been added to the American "egalitarian ideal." How could equal results for groups simultaneously be a part of both the "traditional and established framework" and a "profoundly significant" innovation?)...

President Johnson's June 1965 speech at Howard University built upon this line of argument...

The most powerful and oft-quoted passage in the Howard University speech is

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say "you are free to compete with all theothers," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

This was the central argument in favor of remedial racial preferences. As Shelby Steele has pointed out, it reeks of condescending paternalism. The black subjects of this sentence are passive and helpless, who can hardly walk, much less run, because of the chains whites had put them in. What whites had done, only other (more benevolent) whites could undo.

The ideas that equal outcome for groups, rather than equal opportunity for individuals, is the goal; that blacks are too crippled to compete on equal terms with whites; and that all social problems in the black community are the result of white racism past or present thus all received official sanction by Johnson Administration officials before Watts exploded in August 1965. Appearing three years later, the Kerner Report interpreted the riots as evidence of the truth of these assumptions.

This is not the place to criticize the work of the Kerner Commission in detail, a task Abigail and I take up in our recent volume, America in Black and White. Suffice it to say that the report does not satisfactorily answer the elementary question of why the riots occurred when and where they did. Because the commission took for granted that the riots were the fault of white racism, it would have been awkward to have had to confront the question of why liberal Detroit blew up while Birmingham and other southern cities -- where conditions for blacks were infinitely worse -- did not. Likewise, if the problem was white racism, why didn't the riots occur in the 1930s, when prevailing white racial attitudes were far more barbaric than they were in the 1960s?

Although its analysis is deeply flawed, the Kerner Commission was a great success -- if we measure success in terms of how many people have subsequently referred to it as if it had biblical authority. The commission was wildly mistaken in its claims that the socioeconomic condition of black America was deteriorating, and that the country was splitting into "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal." Even more mistaken have been the pessimists who continue to claim, despite superabundant evidence to the contrary, that "almost every problem defined by the Kerner Commission has become worse." To deny the dramatic progress in the status of African-Americans and in race relations that has been achieved in the past 30 years is perverse and dangerous...

1965. New York City had a black male unemployment rate of 4 percent. We were in the midst of the greatest economic boom in U.S. history. The city was thriving. Five years later, there were 600,000 more people on welfare. Now, this was a tragedy in many ways, especially for the city's African-Americans. They were on the up escalator of jobs and participation in the economy, but they were pulled off the up escalator and shunted off into welfare. The effect on the city was twofold: Fiscal calamity and family breakdown. It's fascinating that this policy was specifically chosen.

In "Broken Cities: Liberalism's Urban Legacy" in the March-April 1998 issue of Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship, Steven Hayward quotes an infamous New York City welfare commissioner whom The New York Daily News dubs "Come and Get It Ginsburg." The city actually was advertising for people to come on to welfare. What was the logic? It was the logic of the Kerner Commission Report. It was the sense that African-Americans were so damaged that what they needed was not help making it into society, but a respite from society; in effect, they should be pensioned off.

people sometimes argue that this welfare explosion was the price of good intentions. Nonsense. The theorists behind this movement are two people named Piven and Cloward, who are still alive. It's difficult to imagine how they get through the day knowing what they did, but they seem to do it. One's at Columbia University, and other is at City University of New York. Their logic is that, if you expanded the welfare role sufficiently, you would bankrupt the city, force a political crisis, and set people at each other's throats. The idea was that New York was at a median point, so if New York exploded like this, then the rest of the country would have to respond. Well, they succeeded in part. people were at each other's throats, and the city did go bankrupt.

You simply can't add that many people to welfare. This is difficult to imagine, but in1965, New York was not a particularly high-tax place. I don't mean that we were ever low. We taxed all sorts of things that no one else would think of taxing, such as moving vans. But we weren't off the charts. Five years later, however, we were off the charts, and the city's economy was heading straight downhill. That's one disaster, a disaster for which we really haven't fully recovered even today. people talk about the drop in welfare rolls under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It's true, but we are back only to 1989 levels.

The second disaster was the creation of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district...

New York's schools, like those in Washington, D.C., at the time, were integrationist in their ideology, and both were judged highly successful using a contemporary standard. That model was destroyed in the name of a kind of multiculturalism. And what happened at Ocean Hill-Brownsville was a conflict so intense, so vicious, so hostile, over black separatism in the schools that the people in the city were literally at each other's throats...

Jason Epstein went to McCoy to tell him that, at that point, the city had two choices, that is, it could restore the teachers to that school district either by "exterminating every black in New York City or by capitulating entirely." Now, neither of those things happened, fortunately, but neither did the schools ever recover. One of the great economic mechanisms of New York, and one of the great civic mechanisms for integrating people into the larger society -- integrating them into the economy -- was destroyed, and it has never been repaired. It's constantly reexamining itself and reshaping itself. It's like Soviet-era agriculture: It's constantly reforming itself, but never succeeding.

So, I would suggest that in New York we actually see the Kerner Commission played out on the ground. In the one case, welfare replaced work for low-income people who were ready to move up the job ladder. In another case, race became the central factor of the curriculum (and the only factor of curriculum in Ocean Hill-Brownsville)...

