White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it.” - Kerner Commission Report, 1968įifty years ago today, the public assassination of Dr. ![]() What white Americans have never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget - is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. A bystander who witnessed the arrest told several civil rights leaders in the city that Smith had been assaulted by the police. On July 12, 1967, police officers in Newark, N.J., arrested a black cab driver named Sam Smith for tailgating and allegedly driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Paul, Minn., Baton Rouge, La., and Chicago in recent years. A closer look at both the Kerner commission's findings and the ensuing fallout uncovers the tangled roots of protests in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, St. Still others point out an important insight into the nature of police brutality - that poverty and segregation can foster police violence. Some historians see the commission as a missed opportunity to broach a national conversation on the role of police in black communities. While the black community pushed for police reform alongside socioeconomic improvement, the federal government responded by equipping police with new tools to control violent expressions of civil unrest. In the wake of the violence, two seperate and opposing movements formed. What’s more, the violence provided the support lawmakers needed to shift from the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, which funneled millions of dollars of federal resources to local police departments and undermined local efforts to address the racialized policing practices that had set entire cities on fire. Crime was rising in many cities, but the commission urged the federal government to invest heavily in programs aimed at improving the lives of the cities’ black populations. The president, still expected to run for re-election later that year, was driven by the fear that white voters would not sympathize with the commission’s findings. ![]() Today, 50 years later, the commission’s findings, that “the nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white - separate and unequal,” still ring true.īut just as the report laid bare the inequality experienced by black Americans in urban areas and attempted to paint police brutality as a main cause of the uprisings, the Johnson administration doubled down on a law-and-order agenda. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders - more commonly known as the Kerner commission after its chairman, Illinois Gov. ![]() Johnson responded by organizing a commission, comprised of lawmakers and law enforcement officials from around the country, to understand what caused the violence that left scores of people dead and caused millions of dollars in damages. News networks broadcast the unrest around the country, and as the cities burned, many Americans watched in shock and horror. During the summer of 1967, more than 150 cities erupted into violence, fueled by pent-up resentments in the cities’ black communities over police brutality and other forms of racial injustice.
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