LYNDON B. JOHNSON: My fellow Americans,
we have endured a week such as no nation should live through.
(sirens wailing)
JELANI COBB: The summer of 1967 was really a crucible.
You see in city after city,
these uprisings, in a broad enough way
that it can't be simply dismissed as coincidental.
FRED HARRIS: Conditions were such, in every one of these cities,
that almost any spark could set them off.
JOHN A. POWELL: You had Newark, you had Detroit.
You had cities all across the country
up in flames.
People were wondering, can we actually have a country?
JOHNSON: I am tonight appointing
a special Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.
The commission will investigate the origins
of the recent disorders in our cities.
It will make recommendations to me, to the Congress,
to the state governors, and to the mayors
for measures to prevent
or contain such disasters in the future.
He said, answer three questions.
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What can be done to prevent it
from happening again and again?
♪ ♪
HARRIS: The commission held 20 days of hearings.
We heard from a lot of witnesses.
COBB: They really were trying to get
a baseline of knowledge
about why American cities were on fire.
HUGH ADDONIZIO: We've had members of
the president's Commission on Civil Disorders
here in our city today.
VESLA WEAVER: The Kerner Commission avoided this tendency
to listen only to certain sections of society.
HARRIS: We can learn a good deal more
out over the country, talking to people,
than we can sitting in a building in Washington.
♪ ♪
JOHN LINDSAY: I trust that the report
will be completely honest.
That being the case, it will describe, undoubtedly,
a very serious condition in the country.
HARRIS: The commission told the truth, but it was a harsh truth.
Buy your books on the Riot Commission!
On the Riot Commission!
REPORTER: Throughout the neighborhood,
more than 2,000 copies of "The Riot Report"
were sold in less than a week.
COBB: It really becomes a centerpiece of conversation.
You see civic groups, churches, libraries,
even police departments buying the book in bulk.
REPORTER: These are the major proposals:
a form of guaranteed annual income,
six million new low- and middle-income units,
two million new jobs in government and private business.
The cost has been estimated at $2 billion a month.
Something like the cost of the war in Vietnam.
DAVID C. CARTER: Once it became clear
what a political bombshell this might represent,
Lyndon Johnson wants to take the legs out from under it.
♪ ♪
(chattering on police radio)
(sirens blaring)
DISPATCHER (over police radio): Anyone at Third Precinct
to check condition at Symphony Hall?
A large crowd gathering.
(distant shouting, popping sounds)
At 94 7th Avenue, they're shooting from the roofs.
(sirens wailing)
All cars in the Second Precinct, get down around Broad Street.
A white van that's supposed to be
loaded with ammunition and guns
and colored people.
That's at the Clay Street Bridge.
Any First Precinct car
can check a man who was shot, he's laying in the gutter
in front of 69 South Orange Avenue.
Precinct cars, the shoe store at Bergen and Renner.
Looting.
It's 498 Clinton Avenue and looting.
(alarm bell ringing)
POLICE OFFICER (over bullhorn): Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen,
let me have your attention, please.
Governor Hughes
and the Newark city officials
have earlier issued a proclamation.
There will be a curfew
upon pedestrians starting at 11:00.
♪ ♪
(crowd shouting)
RICHARD J. HUGHES: The city in those sections
is apparently still in what can only be classified
as open rebellion.
And Mayor Addonizio and I have determined
that the line between jungle assault
on law and order
might as well be drawn here as any place in America.
♪ ♪
REPORTER: Governor Richard Hughes says
the situation in Newark is under control
with the exception of sniper fire.
And he says there is no way to control sniper fire.
(guns firing)
♪ ♪
There are about 22 blocks of Newark's Springfield Avenue
here in the ghetto area.
And this Friday, they all look pretty much like this.
One massive sea of devastation
as far as the eye can see, in both directions.
Debris, broken glass,
all that's left after a night of violent rioting.
How much did you lose?
About $15,000 to $20,000.
But it isn't that.
It's all my life that I've put in here for 18 years
to build up a little business, and now I'm forced out.
Why? Because these professional no-goodniks,
bums and what-have-you.
MAN: Can I say something?
Listen, all we want is a equal right.
That's all we're asking for.
And as long as they keep this up,
we goin' burn the white out.
♪ ♪
HARRIS: The civil disorders, violent protests
that erupted in so many of America's cities
during the hot summer of 1967
were just sensational front-page, big-type news,
and the same was true on television.
They just dominated the television news.
The fires, the looting, the sniping.
(fire crackling)
(glass smashes)
(explosion pops)
MAN (shouting in distance): Burn, baby, burn!
(glass smashes)
GEORGE W. ROMNEY: The difficulty
late yesterday was on the west side of the city,
but it spread pretty well across the city now,
so you're dealing with-- what is it, 139 square miles?
JEROME CAVANAGH: Yes. Something like that?
Yes, that's correct, yes.
ROMNEY: As governor of
the state of Michigan,
I do hereby officially request the immediate deployment
of federal troops into Michigan
to assist state and local authorities
in reestablishing law and order in the city of Detroit.
HARRIS: It caused enormous, uh, fear
and, uh, anger, puzzlement.
43 Americans died in these streets.
386 were injured.
477 buildings were damaged or destroyed.
Something like it happened in 76 American cities this summer.
HARRIS: The question was, is this some kind of organized thing?
How long is it gonna last?
What can be done to stop it?
FRANK MCGEE: Next summer,
it could look like this
in the downtown sections of our cities.
It could look like this
in the neighborhood where you live.
The simple fact is this:
we are in the worst crisis we have known since the Civil War.
Since Newark and Detroit,
law and order have become obsessions on Capitol Hill.
And the main direction of congressional movement
is toward investigating committees,
anti-riot bills, gun control legislation,
more police support.
HARRIS: At the heighth of the Detroit riots,
I introduced a resolution in the Senate.
I said, we ought to have a blue ribbon citizen's commission
to look into these civil disorders,
not just on a law-and-orders basis,
but getting at deeper causes.
That was on July the 25th
of 1967.
On the 27th, it was announced by the White House
that President Johnson was gonna have a nationwide telecast.
And he called me that evening,
not very much before he was to go on the air.
And he said to me, uh, "Fred, I'm gonna appoint
"that commission you've been talking about,
and I'm gonna put you on it."
And I said, "Well, I'll, I'll do the best I can."
And he said, "Another thing, Fred,
"I want you to remember you're a..." (chuckles)
"...you're a Johnson man."
And I said, "Yes, sir, I am a Johnson man."
And he said, "If you forget it,
I'll take my pocket knife and cut your blank off."
He did not say "blank." (chuckles)
My fellow Americans,
we have endured a week
such as no nation should live through.
A time of violence and tragedy.
For a few minutes tonight,
I want to talk about that tragedy.
And I want to talk about the deeper questions
that it raises for us all.
I am tonight appointing
a special Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.
Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois...
HARRIS: I think he just wanted to be sure
that he would get all the credit
for what he'd been doing in regard to race and poverty.
And I should say that Lyndon Johnson did more
against racism and against poverty
than any president before or since,
with the sole exception of, probably, Abraham Lincoln.
♪ ♪
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: It would be fatal
for the nation
to overlook the urgency of the moment.
This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent
will not pass
until there is an invigorating autumn
of freedom and equality.
WALTER CRONKITE: They called it
the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
More than 200,000 of them came to Washington this morning
in a kind of climax
to a historic spring and summer
in the struggle for equal rights.
KING: 1963 is not an end, but a beginning.
Those who hope that the Negro
needed to blow off steam
and will now be content
will have a rude awakening if the nation returns
to business as usual.
