In 1968, a commission identified white racism as the main cause of civil unrest. More than 50 years later, we're still wrestling with this finding.
The Kerner Report, as it came to be known, was an accident, and no person with any influence over American affairs has wanted to remind you it exists. President Lyndon Johnson appointed the bipartisan commission of nine white people and two Black people—one of whom, Edward Brooke, was a moderate Republican senator from Massachusetts—to examine the causes of the 1967 unrest that left 83 people dead, mostly Black civilians in Newark and Detroit, in Black urban neighborhoods that had been ravaged by indiscriminate shooting from panicky National Guardsmen and police after widespread rioting. The commission was directed to answer three basic questions: What happened, why did it happen, and what could be done to prevent it from happening again?
The report came to what it called a basic conclusion: "Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." These words were carefully chosen, 14 years after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the "separate but equal" doctrine was unconstitutional.
It went even further by doing the almost unthinkable. It blamed white society for the conditions in the mostly Black urban ghettos. Its most famous line, front and center in that first page, was as follows: "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."