Martin Luther King constantly challenged conventional wisdom and the consensus of the majority... He said that the greatest stumbling block to black progress is not the White Citizens Council or the Ku Klux Klan, but the white moderates' acquiescence that lukewarm acceptance from those of good will is more difficult to tolerate than outright hostility of those who harbor ill will. He was talking about patronizing policies...

It is interesting that, when the civil rights movement emerged, racial discrimination was affecting all blacks in the same way. At that time, you could talk about the "black community" as a single entity. Once the Civil rights Act was passed, that situation changed. No longer did all blacks suffer equally; those who were equipped to take advantage of opportunities could advance. There was a rich tradition of economic development and self-sufficiency among free blacks even during slavery. It is interesting, however, that the advocates of civil rights had to abandon publications that discussed the strength of black communities in order for them to have civil rights laws applied to them. With these demands, we entered a "grievance period" in which we reported only on our shortcomings and our failings. This had devastating results on attitudes and goals. In addition, the civil rights movement was incubated in the same womb as the poverty movement. Therefore, the moral authority of one was extended to the other. Criticizing poverty programs meant being called a racist. It legitimized a victim mentality and undermined a spirit of self-help and personal responsibility.

As we conducted interviews among many older blacks who were active in the business arena, we found that 68 percent of those blacks who are second-generation college graduates were born into entrepreneurial households. These were the people that had nice houses, small businesses, and barber shops. These entrepreneurs tended to convey the importance of education to their children. Unfortunately, this entrepreneurial legacy was abandoned by black leaders in the 1940s and 1950s. As a consequence, there was a rapid decline in the entrepreneurial activity within the black community. Our history of success was lost, and we took on the role of victims to racism who were trapped in poverty. Personal incentive to escape the situation was dead.

If economic conditions and race were the sole predictors of outcomes in the black community, then why was it possible during the Great Depression that 82 percent of black families had both fathers and mothers raising their children? Current economic conditions are nothing in comparison with those of the Depression, during which time there was negative growth in gross national product with an overall unemployment rate of 25 percent for all Americans. This meant an unemployment rate of about 40 percent for blacks. This was also a time in which blacks had neither political representation nor judicial representation. Worst of all, they were being lynched every day. Despite these odds, they achieved and maintained strong family units. In 1863, when 1,000 blacks were fired from the docks of Baltimore, people did not march on Washington, D.C., demanding jobs, peace, and freedom. Instead, they established the Chesapeake Man Drydock and Railroad Company, which operated successfully for 18 years.

Revisionist history has been communicated to our young people. When I spoke to 200 black MBAs from the finest graduate schools in this country, I learned that not a single one knew anything of the rich entrepreneurial past of black Americans. Consequently, there has been an ascendance of a leadership class within the black community that is grievance-oriented. There are many middle-income blacks who have a proprietary interest in the grievances of the black community. The poverty industry has joined forces with the race-grievance industry, and together they suppress reform that could have the power to uplift those low-income people in the black communities.

In order for us to embrace an agenda that truly empowers people, we must stop this bait-and-switch game in which conditions of the poor are used to justify preferences for all blacks. When the remedies are designed on the basis of race alone, they primarily benefit those in the upper classes. The greatest income gap today is not between the white community and the black community; it is between low-income blacks and upper-income blacks. Sociologist Robert B. Hill conducted a study, "The Strength of African American Families," which reveals that, between 1970 and 1990, the number of black families with incomes between $35,000 and $75,000 grew 200 percent. Black families with incomes exceeding $75,000 increased 300 percent in number. Unfortunately, the number of black families with incomes below the poverty level also expanded 150 percent.

If we are to address the problems that low-income blacks face, we must move beyond race to embrace policies that change the rules of the game. It is not the sex or race of the ruler that determines who wins and who loses in the marketplace; it is the rules of the game. Those who are in the race- and poverty-grievance industries fail to explain or answer some troubling questions. For example, if racism is the primary cause of inequalities, then why are black children failing in systems run by their own people? Why is it that, in 15 separate categories of poverty expenditures, Washington, D.C., leads the country, spending about $9,000 per student in education, yet Washington, D.C., is dead last when it comes to the academic performance of its students? A Harvard study reveals that a black child born in Washington, D.C., today has a life expectancy 15 years lower than a child born just across the river in Virginia. The life expectancy of a black boy born in Washington, D.C., is exceeded by a child born in Haiti, a country with the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere. This is a time in which blacks are running the school system, the foster care systems, and the failing housing programs. Yet, at the same time, middle- and upper-income blacks living in Washington, D.C., are prospering. The ranks of that group have exploded. We have an unfortunate situation in which there are perverse incentives to maintain classes of people in poverty. Still, we are prevented from addressing this situation because, whenever criticism is valid, an issue is raised to prevent us from engaging in thoughtful debate and discussion.

The National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise focuses on remedies and recognizes that we must move to a different paradigm that goes beyond a Left and a Right. The Left believes that all you have to do is spend more money on affirmative action and poverty programs. We reject that notion. We also reject the strategies of some on the Right, however, that believe that all we must do is cut those programs"