#kerner commission

[arinzeture]

The Kerner Report!

[petervintonjr]

"Everybody always says, 'Why doesn't the Black press do this [or that?],' but nobody ever says, 'Why don't I?'"

In parallel to the previous lesson, for this entry we celebrate the life of Nancy Hicks Maynard: the first Black woman journalist to be hired by The New York Times.

Born in 1946 Harlem, Nancy Alene Hall grew up only too well aware of the popular media depictions of her hometown; her own elementary school burned down, further cementing this neighborhood stereotype. Believing that the press could --and should-- do better than to reinforce the misinterpretations, she graduated cum laude from Long Island University with a degree in journalism. In 1966 she took a (menial) job at the New York Post, but two years later an opportunity presented itself at the Times, and she took the chance. Within months she was covering such stories as the student protests/takeovers at Columbia and at Cornell, the state of healthcare in the U.S. and a deconstruction of Medicaid, as well as Chinese-American relations and the funeral of Robert Kennedy, Sr.

In 1965 she had married Daniel Hicks, with whom she had a son, but Hicks died in 1974. She remarried Washington Post reporter Robert Maynard in 1975, and together they founded the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education (MIJE), a nonprofit committed to training minority journalists. (The MIJE's work has been touched upon, in a number of recent preceding lessons --one of its directors was Earl Caldwell; later in 2002 Nancy's own stepdaughter --Robert's daughter from a previous marriage-- Dori J. Maynard would also serve as its director.)

In 1978 Nancy taught journalism at the University of Michigan, but would also frequently appear as a guest commentator or panelist on Oakland's own KTVU-TV. She was also named co-director of the Media Studies Center at Freedom Forum (originally a Columbia University journalism project). In 1983 the Maynards took a gamble on acquiring the then-struggling Oakland Tribune from its parent company, Gannett. They co-owned the newspaper until Robert's death in 1993. During this time period Nancy secured a law degree from Stanford, and also published Mega Media: How Market Forces Are Transforming News.

To this day the Tribune holds the distinction of ever being the only Black-owned major metropolitan daily. After retirement Nancy continued to advocate for greater diversity in the newsroom. She died in Los Angeles in 2008.

[porterdavis]

You break it, you own it

White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. 

— The Kerner Commission, March 1, 1968 

http://nyti.ms/2FHpM6A

[thevitalportal]

The Bombshell Political Report So Shocking a U.S. President Tried to Pretend It Didn't Exist | American Experience | PBS

LBJ tried to torpedo the official Kerner Commission record. Instead it became a bestseller.

This os a follow up post.

[uboat53]

This article is wild and you should absolutely read it.

TL;DR: A US commission studied civil unrest in the 60s and determined that it was primarily driven by white racism. They recommended increasing funding toward fostering equality between blacks and whites. Instead, the government militarized police forces.

Riotsville, U.S.A. is a window onto the bizarre beginnings of police militarization

How the director of an astonishing new documentary used old government footage to shed light on the present.

[shrinkrants]

The historian Elizabeth Hinton recently argued in The New York Times that the seeds of mass incarceration were planted in the 1960s and ’70s in response to the period’s racial uprisings and unrest. The US president Lyndon Johnson convened the Kerner Commission in 1967 to find a solution to the national security problem that the ‘race riots’ represented in the context of Cold War competition over hearts, minds and social structures. The commission answered with a strategy rooted in collaborative security: US political and economic institutions should commit resources ‘sufficient to make a dramatic, visible impact on life in the urban Negro ghetto’. Instead, Johnson signed the first piece of national crime-control legislation into law, and massively invested in the groundwork for a federalised system of surveillance and police militarisation. Over the coming decades and administrations, this would congeal into a massive system of caging and police violence, securing the political aspirations of elites such as Johnson at the expense of the US racial underclass.

https://aeon.co/essays/on-liberty-security-and-our-system-of-racial-capitalism

[morphiccompendium]

The History of the “Riot” Report

How government commissions became alibis for inaction.

[annoyinglydarkflower]

What A 1968 Report Tells Us About The Persistence Of Racial Inequality

Despite political and social progress, African Americans still lag far behind economically.

In summer of 1967, African Americans protested, marched, and rioted in cities across the country. The unrest convinced President Lyndon Johnson to set up the Kerner Commission, which spent about six months doing research, visiting slums, and holding hearings. In 1968, they published a provocative report that civil rights leader Jesse Jackson recently called "the last attempt to address honestly and seriously the structural inequalities that plague African Americans."

"Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans," the Kerner report said. "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."

Fifty years later, Americans are taking to the streets again, protesting systemic inequities that haven't gone away. How much has really changed?