Blacks were integrating into white society quite nicely into the 1960's. It was LBJ's "Great Society" programs that set them back.On July 28, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. The more common name for this is The Kerner Commission. . The Kerner Commission report was perhaps the most definitive government study done on race in the history of this nation.
The Kerner Commission was created to find out why the racial unrest happened. Instead of blaming blacks for being angry about how they were treated and inventing terms like victim mentality, the commission took a long hard look at American societal issues. The bottom line is that the Kerner Commission determined in 1968 what blacks already knew and what whites refused to hear. This quote from Nathaniel Jones, Assistant General Counsel for the Commission says it all, “One of the conclusions of the Kerner Report was that white racism was at work, was the cause of the upsets and the uprisings that we had. In fact, the report stated that white society created it, perpetuates it, and sustains it.”
In other words, “The root cause of the problems blacks face is white racism.” That conclusion made it possible for much of white America to ignore the findings. Once whites felt as if they were to blame for the conditions of black people in America, they resisted the conclusions of this study. President Johnson called for the research but never implemented the suggested actions. He wasted government money by increasing spending on the Vietnam war and claimed he did not have the funds to implement the types of programs proposed in the report.
As a result of this study, the commission identified 12 grievances in all the communities they visited: “1. Police practices. 2. Unemployment and underemployment. 3. Inadequate housing. 4. Inadequate education. 5. Poor recreation facilities and programs. 6. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms. 7. Disrespectful white attitudes. 8. Discriminatory administration of justice. 9. Inadequacy of federal programs. 10. Inadequacy of municipal services. 11. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices. 12. Inadequate welfare programs.”
Americans would be hard-pressed to say the grievances presented by the commission do not still exist. In fact, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute wrote an op-ed published in the February 28, 2018 edition of the New York Daily News titled, “50 years after the Kerner Commission, minimal racial progress.” After studying the Kerner Report, Rothstein stated: “So little has changed since 1968 that the report remains worth reading as a near-contemporary description of racial inequality.”
The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened
Released 50 years ago, the infamous report found that poverty and institutional racism were driving inner-city violence
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The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened
Released 50 years ago, the infamous report found that poverty and institutional racism were driving inner-city violencewww.smithsonianmag.com
So lets look at some of the suggestions in the Kerner Commission Report.
http://www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/docs/kerner.pdf
It was predicted to happen:
The Moynihan Report generated considerable controversy and has had long-lasting and important influence. Writing to Lyndon Johnson, Moynihan argued that without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers, which would cause rates of divorce, child abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s), leading to vast increases in the numbers of households headed by females