(applause)
HARRIS: Johnson took up the mantle of John Kennedy.
President Kennedy had recommended
civil rights legislation
but had no chance to pass it.
JOHNSON: We have talked long enough in this country
about equal rights.
We have talked for a hundred years or more.
It is time now
to write the next chapter,
and to write it in the books of law.
(applause)
HARRIS: Johnson made that really a major thing,
and I think felt very deeply about it.
CHET HUNTLEY: Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Great Society.
Two weeks before he took the oath of office
for the first term as president in his own right,
Mr. Johnson spelled out to Congress
what he wanted for the Great Society.
JOHNSON: ...major recommendations.
First, to keep our economy growing.
To open, for all Americans,
the opportunity that is now enjoyed by most Americans.
And to improve the quality of life
for all.
(applause)
JOSHUA ZEITZ: In the first two or three years of Johnson's administration,
owing to large Democratic majorities in Congress
and a well of goodwill,
following the Kennedy assassination,
Johnson was able to pass a sweeping domestic agenda.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which desegregated all public accommodations.
Passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
which essentially desegregated the voting process
throughout the entire U.S. South.
JOHNSON: Millions of Americans
are denied the right to vote because of their color.
Today is a triumph for freedom,
as huge as any victory
that's ever been won on any battlefield.
Today, the Negro story
and the American story fuse and blend.
COBB: Johnson also initiated the War on Poverty,
and authorizes nearly a billion dollars
to specifically target the places
and institutions where poverty
is created and re-created
in education, in employment.
It is an actual good-faith effort to move the needle some
on what American poverty looks like,
particularly in disenfranchised communities.
JOHNSON: It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity.
All our citizens
must have the ability
to walk through those gates.
And this is the next and the more profound stage
of the battle for civil rights.
(applause)
COBB: Lyndon Johnson had made the calculation
about what investment in civil rights
would mean politically.
He is aware that every significant step he takes
simultaneously feeds
this growing backlash, or what people have called
"whitelash," to the Civil Rights Movement--
the idea that Johnson had set in motion
a kind of government overreach.
ZEITZ: You saw that manifest itself as early as 1964,
when Barry Goldwater entered the presidential race
and challenged Johnson.
It was very clear
that he was tapping into a reserve of white anger,
a belief that somehow
the Great Society and Johnson's
civil rights agenda were going to be threatening
to their communities, uh, to their jobs and to their safety.
While the President of the United States
speaks of the Great Society,
our cities and suburbs
are turning into the lawless society.
(applause)
MICHAEL FLAMM: Goldwater is making the argument
that the doctrine of non-violent civil disobedience
that is promoted by Dr. King and other civil rights leaders
is fundamentally encouraging
a disrespect for authority and for law.
WEAVER: This is a claim that had been articulated before.
Southern segregationists
are famous,
in the congressional record
and on, on the floor of Congress,
for saying that civil rights agitation is breeding crime.
So you've got, on the one hand,
one of the largest political struggles
for racial justice in our nation's history happening.
And at that time, legislators are actively arguing
that we ought to, to treat protestors as ordinary thugs.
GOLDWATER: Nothing prepares the way
for tyranny more than the failure
of public officials to keep the streets safe
from bullies and marauders.
(applause)
FLAMM: He's the making the argument that
not only has the federal government expanded too much,
not only is it spending too many tax dollars
on too wide a range of social programs,
but those social programs themselves
are fueling the troubles that are beginning to appear
in America's cities.
(car horns honking)
ELIZABETH HINTON: In the 1960s, the U.S. begins to witness
massive demographic changes
that resulted from the Great Migration
of rural Black Americans in the southern states
to northern and western cities.
Cities were becoming Blacker.
Washington D.C. had come into a Black majority by 1960.
Detroit and Cleveland, Black people were edging majorities.
This was alarming to federal policymakers
because as Black populations in cities are growing,
there are fewer and fewer jobs.
De-industrialization is already happening.
WEAVER: There's a sense that society
is breaking down, and it was breaking down.
Black people were saying, like, "Enough!"
HINTON: Social scientists and policymakers
in the early 1960s start to label
Black youth as "social dynamite."
Given this cocktail
of population change and continued inequality,
this group of "social dynamite,"
these youth of color, would explode.
(explosion, people shouting)
And that's exactly what happened.
REPORTER: There's looting at this moment
at 88th and Broadway.
At 103rd and Compton, a Molotov cocktail
was thrown a short time ago,
and in that area are about 3,000 or 4,000 rioters.
(sirens wailing, chattering on police radio)
REPORTER: A bloody rampage in a crowded Negro neighborhood called Watts.
(guns firing) Absolutely incredible scene.
A gun battle in the middle of Broadway,
the main business streets of Los Angeles.
(men shouting, guns firing)
Small army of policemen, most of them carrying shotguns.
National Guardsmen with 30-caliber machine guns,
bodies of several Negroes
who have been shot already in this battle.
♪ ♪
ZEITZ: Johnson is at his ranch in Texas,
and Joe Califano, his domestic policy chief,
spent two days trying to get the president
on the phone and couldn't; Johnson simply shut down.
COBB: This is just days after he's cashed in
all of his political chips to shepherd the Voting Rights Act
through Congress.
It's a kind of indignation,
almost a sense of being slapped in the face.
"We just had the most massive
"legislation in U.S. history,
"certainly since the Civil War,
"extending the rights to African Americans.
Why aren't you happy?"
♪ ♪
BILL STOUT: With no reason at all, bottles and rocks and broken windows.
Almost a mad holiday atmosphere, people laughing,
cheering on those who find things to take home,
stores broken into,
the one directly across the street, a pawn shop.
COBB: These reporters
might as well have been foreign correspondents.
Can I talk with you for just a moment?
I just want to ask... COBB (voiceover): Overwhelmingly white,
overwhelmingly male,
overwhelmingly middle upper class.
They were covering a different nation.
STOUT: The burning and looting,
the shooting and beating went on for nearly a week.
In the background, there's a long chronicle
of defeat and disappointment,
of discrimination and Negro grievances,
of pure hate for the white man.
CHAMBERS: The news coverage was lurid.
The tone was,
big cities in America are exploding
and we should all be afraid.
ELIZABETH HINTON: For Johnson, there's a real fear
that this violence is somehow going to undercut
the War on Poverty.
He's put in this position where
he's got to maintain his commitment
to addressing racial discrimination,
but also his commitment to restore law and order.
JOHNSON: 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 would ultimately destroy a free America.
COBB: On the heels of Watts, Congress passes,
by unanimous vote, the Law Enforcement Assistance Act.
And that's really the point at which
we can mark the beginnings of the War on Crime.
In theory, this War on Crime
coexists with this War on Poverty,
almost as a kind of stick and carrot.
And it funnels millions of dollars
into increasing numbers of police
and experimental crime control projects
that were being enacted, by and large,
in low-income communities of color.
WEAVER: This is the first moment that we see
the federal government actually sending money
to help support crime control.
Crime is no longer a state and local issue.
The federal government's gonna get involved.
It's setting up a precedent for ever more investment.
COBB: But the War on Crime in no way quelled the uprisings.
You have even more of those kind of conflicts in 1966.
Uprisings in 38 American cities,
from San Francisco to Providence, Rhode Island.
I think America must see
that riots do not develop out of thin air.
Certain conditions continue to exist in our society,
which must be condemned
as vigorously as we condemn riots.
CARTER: The image of civil rights
in many white Americans' minds
had been of African Americans
beseeching the nation for decent treatment,
for equality, asking white America
to just accord them their basic humanity.
