| National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders | |
 | |
_in_the_Cabinet_Room_of_the_White_House,_Washington,_D.C..jpg) President Lyndon Baines Johnson with some members of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Washington, D.C. | |
| History | |
|---|---|
| Status | Defunct |
| Established by | Lyndon B. Johnson on 28 July 1967 |
| Related Executive Order number(s) | 11365 |
| Jurisdiction | |
| Purpose | Investigate the causes of a recent outbreak of race riots, with a particular focus on the 1967 Detroit riots. |
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member Presidential Commission established in July 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson in Executive Order 11365 to investigate the causes of over 150 riots throughout the country in 1967 and to provide recommendations that would prevent them from reoccurring.[1]
The report was released in 1968 after seven months of investigation. Rather than attributing the rioting to a small group of outsiders or trouble-makers ("riffraff") as many prior riot investigations had done[2] or to radicals or a foreign conspiracy as almost three-fourths of white America believed,[3] the Commission concluded that the rioting was a response to decades of "pervasive discrimination and segregation." Said the Commission, "White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II . . . What white Americans have never fully understood--but what the Black 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."[4]
The Commission's 426-page report is regarded as "the touchstone for race relations"[5] and as "one of the two seminal works"[6] on race in this country. It was also a bestseller, outselling even the Warren Report which dealt with President Kennedy's assassination.[7]
- ^ Johnson, Lyndon B. (July 29, 1967). Woolley, John T.; Peters, Gerhard (eds.). "Remarks Upon Signing Order Establishing the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders". The American Presidency Project. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California.
- ^ See, for instance, the riot reports for the 1936 Harlem riot, the 1943 Detroit riot, and the 1965 Watts riot.
- ^ Woods, Randall (2016). Prisoners of Hope. Basic Books. p. 321.
- ^ National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968). Report of the National Advisory Commission on civil Disorders. Bantam Books.
- ^ Michael Lipsky and David J. Olson (1977). Commission Politics: The Processing of Racial Crisis in America. Transaction Books. p. 137.
- ^ Rick Loessberg and John Koskinen (September 2018). "Measuring the Distance: The Legacy of the Kerner Report". Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 4 (6): 115.
- ^ Julian E. Zelizer (2016). Introduction to the 2016 Edition, The Kerner Report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. xxxiv.