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

Statement on the Riots in Watts by President Lyndon B. Johnson, August 20, 1965

If there is one thing I think we have learned from the civil rights struggle, it is that the problem of bringing the Negro American into an equal role in our society is more complex, and is more urgent, and is much more critical than any of us have ever known. Who of you could have predicted 10 years ago, that in this last, sweltering, August week thousands upon thousands of disenfranchised Negro men and women would suddenly take part in self government, and that thousands more in that same week would strike out in an unparalleled act of violence in this Nations.

Our conscience cries out against the hatred that we heard last week. It bore no relation to the orderly struggle for civil rights that has ennobled the last decade. Every leader in that struggle has condemned this outrage against the laws of the land. And during the few days that preceded it, I had spent all week at the White House visiting individually with Dr. King, Mr. Farmer, Dr. Roy Wilkins, Mr. Philip Randolph—all talking about the great meeting that we had to have here later in the fall, because the cities of this Nation and the Negro family in this Nation are two of our most pressing, most important problems. Well, the bitter years that preceded the riots, the death of hope where hope existed, their sense of failure to change the conditions of life—these things no doubt led to these riots. But they did not justify them.

I hope that every American who believes in equal opportunity for his fellow men, understands this distinction that I have made. For we shall never achieve a free and prosperous and hopeful society until we have suppressed the fires of hate and we have turned aside from violence—whether that violence comes from the nightriders of the Klan, or the snipers and the looters in the Watts district Neither old wrongs nor new fears can ever justify arson or murder....

With . . . rights comes responsibility.

And with responsibility there goes obligation.

We cannot, and we must not, in one breath demand laws to protect the rights of all of our citizens, and then turn our back, or wink, or in the next breath allow laws to be broken that protect the safety of our citizens. There just must never come the hour in this Republic when any citizen, whoever he is, can ever ignore the law or break the law with impunity.

And so long as I am your President I intend to preserve the rights of all of our citizens, and I intend to enforce the laws that protect all of our citizens— without regard to race, religion, region, or without fear or favor.

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them: lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties, and ultimately destroyers of a free America. They must be exposed and they must be dealt with.

It is our duty—and it is our desire—to open our hearts to humanity's cry for help. It is our obligation to seek to understand what could lie beneath the flames b that scarred that great city. So let us equip the poor and the oppressed—let us equip them for the long march to dignity and to wellbeing. But let us never confuse the need for decent work and fair treatment with an excuse to destroy and to uproot.

Ours is an open society. The world is always witness to whatever we do—sometimes, I think (results of the cooperation of some of my friends) to some things we don't do. We would not have it otherwise. For the brave story of the Negro American is related to the struggle of men on every continent for their rights as sons of God. It is a compound of brilliant promises and stunning reverses. Sometimes, as in the past week

when the two are mixed on the same pages of our newspapers and television screens, e result is baffling to all the world. And is baffling to me, and to you, and to us. .nd always there is the danger that hours of disorder may erase the accumulated goodwill of many months and many years. And warn and plead with all thinking Americans to contemplate this for a due period.

Yet beneath the discord we hear another theme. That theme speaks of a day when Americans of every color, and every creed, and every religion, and every region, and every sex can be trained for decent employment, can find it, can secure it, can have it preserved, and can support their families in an enriching and a rewarding environment....

Source: “On the 1965 Watts Riots” Johnson, Lyndon. 1965

www.multied.com/documents/LBJwatts.html

Document 5.22.3

Statement on the Riots in Watts by President Lyndon B. Johnson, August 20, 1965

If there is one thing I think we have learned from the civil rights struggle, it is that the problem of bringing the Negro American into an equal role in our society is more complex, and is more urgent, and is much more critical than any of us have ever known. Who of you could have predicted 10 years ago, that in this last, sweltering, August week thousands upon thousands of disenfranchised Negro men and women would suddenly take part in self government, and that thousands more in that same week would strike out in an unparalleled act of violence in this Nations.

Our conscience cries out against the hatred that we heard last week. It bore no relation to the orderly struggle for civil rights that has ennobled the last decade. Every leader in that struggle has condemned this outrage against the laws of the land. And during the few days that preceded it, I had spent all week at the White House visiting individually with Dr. King, Mr. Farmer, Dr. Roy Wilkins, Mr. Philip Randolph—all talking about the great meeting that we had to have here later in the fall, because the cities of this Nation and the Negro family in this Nation are two of our most pressing, most important problems. Well, the bitter years that preceded the riots, the death of hope where hope existed, their sense of failure to change the conditions of life—these things no doubt led to these riots. But they did not justify them.

I hope that every American who believes in equal opportunity for his fellow men, understands this distinction that I have made. For we shall never achieve a free and prosperous and hopeful society until we have suppressed the fires of hate and we have turned aside from violence—whether that violence comes from the nightriders of the Klan, or the snipers and the looters in the Watts district Neither old wrongs nor new fears can ever justify arson or murder....

With . . . rights comes responsibility.

And with responsibility there goes obligation.

We cannot, and we must not, in one breath demand laws to protect the rights of all of our citizens, and then turn our back, or wink, or in the next breath allow laws to be broken that protect the safety of our citizens. There just must never come the hour in this Republic when any citizen, whoever he is, can ever ignore the law or break the law with impunity.

And so long as I am your President I intend to preserve the rights of all of our citizens, and I intend to enforce the laws that protect all of our citizens— without regard to race, religion, region, or without fear or favor.

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them: lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties, and ultimately destroyers of a free America. They must be exposed and they must be dealt with.

It is our duty—and it is our desire—to open our hearts to humanity's cry for help. It is our obligation to seek to understand what could lie beneath the flames b that scarred that great city. So let us equip the poor and the oppressed—let us equip them for the long march to dignity and to wellbeing. But let us never confuse the need for decent work and fair treatment with an excuse to destroy and to uproot.

Ours is an open society. The world is always witness to whatever we do—sometimes, I think (results of the cooperation of some of my friends) to some things we don't do. We would not have it otherwise. For the brave story of the Negro American is related to the struggle of men on every continent for their rights as sons of God. It is a compound of brilliant promises and stunning reverses. Sometimes, as in the past week

when the two are mixed on the same pages of our newspapers and television screens, e result is baffling to all the world. And is baffling to me, and to you, and to us. .nd always there is the danger that hours of disorder may erase the accumulated goodwill of many months and many years. And warn and plead with all thinking Americans to contemplate this for a due period.

Yet beneath the discord we hear another theme. That theme speaks of a day when Americans of every color, and every creed, and every religion, and every region, and every sex can be trained for decent employment, can find it, can secure it, can have it preserved, and can support their families in an enriching and a rewarding environment....

Source: “On the 1965 Watts Riots” Johnson, Lyndon. 1965

www.multied.com/documents/LBJwatts.html

Document 5.22.3

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