The images of well-dressed sit-in demonstrators
being beaten, being spat upon
are so important to understanding
white Americans' sympathetic attitudes
towards civil rights.
And then you see a fundamental transition
where media simply can't resist
the spectacle of urban disorder.
The camera simply cannot look away.
And as much as it unsettles
white viewers, there's also this sort of fixation.
In some ways, it's confirming their darkest prejudices
about Black Americans.
Now they're seeing a more menacing face of Black America,
and they emphatically do not like what they're seeing.
FLAMM: What you start to see is this phrase,
"We're rewarding the rioters."
We're creating a climate
where people understand that through uprisings,
through rioting, through looting,
they can gain the support of liberals,
who will then shower communities
with new and expensive social programs
subsidized by angry and anxious white voters
outside of urban America.
Louis Harris is one of this nation's
foremost public opinion analysts,
in years gone by, and again this summer.
Mr. Harris, how much of a change has there been
in the northern white man's attitudes
toward the Black man during the summer of 1966?
The fear that whites have
over Negroes moving into their neighborhoods is,
without question, the deepest fear
that abounds in white society today.
ZEITZ: The Civil Rights Act of 1964
was fairly uncontroversial in the North.
Same with the Voting Rights Act.
Where it got tricky for Johnson
was when the administration began to attempt to address
systemic racism and systemic inequality outside of the South.
CARTER: Open housing pushed all sorts of buttons with white Americans,
in the North, in the Midwest,
places where whites simply were not accustomed
to living in the same geographies
with Black neighbors.
(crowd shouting)
WOMAN IN CROWD: We want freedom!
CARTER: That is when whites seem to say "This far, but no further."
I'm sure he's only coming here for one reason,
that's to bust the neighborhood down,
discourage the white person,
stop the whites from moving into the area
and hope that it will be converted
to a Negro, integrated development.
ZEITZ: A lot of that was driven by fear,
fear of what they saw
in neighborhoods that were predominantly African American.
Those neighborhoods were heavily blighted.
Those neighborhoods were dangerous.
There was a fair amount of crime.
MAN: I really envy you out here on the northwest side
of the city of Chicago,
because you are very, very far removed
from the real problems that exist.
You don't have slums within a block or two of you.
ZEITZ: And if you're one of these white voters,
you're thinking like, "I don't want this in my neighborhood."
You're not seeing what's behind it.
You just see something that scares you.
Every taxpayer in the United States of America
has donated money to these people.
For what?
We can be sociable with 'em in work.
We can get along with them and joke with them.
But when we leave our job,
and close the door, and we're on our way home,
we want them to go in their direction,
and we can go in ours.
Whites were saying things like,
"Why can't you wait?"
Even whites who were supportive.
It's like, we support the idea that Blacks need to,
to have a different life,
but you're pushing too fast.
FLAMM: In the 1966 election,
you now see conservative white politicians across the country
borrowing from the Goldwater playbook
and using "law and order" in races for Congress.
And Democrats in general, and liberals in particular,
suffer serious, serious losses.
COBB: If you are a Republican elected official in 1966,
you see this as a mandate to, one,
do more of the same and, two, increasingly,
to roll back the War on Poverty,
Great Society initiatives
that have been the centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson's presidency.
(applause)
At home, the question is
whether we will continue working for better opportunities
for all Americans,
when most Americans are already
living better than any people in history.
Abroad, the question is
whether we have the staying power
to fight a very costly war,
when the objective is limited,
and the danger to us is seemingly remote.
FLAMM: Johnson is painfully aware that the war in Vietnam
is consuming $30 billion a year,
while the expenditures on the Great Society
are about a billion dollars a year.
And conservatives in Congress are going after
even that small amount.
HARRIS: Johnson had said,
"We can have guns and butter.
"We don't have to choose between
"domestic programs and the war.
We can do both."
But in 1967,
it was becoming increasingly clear that was not true.
(crowd shouting)
Then came these terrible disorders
all around the country.
POWELL: You had Newark, you had Detroit.
You had cities all across the country
up in flames.
People were wondering, can we actually have a country?
ZEITZ: Johnson's being faced
with a good deal of pressure to do something.
But he's really incapable
of governing in the way that he had been accustomed to before.
Last week in Congress, a small but important plan
for action in the cities
was voted down in the House of Representatives.
The members of that body rejected my request
for $20 million to fight the pestilence of rats.
Rats which prowl in dark alleys and tenements
and attack thousands of city children.
Moderates who pride themselves
on their civil rights voting record,
because they survived the dangers
of the political backlash back home,
are now becoming backlashers themselves.
Many of them seem to be saying,
"If Newark and Detroit and Plainfield and Toledo
are the thanks we get, here is our answer."
FLAMM: Lyndon Johnson is a political animal.
He understands
exactly what is happening.
He sees the political trap that he is in,
and he's desperately trying to find a way out.
GILLON: Creating a presidential commission
was, for Johnson, the best option,
because it allows him to show presidential leadership,
that he's aware of the disturbances
that are taking place, that he's doing something about it,
but it also allows him to kick the can down the road.
He can say, "Well, I've done my part.
"I've set up this distinguished commission.
Let's wait for the recommendations."
CHAMBERS: I was in Mississippi doing civil rights work,
and I remember watching a black-and-white television set,
and Johnson speaking about this terrible crisis
that was occurring in America.
And he announced that he was forming this commission.
We laughed, and we thought, "Oh, my God," you know?
Commissions are appointed to make problems go away,
not to deal with them, right?
The commission will investigate the origins
of the recent disorders in our cities.
It will make recommendations to me, to the Congress,
to the state governors, and to the mayors
for measures to prevent
or contain such disasters in the future.
President Johnson called us together by telegram
after he had appointed us.
We met in a cabinet room.
He signed the executive order
and gave each of us a pen.
JOHN KOSKINEN: The president really was a conciliator
who would put a lot of different people
from different backgrounds together
and say, "Come, let us reason together."
And they covered the political spectrum.
GILLON: They had to have supported
some aspect of his Great Society, especially
the Civil Rights Act of '64 and Voting Rights Act.
Also, just as important,
is they had to have been supporting the Vietnam War.
He would not appoint anyone who was a skeptic
of the Vietnam War.
COBB: It's meant to give him
the political leeway to maneuver.
And you anticipate him
being able to pull the strings
and move this commission
in a direction that's most politically beneficial for him.
♪ ♪
CHAMBERS: There were 11 members.
The chair was Otto Kerner, who was governor of Illinois.
OTTO KERNER: I was contacted
with a telephone call day before yesterday.
JOHNSON: I want nothing but competence,
and I want nothing but compassion,
and I want nothing but, uh, patriotism.
CHAMBERS: John Lindsay, the mayor of New York...
JOHNSON: I want you to be vice-chairman,
and I don't want you to even consider, uh, thinking about it;
I just want you to say "Yes, sir."
LINDSAY: Yes, sir.
KOSKINEN: Lindsay, at that time,
was still a registered Republican.
He was a very liberal Republican,
back in the old days where there were such things
as liberal Republicans.
CHAMBERS: There were two United States senators.
JOHNSON: Fred Harris, a young man who'd been interested
in this field in the Senate.
I haven't asked him yet, but I'm hoping
that I can get Senator Brooke from Massachusetts.
CHAMBERS: Ed Brooke,
the first and the only, then, Black senator
since Reconstruction.
A businessman...
JOHNSON: I want to ask Tex Thornton, of Litton Industries,
California, to be on it.
CHAMBERS: Two members of the House, McCulloch and Corman,
a Republican and a Democrat;
Herb Jenkins, the Chief of Police of Atlanta;
the Secretary of Commerce of the state of Kentucky,
Katherine Ann Peden;
Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP;
and I.W. Abel, the head of the Steelworkers.
