Excerpts from the introduction to the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders [Kerner Commission Report], 1968  

The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission Report after the commission’s chairman, Otto Kerner, Governor of Illinois, investigated the riots in the cities of the 1960s.  President Johnson assembled the commission after the Detroit riot of 1967.  It consisted mainly of white, moderate, male politicians.  Roy Wilkins of the NAACP was included, as was the President of the United Steelworkers of America and the Atlanta Chief of Police.  The commission described the riots in a variety of cities; their causes, both proximate and historical; the handling of the riots at all levels of government; and recommended a wide range of social reforms.  

The “typical” riot did not take place.  The disorders of 1967 were unusual, irregular, complex and unpredictable social processes.  Like most human events, they did not unfold in an orderly sequence.  However, an analysis of our survey information leads to some conclusions about the riot process.

In general:

• The civil disorders of 1967 involved Negroes acting against local symbols of white American society, authority and property in Negro neighborhoods – rather than against white person.
• Of 164 disorders reported during the first nine months of 1967, eight (5 percent) were major in terms of violence and damage; 33 (20 percent) were serious but not major; 123 (75 percent) were minor and undoubtedly would not have received national attention as “riots” had the nation not been sensitized by the more serious outbreaks.
• In the 75 disorders investigated by a Senate subcommittee, 83 deaths were reported.  Eighty-two percent of the deaths and more than half the injuries occurred in Newark and Detroit.  About 10 percent of the dead and 38 percent of the injured were public employees, primarily law officers and firemen.  The overwhelming majority of the persons killed or injured in all the disorders were Negro civilians.
• Initial damage estimates were greatly exaggerated.  In Detroit, newspaper damage estimates at first ranged from $200 million to $500 million; the highest recent estimate is $45 million.  In Newark, early estimates ranged from $15 to $25 million.  A month later damage was estimated at $10.2 million, over 80% in inventory losses. . . .

We have seen what happened.  Why did it happen?

In addressing this question, we shift our focus from the local to the national scene, from the particular events of the summer of 1967 to the factors within the society at large which have brought about the sudden violent mood of so many urban Negroes.  

These factors are both complex and interacting; they vary significantly in their effect from city to city and from year to year; and the consequences of one disorder, generating new grievances and new demands, becomes the causes of the next.  It is this which creates the “thicket of tension, conflicting evidence and extreme opinions” cited by the President.

Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear.  Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans.  

Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future.

White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.  Among the ingredients of this mixture are:

• Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing, which have resulted in the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress.
• Black in-migration and white exodus, which have produced the massive and growing concentrations of impoverished Negroes in our major cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs.
• The black ghettos where segregation and poverty converge on the young to destroy opportunity and enforce failure.  Crime, drug addiction, dependency on welfare, and bitterness and resentment against society in general and white society in particular are the result.

At the same time, most white and some Negroes outside the ghetto have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization.  Through television and other media, this affluence has been flaunted before the eyes of the Negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth.

Yet these facts alone cannot be said to have caused the disorders.  Recently, other powerful ingredients have begun to catalyze the mixture:

• Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.
• A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest; by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation; and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitutionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree.
• The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of redress of grievances, and of “moving the system.”  These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan “Black Power.”
• A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly among the young, in which self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to “the system.”
• The police are not merely a “spark” factor.  To some Negroes, police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression.  And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes.  The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a “double standard” of justice and protection – one for Negroes and one for whites.  

* * *

To this point, we have attempted to identify the prime components of the “explosive mixture.”  In the chapters that follow we seek to analyze them in the perspective of history.  Their meaning, however, is clear:

In the summer of 1967, we have seen in our cities a chain reaction of racial violence.  If we are heedless, none of us shall escape the consequences.

Document 5.22.4