The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race by Carl C. Anthony

Author:Carl C. Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781613320228
Publisher: New Village Press
Published: 2017-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

The Kerner Commission Report

Civil unrest was rampant in American cities during the late 1960s when I was completing my architecture studies at Columbia University. Several short-lived uprisings occurred in Harlem; Rochester, New York; Elizabeth, New Jersey; Chicago; and Philadelphia during 1964, but a six-day insurrection in August of 1965 in Watts, an impoverished, black neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, caught the nation’s attention. It was followed by outbreaks in Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha, Tampa, and Buffalo, culminating in a two-week uprising in the summer of 1967, first in Newark and then in Detroit. The intensity of these insurgencies moved President Lyndon Johnson to action.

President Johnson appointed an eleven-man National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the cause of the civil unrest. He requested Otto Kerner Jr., the former governor of Illinois, to head it. The Kerner Commission, as the commission became known, published a report that became available in paperback all over the country in 1968. The commission concluded that the nation was moving toward two societies: one black and one white—separate and unequal. The white part was suburban and thriving while the black part, in the inner city, was in decline. Unless conditions were remedied, the commission warned, the country faced a system of apartheid in its major cities.

To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values. The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society. . . . 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. (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968, 1)

The Kerner Commission report identified unjust policies that isolated African Americans and prevented their educational and economic advancement. It called for legislation and policy reforms to promote racial integration and enrich the ghetto—making resources available for jobs, job training, improved public schools, and decent housing.

We believe that the only possible choice for America is. . . a policy which combines ghetto enrichment with programs designed to encourage integration of substantial numbers of Negroes into the society outside the ghetto. . . . The primary goal must be a single society, in which every citizen will be free to live and work according to his capabilities and desires, not his color. (Ibid., 19–20)

Unfortunately, none of the Kerner Commission’s recommendations were implemented—neither on the national nor the local level.5 Not surprisingly, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April of 1968, insurrections broke out in many cities, including the student takeover of the president’s office at Columbia when I was an architecture student there. The fact that the recommendations had not been taken up lingered and festered within me. Many white people thought the “Negro problem” had been eliminated by civil rights legislation, but that was neither my view nor one widely shared among black people.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.