Many very well-known people
and establishment people.
♪ ♪
COBB: The only activist voice
is that of Roy Wilkins, who, by the standards of 1967,
is a fairly moderate figure.
Edward Brooke was the only other Black person
on the commission, and he was a Republican.
"Time" magazine had given him
the really questionable honorific of NASP,
or Negro Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
HARRIS: People looking at this group,
a lot of people thought
that nothing really was gonna come of it.
And that had been true of a lot of commissions.
But I think Johnson really wanted a deep and full report.
As he said, answer three questions.
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What can be done to prevent it
from happening again and again?
Johnson said, "Charlie Schultze, the budget director here,
"will take care of whatever your needs are
to do what needs to be done."
In effect, money won't be any problem for you.
So, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice-Chairman,
let your search be free.
Let us be untrammeled by what has been called
the conventional wisdom.
As best you can, find the truth, the whole truth,
and express it in your report.
♪ ♪
HARRIS: I didn't know John Lindsay earlier.
But in our first meeting, John spoke out about how important
he thought it was that we not just deal with the question
of law and order, but that we get at deeper causes.
HARRIS: I, from earliest time,
was very interested in the plight of poor people.
I grew up in a little town in Oklahoma.
I started working the fields when I was five years old.
We lived in a area
where Comanche Indians were all amongst us.
And that, I think, had some effect on me.
No Negroes lived in my town;
at one time, I think, were prevented from doing so.
But I knew how they were treated generally.
John Lindsay was probably more knowledgeable
about these issues than anybody in America at that time.
He was living with this problem as a big-city mayor.
He saw the desperate conditions
in which so many Black people lived.
And I was convinced from the very first moment he spoke
that he and I were on the same wavelength exactly.
(indistinct talking)
That first day, the very first meeting,
it's clear John Lindsay
and Fred Harris wanted to push the committee
into dealing with
the root causes of racial unrest,
which they believed was poverty and a sense of powerlessness.
Tex Thornton sees the commission's purpose
solely to help law enforcement to crush future uprisings.
And in every debate, just about, those two are on opposite sides.
REPORTER: Governor, what is the feeling of urgency
among the commission members on this first day?
Great urgency.
As a matter of fact, if we could have continued on,
I think we would've done so.
But we felt we had to take a little breathing spell here,
review our charge,
obtain an executive director,
look at staff opportunities and places for us to operate.
The group decided to begin hearings
in Washington next Tuesday and Wednesday
with government officials.
The commission will ask for subpoena powers.
The president wants an interim report
from his new commission
no later than March 1 of next year.
He wants a final report, at the latest,
one year from today.
♪ ♪
COBB: This is not the group of people
that you would generally expect
to be a kind of fount of wisdom
on a subject as intractable as race.
And that is
the foremost challenge that confronts them
the minute they walk through the door.
What can they possibly say
that can, one, lend insight
into questions of race
and, two,
be instructive as to how
the society can move forward.
♪ ♪
REPORTER: Senator Thurmond,
there's some suggestions that there may be
a Communist conspiracy or a conspiracy
involved in these riots.
Do you have any information on this?
I don't think there's any question about it.
There's no doubt in my mind that these riots are organized,
and there's no doubt in my mind
that the Communists are behind these riots.
CROWD: ♪ We're gonna walk the walk ♪
♪ We're gonna talk the talk ♪
♪ Ride on, freedom... ♪
POWELL: "Outside agitator" was the phrase
that people used in the South,
whenever anything happened that people didn't like.
I said we're gonna take a stand today.
POWELL: "These must be outside agitators,
'cause our Negroes wouldn't behave this way."
(crowd calling back, clapping)
And in the North, it went one step further.
It was to say that the Communists were behind it.
CARTER: Surely, Blacks of their own accord wouldn't be
torching their own neighborhoods,
so there must be some hidden hand here.
CARMICHAEL: Don't be afraid.
Don't be ashamed.
We want Black Power.
CROWD: We want Black power!
We want Black Power.
CROWD: Black Power!
We want Black Power.
WALLACE: Stokely Carmichael,
a 25-year-old revolutionary,
a college graduate with a degree in philosophy.
It was here in Mississippi this summer
that Carmichael, with his cry for Black Power,
first became a national figure,
and to many, a frightening one.
You gonna sit in front of your television set
and listen to LBJ tell you that
"violence never accomplishes anything, my fellow Americans."
The face of the Civil Rights Movement has changed
by the summer of 1967.
But you see, the real problem with violence
is that we have never been violent.
We have been too nonviolent, too nonviolent.
(crowd cheering)
FLAMM: Dr. King remains the preeminent leader...
Oh, that's all right,
that's all right...
FLAMM: But there is a sense among white Americans
that Dr. King is no longer in charge.
You better quit running around here,
talking about loving these honkies to death.
During rebellions, brother,
you got stop looting and start shooting.
(crowd cheering)
Black Power, brother.
BOESEL: Of course it alarms white people;
it alarmed the government.
The FBI was all over these guys.
The Communists in this country
had organized, very intensely,
a drive to infiltrate into the racial discord
and discontent in the country.
MUHAMMED: Running the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
J. Edgar Hoover had been a key opponent of civil rights,
had collapsed civil rights with communism.
He understood that
any form of civil rights did pose,
to some degree, a legitimate challenge
to the way the nation functioned.
Black people had literally been
raw material for wealth creation.
And so Hoover's holding the line
against the threat of Black people being at the vanguard
of a communist takeover of the United States.
♪ ♪
CARTER: Hoover is consistently
playing up these possibilities,
sending wildly inaccurate,
unvetted raw intelligence information
to the White House.
Because where there's smoke, there must be some fire.
♪ ♪
GILLON: This issue of conspiracy
was very important to the commission.
Their first major witness was J. Edgar Hoover.
He puts all of these charts up around the room.
And shows, you know,
"Stokely Carmichael was in Maryland on this day,
and the next day, there was a disturbance."
He's trying to create
a connection between these advocates of Black Power
and the racial unrests.
(flames roaring, indistinct shouting)
(rioting footage continues)
MAN (on footage): Burn, baby, burn.
(indistinct shouting)
HARRIS: If you pressed him,
J. Edgar Hoover, he'd... he said, "No, there was not
any national conspiracy behind the riots."
But then, he talked about outside agitators and so forth,
and really made you think-- and made Lyndon Johnson think--
that there was a conspiracy.
FLAMM: Johnson believes Hoover
and listens to Hoover.
They are neighbors in Washington.
Johnson is also extraordinarily thin-skinned.
He takes criticism really, really personally.
He is attracted to the idea that the only reason
all of this violence is taking place
is because people are being provoked,
incited, and agitated.
HINTON: If the rebellions were about underlying racial inequalities,
then that was an indictment of the War on Poverty.
Perhaps it hadn't gone far enough.
Perhaps it wasn't sufficient
to address historical racism
and inequality.
♪ ♪
(indistinct chatter)
REPORTER: Dr. King, what were the major points discussed
before the commission today?
KING: Well, we discussed many points
concerning the civil disorders taking place.
My major point was that the time has come for
a massive program on the part of the federal government
that will make jobs or income
a reality for every American citizen.
♪ ♪
HARRIS: The commission held a long series of hearings
about civil disturbances and violent protests.
20 days of hearings.
We heard from a lot of witnesses.
COBB: The commission called upon people
who had varying perspectives and insights
into the pertinent questions of race--
historians, sociologists, economists,
law enforcement figures, activists.
