Jelani Cobb on the Kerner Report, an Unheeded Warning about the Consequences of Racism

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

In 1967, in the wake of a violent uprising in Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson assembled the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate what had happened. This seemed futile: another panel to investigate yet another uprising. “A lot of people felt that way—‘We don’t need more studies, nothing’s going to come out of that commission,’ ” Fred Harris, a former senator from Oklahoma and the commission’s last surviving member, tells Jelani Cobb. But the conclusions were not typical at all. In the final analysis, known as the Kerner Report, the commission named white racism—no euphemisms—as the root cause of unrest in the United States, and said that the country was “moving toward two societies, one Black, one White—separate and unequal.” The report called for sweeping changes and investments in jobs, housing, policing, and more; the recommendations went so far beyond Johnson’s anti-poverty programs of the nineteen-sixties that the President shelved the report and refused to meet with his own commission. The Kerner Report, Cobb says, was “an unheeded warning,” as America still struggles today to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism. Jelani Cobb co-edited and wrote the introduction to “The Essential Kerner Commission Report,” which was published this year.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:12.1	So, Senator Harris, Mr. Harris, what would you prefer that I call you?
0:18.0	Either way, it's whatever, Senator Harris, I suppose.
0:21.8	But a former senator asked me after I started teaching at the university, what do you
0:25.2	students call you?
0:26.3	And I said, what do you mean?
0:27.5	They call you professor or senator.
0:30.5	And I had to think a minute.
0:31.8	I said, most of them called me Fred.
0:36.1	Fred Harris is a former senator from Oklahoma, a two-time presidential candidate and a professor
0:41.7	of political science. He's 90 this year, and he's the last surviving member of the National
0:47.3	Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Lyndon Johnson had assembled the commission to look into
0:53.2	the causes of an uprising in Detroit in 1967.
0:57.0	Offices, banks, schools, businesses, industry were closed down. The heart of Detroit was deserted.
1:06.0	Deliveries were curtailed, food ran short. All normal activities in the nation's fifth largest city were at a standstill.
1:13.8	The commission's findings were stark. In a document known as the Kerner Report, they said that
1:19.4	America was moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. This was not at all
1:27.2	what President Johnson wanted to hear,
1:29.1	and he refused to meet with his own commission to discuss the report.
1:34.3	A concise version has been republished and edited with an introduction by staff writer Jelani Cobb.
1:43.4	The original kernel report was huge.
1:46.2	It ran more than 700 pages.
	...

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