And they really were trying to get
a kind of baseline of knowledge
about why American cities were on fire.
One of the witnesses,
the renowned Black psychologist Kenneth Clark,
voiced a real degree of skepticism
about what they were doing.
He ticks off all of the inquiries
that have happened in response to other uprisings--
1935, 1943, 1965-- and says,
"Each of them produced a report.
None of those reports actually made any difference,"
and raises the question about whether this inquiry
will make any difference either.
So far as we can find at this point-- and of course
we've had only a small amount of material before us--
as to the various riots that have occurred,
there seems to be no common plan.
There doesn't seem to be a plan at all.
Something happens, it may be rumor,
it may be an arrest,
but suddenly it triggers the riots.
HARRIS: The president told us to state the facts.
And one of the facts
that we said straight out was
that there was a great deal of overreaction
by the police and by the National Guard.
The great majority of people who were killed
were Black people.
We looked, for example,
at sniping reports. (gun firing)
(repeated firing)
MCGEE: Sniping was organized.
They were mobile
and able to tie up large forces.
MUHAMMED: There was a consistent refrain
that a sniper was shooting at
or had shot law enforcement
or members of the National Guard or fire departments.
No one to this day will ever know,
in all instances,
what did happen or didn't happen.
What we do know is that a lot of the instances
of the shooting or deaths
of members of the National Guard,
of the fire department, the police,
were by friendly fire.
That being said, it didn't really matter.
The notion of a fictionalized, larger-than-life sniper problem
meant that law enforcement
could use the most aggressive, militarized weaponry and tactics
to "put down" their own citizens.
(weapon firing, siren wailing)
(tires screeching, siren continues)
HARRIS: When we could trace down a sniper incident report,
here's the kind of thing we found:
A young National Guard guy with live ammunition
was stationed under a streetlight.
And he was scared to death in this Black neighborhood,
high rise apartment nearby.
And he shot out the streetlight.
And that gave rise to all sorts of reports,
everywhere on the radio and everywhere else,
"There's snipers.
"They pulled up some kind of vehicle
with a machine gun on it and sprayed that apartment."
(rapid gunfire)
As a result of what we thought was
a overreaction by the National Guard,
virtually all of whom were white and young,
with no training whatsoever
of how to deal with any civil disturbances,
I suggested we make an announcement early,
separate from our final report,
calling for integration of the National Guard.
♪ ♪
GILLON: African Americans made up
less than two percent of National Guard members.
Lindsay and Harris both thought
that it was important to, to make that statement.
Tex Thornton doesn't want to do it.
And this is the first big battle.
And Tex Thornton argues vehemently
against the commission making any kind of a statement.
HARRIS: We were such different people,
and there were a lot of different views
and a lot of argument from the first.
I had worried that we wouldn't be able
to come up with a good report.
So I made a deal with a publisher
to write a book myself.
♪ ♪
(children playing)
ADDONIZIO: We've had members of
the president's Commission on Civil Disorders
here in our city today.
We hope that they have been able to walk through our city,
and find out for themselves exactly what exists out there.
(children playing in background)
LINDSAY: There isn't anybody that you talk to in a community
that's under stress in any city of the country
who is not a valuable person to talk to.
WEAVER: The Kerner Commission avoided this tendency
to listen only to certain sections of society.
And they go out and they scour,
trying to understand the patterns
and the common features
and what is it people are saying.
HARRIS: We can learn a good deal more
out over the country, talking to people,
than we can sitting in
a building in Washington, and so,
we're going to a good many cities around the country;
Milwaukee is one of them.
We just want to kind of get the sense and feel of some of
these tremendous urban problems that we have in America.
(interview): In Milwaukee, I spent a morning in a Black barbershop.
Young men coming in, 25 to 30.
And the first question I asked each of them
as they came into the barbershop puzzled them,
and I finally figured out why.
My question was,
"Is there greater discrimination
"here in Milwaukee than where you came from
in Jackson or, or Memphis or wherever?"
And the reason it puzzled 'em was, as I found out,
in Milwaukee, they didn't see any white people.
There was more segregation
in Milwaukee-- that's a northern city--
than those southern cities that they'd come from.
♪ ♪
And to see the terrible conditions:
three and four families living in a one-family house.
Grocery store with day-old bread and wilted vegetables.
Criminally inferior schools.
♪ ♪
There wasn't any transportation system.
The jobs had left--
moved out to the suburbs, or had disappeared altogether.
♪ ♪
In Cincinnati, John Lindsay and I ran onto
some young men that were shooting craps
on the street, in broad daylight.
When they found out we were from Washington,
they all, just in a chorus almost, said,
"Jobs, baby. We need jobs, baby."
The only thing we can do
is stand around and stand on the corner
all the time.
See, we don't have anything to do,
so, not no purpose.
KOSKINEN: It was an eye-opener.
These weren't outsiders,
these weren't conspirators,
these weren't political radicals.
These were people who had legitimate
and great, long-standing grievances
about the nature of their life
and the limited opportunities they were provided.
Everybody's so all fired up about these riots
and this here racial disorder and Black Power,
and nobody's figuring out that half of these cats
want to get out there and make it for themselves.
You think they want to stay like this all their lives?
The resentment is of the same kind.
The conviction that something must be done quickly,
outside of the routine channels, is very widespread.
HARRIS: It really put faces on these problems.
And I know that it had the same effect
on other members of the commission.
Tex Thornton said himself,
after going out to riot cities and talking to people there,
"I have moved about 90 degrees to the left."
(film reel clicking on, whirring)
(clicking)
HARRIS: We also had these copious reports
from our survey teams.
♪ ♪
GILLON: The commission staff included social scientists
who were in Washington at the headquarters.
(typewriter keys clacking)
CHAMBERS: And the commission sent out these teams of six people
to 23 cities to learn exactly what had happened.
WEAVER: They do an extraordinary field investigation.
They interviewed business leaders, civic leaders,
on down to Black police officers.
They sat in people's living rooms and barber shops.
They heard their stories.
♪ ♪
BOESEL: I was one of four analysts
in charge of conducting analyses of those reports.
There were mountains of material that we had to go through--
news reports,
some FBI reports,
boxes and piles of documents.
Our job was to take that information
and all the statistics that we could find,
put them together
in an analysis that answered the question,
"Why did it happen?"
♪ ♪
KOSKINEN: After having done that through about 15 cities,
a common pattern began to emerge,
which was, these were people protesting.
♪ ♪
BOESEL: In the South,
you had the Jim Crow system,
organized legal segregation.
There were lines that you couldn't cross.
If you crossed them,
you knew what the consequences would be.
So it was possible to use civil disobedience tactics
to move toward a goal.
♪ ♪
In the North, the causes of oppression and disadvantage
were more opaque.
You were a lot freer in many ways,
but one thing that you couldn't do
was move out of your constricted neighborhood,
your ghetto.
ZEITZ: The six million African Americans
who've moved north since World War I
find that they're facing a wall of opposition.
Unions discriminate against them.
They're not able to get the same high-paying,
high-benefits union jobs that many white people did.
Realtors and home sellers are discriminating against them.
They're consigned to
some of the worst rental properties in cities.
MAN: The least little thing you do,
it upset...
it unbalanced the cart, and once the cart is tipped,
then the apples begin to roll out,
and they just keep rolling,
and you can't pick them all back up.
The federal government
underwrote the suburbanization of America
through agencies that insured mortgages.
It did so through the G.I. Bill of Rights.
But African Americans, who were helping
to fund these programs through their taxes,
did not get to take part in them,
because of discrimination
among realtors and home sellers.
BOESEL: You've had a generation of young people,
politically conscious.
Black Power
and Black nationalism were in the air at the time.
They rejected the gradualism
of traditional civil rights organizations.
They wanted control,
control of their own communities.
They wanted action.
♪ ♪
There were long histories
of efforts by Black leaders
to pressure city governments
to address a wide variety of problems.
But it never resulted in much.
They're gonna have to find
some other way to bring about change.
Not going through the system anymore,
but turning out in the streets.
HINTON: Many of the young people who participated
had spent their childhoods
witnessing the Civil Rights Movement unfold.
Yet they were still living
with roaches and rats running around,
in public schools that didn't have
up-to-date books or resources.
When nonviolent direct action protests
haven't worked to change your conditions,
then the next step
is violent direct action.
POWELL: The word "riot" has a connotation to it.
The idea of riots being people destroying property,
almost irrational.
It doesn't suggest there's any underlying cause
other than bad actors, if you will.
But I was back in Detroit, visiting my parents;
Detroit was burning.
And I remember going down to the end of the block,
and someone pointing...
I think it was an M-16, at me, and saying,
"Go back where you were."
I was just pissed at America.
That James Brown song comes to mind, you know,
"We'd rather die on our feet than keep living on our knees."
And to me, I felt that way.
And I felt like, "Okay, yeah,
there's a risk involved, but we gotta do something."
♪ ♪
HARRIS: Conditions were such
in every one of these cities,
that almost any spark
could set them off,
and the sparks we found
were the police department.
♪ ♪
MUHAMMED: For African American migrants
who began to leave the South
in first thousands and then tens of thousands
and, over time, hundreds of thousands,
they were leaving the South
one step ahead, often, of racial terrors,
whether it came from a southern sheriff or a lynch mob.
And they came to these northern cities
in hopes that the freedom they found there
would provide safety and security,
in addition to economic mobility.
♪ ♪
Too often, what they found, however,
was that the police,
by and large, were there to protect
the interest of white residents.
♪ ♪
When I was researching
Black people moving into New York City in the 1930s,
one of the things that surprised me
was the number of complaints
from white residents about Black children
playing on playgrounds with their white children.
And they wanted the city administrators
to use the police to keep those Black kids
off those playgrounds.
♪ ♪
This is the kind of pressure
that police officers are not only getting,
but they're responding to.
They're doing this work.
♪ ♪
The white community treats every Black person
on their block, in their store,
on their playground,
as a would-be suspect.
Rhetoric around Black criminality
was the most elastic and most durable way
of justifying segregation.
Police behave differently,
essentially interrogating Black people at every turn.
POLICEMAN: And what did you do?
I pulled right on around-- I come around...
For two blocks... She lives right here.
MUHAMMED: Setting up virtual checkpoints
on the borders of these communities,
doing hostile drives through Black neighborhoods,
as a show of force
for Black people to so-call "stay in their place."
They're policing the boundaries of Black life.
HARRIS: Very often, African Americans in these central cities,
the contact with the police,
that was the only contact
they had with the government.
(indistinct shouting)
And that was a contact which was really
very, very dangerous for them.
(man shouting indistinctly)
Police brutality was a real thing.
But on top of that,
there was really no kind of procedure for grievance
or for complaints.
That, I think,
is a perfect situation waiting for an explosion.
♪ ♪
COBB: So when you see legislation
like the Law Enforcement Assistance Act
coming out in 1965,
it effectively pours gasoline on the very problem
that is at the core of these
uprisings in the first place.
(thumping)
HINTON: As rebellion escalates,
we see a real merger happening
between social welfare programs,
programs specifically targeting Black youth...
(man giving marching instructions)
HINTON: And crime control programs
that are also targeting Black youth.
Police officers are running
after-school recreation programs.
Police started giving toys
and delivering turkeys to families on Thanksgiving,
and to essentially cast a layer of surveillance.
It was about making sure that you could identify
people in the Black community who posed a potential threat
to the neighboring white communities,
taking down the names of potential delinquents.
HINTON: The police also supported tactical patrol units
who walked the streets in order to prevent crime
before it occurred.
Essentially subjecting people of color
to a set of laws
that people in middle-class, suburban,
and white communities would never be subjected to.
POWELL: They would actually stop people
for bumping the tires against the curb
when they're parking, spitting.
Part of it is sending a message.
It's sending a message that we're in control.
You're supposed to be afraid of us.
And we can stop you for any reason.
♪ ♪
BOESEL: They're out on the street all the time.
There are these young people on the street.
The police are trying to keep them moving,
keep them off balance by all of these harassing tactics--
stop and frisk,
make arbitrary arrests
and then they'd be released without charges.
There's this constant conflict,
constant daily rubbing conflict,
between police and young people in the streets.
I have more fear for the police
than I have for the criminal,
because the policeman can do it
and get away with it.
I can fight the criminal back.
(indistinct argument)
BOESEL: There often comes a conspicuous incident of police brutality,
an outrageous act by police.
♪ ♪
In Detroit,
it was a raid on an after-hours social club.
People were partying to celebrate the return
of one veteran from Vietnam
and console another guy who was gonna head to Vietnam.
(siren wailing)
In Newark, it was the beating of a cab driver.
MUHAMMED: When residents observe what's happening,
they decide enough is enough.
Time and time again,
somewhere in that story, is this
moment of exchange, this interaction
between a police officer and a Black person.
ZEITZ: There was an endless cycle, a wave of urban violence
followed by calls for law and order.
Law and order would then express itself
in a heavy-handed way, and this was often
the spark behind the next wave of violence.
HINTON: When Detroit and Newark erupt in '67,
two years into the War on Crime,
that should have been taken as a moment for policy makers
to rethink these strategies.
But policymakers responded
by militarizing police,
so that when and if rebellion comes,
police departments will be ready
to suppress the disorder on their own.
We begin to see local police
getting armored tanks,
getting M-1 and M-14 carbine rifles,
using helicopters, all techniques and devices
that had been used in Vietnam.
HARRIS: We very much were opposed to the military
giving military hardware
and vehicles to the police.
(weapon firing) We thought that the police
ought to be civilians.
They should look like and be a part of
the communities where they served.
Lyndon Johnson himself once had said,
"If I were one of these people
and mistreated the way some of them are by the police,
I might pick up a gun myself."
Later on, I'm sure he was sorry he had said that.
(indistinct yelling)
But that's the way we felt.
♪ ♪
KING: It is estimated
that we spend $322,000
for each enemy we kill in Vietnam,
while we spend
in the so-called War on Poverty in America
only about $53
for each person classified as poor.
♪ ♪
CARTER: Absent the conflict in Southeast Asia,
Lyndon Johnson would go down
as an extraordinarily gifted leader.
But Vietnam is the albatross
that will always hang over Lyndon Johnson's legacy.
JOHNSON: I report to you that our country is challenged,
at home and abroad.
That it is our will that is being tried,
and not our strength.
PROTESTORS: Hell no, we won't go!
(jet engine roaring)
ZEITZ: As he began to lose the hearts and minds of young people,
of people on college campuses,
as, as the war became
a divisive factor in American life,
he was loath to admit how deeply involved
the United States was in Vietnam.
JOHNSON: I wish, with all of my heart,
that the expenditures that are necessary
to build and to protect our power
could all be devoted to the programs of peace.
ZEITZ: He remembered other Democratic presidents
who saw their domestic policy ambitions cut short by wars
that ultimately made it impossible for them
to continue to pursue those goals.
He didn't want that to happen to the Great Society.
FLAMM: Johnson is also hoping desperately
that the Kerner Commission will
acknowledge that his Great Society is
actually making a difference and improving the lives
of Black Americans across the country.
But the Kerner Commission quickly becomes
a runaway commission.
KERNER: Certainly,
in speaking to people, sociologists,
who've been at this thing much longer than I have
and who've made it their specialty,
have all pointed out the fact that there is a,
a feeling of deep inferiority among these people.
They've been rejected as to housing, as to job,
and after job, as to improving the status of the job.
And I do have a feeling myself--
and again, I'm speaking personally--
that the white community of the United States is not aware
of the existence of this problem;
I'm afraid many aren't.
And many who are aware of it
are not aware as to how deep and sensitive this is.
HARRIS: Johnson was getting all the time inside reports,
some from some of the members of the commission itself,
who thought that John Lindsay and I
were going too far.
And that we were going to recommend
huge new federal programs
and not put any money figures on 'em.
And that angered him a great deal,
I was later to find out.
CARTER: That's when Lyndon Johnson becomes acutely aware
of what a political bombshell this might represent.
And as soon as the Kerner Commission becomes
perceived as a potential threat to him politically,
I think he wants to take
the legs out from under it.
♪ ♪
KOSKINEN: My assumption was this was a national crisis,
this was the federal government.
Money was not gonna be the problem.
My role on the commission
was to be the assistant to Victor Palmieri,
the deputy executive director,
who was responsible for the day- to-day operations.
In early December,
we were invited to the White House
to meet with Charlie Schultze,
who was then the director of the Bureau of the Budget,
who had the task of informing us that
we were gonna have to close the commission down
as quickly as we could.
Victor and I, a couple weeks before Christmas,
had to have a meeting with,
by then, 200 members of our staff
to advise them that most of them
were not gonna be on the payroll after January 1.
CHAMBERS: David Ginsburg, for whom I worked, was the director.
He tried very much to protect Johnson,
even though he knew the truth, by saying that
the commission's work was so important
that we were going to get out a report
months, months earlier
in order to have our views before the American people,
before the hot weather of the next summer.
Well, that was baloney.
REPORTER: Governor, some of the ex-staff members of the commission
are all over the Hill complaining to congressmen
that the president or some of the White House people
are torpedoing the work of the commission.
Well, let me say, there is absolutely not
an iota of truth in that.
LINDSAY: This March 1 deadline is a self-imposed deadline
by the commission.
And the reason the commission came to that conclusion
was because of the urgency of the problem.
But it's a very difficult timetable to live with,
because of the mountains of material
that we're working with.
KOSKINEN: What we had to do
was start drafting.
(typewriter keys clacking)
(typewriter bell chimes)
We had eight or ten different people,
some people working on the introduction,
others working on various programmatic sections,
and all of that had to be put into readable form
within a matter of days.
HARRIS: David Ginsburg and Vic Palmieri
were primarily responsible for writing these drafts.
And we discussed, and then actually voted,
on each draft.
All of us were people of very strong opinions,
and so our meetings were quite contentious.
COBB: The commissioners argued over
the significance of social conditions
in creating the uprisings,
how forcefully to condemn the police,
how strongly to support open housing.
And as each of those is resolved,
it sends the commission further down the path
toward its ultimate conclusions.
CHAMBERS: Probably the most significant chapter
was the fourth chapter.
That was drafted by David Ginsburg himself
after sensing a consensus among the commissioners
that the central theme of the report
should be the impacts of white racism on Black people.
And that was the subject
of a whole day's commissioner's meeting.
I remember the commission spending
well over an hour haggling over two sentences.
HARRIS: I thought, and so did John Lindsay,
that it was highly important to use the word "racism."
To say "white racism."
We thought we really needed to shock people
by the use of that term.
And to get people to have...
make people have to think about that
and talk about it, and size up history
in terms of racism
as it had existed from the first.
♪ ♪
We also wanted to say, to young Black people particularly,
you're not crazy.
There is systematic racism that you're a victim of.
The word "racism" didn't sit well
with some members of the commission.
Some thought it was too harsh, that we ought to use
softer words like "intolerance"
or "discrimination" or whatever.
And we had a vote.
It was a six-to-five vote within the commission
in favor of saying "racism."
REPORTER: Governor, are there any measures
that won't cost any money?
Yes, there are recommendations in there
would not cost any money.
And there are the measures that would do away with racism,
we believe, by actually setting forth to the American people
that there is this problem.
Let's not sweep it under the rug.
That there is segregation,
that if we can change people's attitudes,
this will not cost a penny.
HARRIS: On a lot of tough questions, we voted six to five.
But when we got down to the final report,
we eventually adopted it unanimously.
David Ginsburg said once that this is the only
unanimous report that was adopted
by a vote of six to five.
♪ ♪
There was a lot of compromise involved.
We thought, if we can't come together,
there's no hope the country can.
CHAMBERS: Only if those who were
most conservative on the commission
endorsed the strong findings
that we had made, would it have an effect
on white America in general.
And the report was written for white America.
Black people didn't need to be told
that racism was a central problem in their lives.
LINDSAY: I, I trust that the report
will be thoroughly readable,
um, and I expect that it will be completely honest.
Um, that being the case, it will describe, undoubtedly,
a very serious condition in the country.
And, uh, the commission's view undoubtedly will be
that no one can turn their back on that, it's too serious.
HARRIS: We had, well in advance, decided that we wanted to try
to get this out popularly to as many people as possible.
And David Ginsburg, our executive director,
was very prescient about this.
And so made arrangements with Bantam Press
that as we finished one chapter, we would turn that over,
so that they could get it out exactly
when the report was finished.
The other thing we did was to put the report out
with an embargo for the A.M.s
on the morning of March 3.
We wanted time to background the reporters,
journalists, and opinion leaders.
But Alan Spivak, our press secretary,
got word from a "Washington Post" reporter
that the "Washington Post" had a copy
of the summary of the report
and they intended to turn it loose for February 29.
So David Ginsburg talked
to Ben Bradlee of the "Post," said to him, "If you do this,
"we are going to turn loose the summary ourselves.
So that you won't have an exclusive on it."
There was just chaos.
Reporters here, they're looking at all this
and don't have time to digest it.
I got a call
from an AP reporter who said,
"I have a 30-minute deadline.
Can you sort of capsulize the report for me?"
The headlines were very shocking headlines,
particularly if you had not thought about this before,
or known anything about it,
as most people didn't know much about it.
The headlines were something like,
"White Racism Cause of Black Riots, Commission Says."
HARRY REASONER: Good evening, this is Harry Reasoner.
For the last few days,
this country has lived under indictment,
a charge of white racism, national in scale,
terrible in its effects.
The evidence to support that charge has now been presented,
more than 1,400 pages of testimony, findings,
conclusions, the full text of a report released just last night.
This is our basic conclusion.
Our nation is moving toward two societies.
One Black, one white.
Separate and unequal.
The commission found that the country
is at a crossroads, and that a choice can be made
and must be made.
KOSKINEN: You had to really be hibernating somewhere
not to see the media coverage in the press and on television.
But if you wanted to know more in detail,
the fact that you could go to a store
and buy the paperback allowed a million-and-a-half people
within a month to have the actual report in their hand.
HARRIS: We said that white racism has created these Black ghettos,
as we said in those days,
and it's white racism that sustains it.
COBB: This is shocking to the sensibilities in 1968.
There had been large-scale studies
that indicted American racism prior to this.
W.E.B. DuBois had done one, um, you know,
nearly 70 years earlier.
What we had not seen was this kind of argument
being echoed in the highest echelons of American power.
CHAMBERS: It was very important to the commission that people
in the United States understand that more was going on
than that just some of us individuals
didn't like Black people.
It was that kind of change that was necessary
involved the changing of whole institutions.
♪ ♪
ZEITZ: You're looking at a report
that's basically identifying a whole range of public
and private actors who have been responsible
for perpetuating racism, from the banks
to the mortgage providers and the realtors,
to public and private sector unions,
to municipal police forces
and municipal governments more broadly.
This is the first time you had the government saying
these problems are systemic.
Certain people have benefited from the system,
certain people have perpetuated the system,
and other people have been disadvantaged,
and to fix it,
we are probably going to have to rebalance the books.
POWELL: Whites were saying things like,
what's wrong with the Negro in the country?
What's wrong with Black people in the country?
How do we fix them?
What the Kerner Commission did was say,
"Mm, it's not... the problem is
"not so much with them.
The problem is with us."
Here in the populous Central Ward, a Negro district,
the special commission's report was greeted
as an acknowledgement of what Negroes themselves
have been saying in Newark for several years.
WEAVER: The Kerner Commission united the political
and economic abandonment of a group of people
with the cause of American democracy.
They say this forthrightly.
They say our collective future
is in peril.
To pursue our present course,
will involve the continuing polarization
of the American community and, ultimately,
the destruction of basic democratic values.
The alternative will require a commitment to national action--
compassionate, massive, and sustained--
backed by the resources of the most powerful
and richest nation on the earth.
From every American, it will require new attitudes,
new understanding and, above all, new will.
POWELL: The Kerner Commission comes down and says
we don't have to be two Americas.
We can't be two Americas.
We can fix this, but first of all
we have to acknowledge it.
What we've tried to do in this report
is to let people see this thing through our eyes
and to feel it in the pit of their stomachs like we do.
And then if they see what a crisis this really is,
what a terribly serious crisis this is for our country,
I think there'll be a great deal more willingness
to try to move to do something about it.
HARRIS (interview): We called for massive new federal programs,
jobs in particular, but also in education
and in housing and in transportation.
And we called for changes in the media,
and in police.
REPORTER: An integrated police force is a must,
says the commission, a visible symbol for the ghetto
that police are not just the agents of repression
put there by the white majority.
HINTON: The commission suggested all sorts of measures
to promote police-community relations,
to increase trust between residents and police
and to kind of scale back
some of the more aggressive enforcement approaches
that had led to the rebellions in the first place.
These are the major proposals:
on welfare, a new approach,
a form of guaranteed annual income based on the idea
that even in good times, some people can't get jobs
or can't make enough to support their families.
On housing, a national open housing law,
six million new low- and middle-income units.
On jobs, two million new jobs in government and private business.
The cost has been estimated at $2 billion a month.
Something like the cost of the war in Vietnam.
HINTON: The Kerner Commission recognized
that the War on Poverty had not gone far enough.
That what was needed was a massive,
structural transformation to address
the underlying causes of the rebellions.
The report in many ways is a really bold
and exciting vision, uh, for what
U.S. domestic policy could be.
Buy your books on the Riot Commission!
On the Riot Commission!
REPORTER: This is Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn
that's half Black and half white.
At PS 151,
where the pupils are mostly Negro or Puerto Rican,
the school's book fair was enlarged to include a table
full of the paper-bound reports.
Sixth graders were not the best customers,
but throughout the neighborhood in various ways,
more than 2,000 copies of "The Riot Report"
were sold in less than a week.
POWELL: It was a "New York Times" bestseller and it's a tome.
It's not light reading, it's not a comic book.
So there was interest.
COBB: It really becomes a centerpiece of conversation.
You see civic groups,
churches, libraries,
even police departments buying the book in bulk.
Bought already.
At one point, Marlon Brando,
who was then an A-list figure in Hollywood,
made the rounds on talk shows,
carrying a copy of the Kerner Commission Report with him.
This report clearly indicates,
uh, that the Black people
have not been able to pick themselves up
by their bootstraps because
of white feelings against them.
And we all of us have to find out, what is that?
What's going to be the answer to this report?
What answer in the form of action in Washington?
Here's Roger Mudd, who covers Congress.
Roger, what's the impact down there?
Harry, the report has not been accepted on Capitol Hill
as gospel as it has been in most of the editorial reaction,
in the public prints.
The mentality of Capitol Hill is not geared
to, uh, instant reaction to broad programs, broad studies.
It's geared to specific legislative proposals.
As yet, nothing has come from the White House but silence.
When the report was issued,
Johnson already had a good sense of what was in it.
His reaction was the most negative of any president
who ever received a report from a commission he'd created.
He refused to accept a copy.
He refused to thank the commissioners.
He refused to hold what had already become a custom,
receiving it from them and thanking them for it,
maybe having everybody appear on the White House lawn.
REPORTER: Mr. Lindsay, does it seem strange and peculiar
that the president would not choose to comment
on the findings of the commission
that he himself appointed?
Not necessarily at all.
It's a very large report, very comprehensive,
and, uh, needs a lot of review.
HARRIS: We didn't really think about whether Lyndon Johnson
would like what we said or found or recommended.
He said, "Find the truth and express it in your report."
That's what we did.
And we were really disappointed, surprised,
that he, he rejected it.
LYNDON JOHNSON: Every time you appoint one of these committees,
you get more than you can do anything about.
They recommended that I spend $80 million,
and I got no place to get the 80-- I can't borrow it.
I can't tax it, I can't get a tax bill
of any kind, and they didn't discuss that.
That's a detail they didn't get into.
HARRIS: Johnson was just in a mess.
The Tet Offensive had happened in January of that year.
WALTER CRONKITE: We have been too often disappointed
by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam
and Washington, to have faith any longer
in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.
For it seems now more certain
than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam
is to end in a stalemate.
PROTESTORS (chanting): Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
Hey, hey, LBJ...
HARRIS: There were increasing demonstrations
all around the country and right outside the White House
with people saying, "LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
His own popularity had sunk to 36 percent.
JOHNSON: I've not wanted to reflect on Kerner
and criticize the commission.
At the same time, I couldn't embrace it
because I've got to have some fiscal solvency,
and I can't have it unless I have a tax bill.
LINDSAY: We're not talking about something
that is going to kill the country.
Over a five-year period,
we put $18 billion into highways alone.
Another $18 to $20 billion into the space program.
Now is this country going to say that it's impossible
to correct the cancer that exists
in the center of these, of these cities?
ZEITZ: So it's bad enough that it's a presidential commission
and it's Johnson's presidential commission,
but it's also populated
with leading white liberal politicians
who are effectively telling white America,
you're responsible for the racism.
You're responsible for the violence.
You're responsible for what you see on TV.
And this is in the lead-up to the 1968 elections.
Johnson was already conducting a fair amount of public polling.
Richard Scammon, who was his pollster,
looked at the electorate
and came back to him and said, "Look, the median voter in 1968
is un-young, un-Black, and un-poor."
And it fundamentally created a political problem for Johnson.
The great irony of the Kerner Commission
is that Johnson sets it up
as a way of building support for his presidency.
But in the end, it puts him in an impossible position.
He can't accept the recommendations without
alienating the conservative members of Congress.
He also can't criticize it without alienating liberals.
He can't please anyone.
ZEITZ: There was also a sense that he had run out of steam
and run out of capital; he liked being president
to do things and it was by no means clear that,
were he able to eke out another term,
he'd be able to expand on the Great Society
or build bigger domestic policy programs.
In all likelihood, he would've had to just continue
what he was doing,
which was managing an unruly nation at home and a war
that seemed impossible to get out of abroad.
CARTER: I think Johnson sort of felt, increasingly,
"Where are my allies?
"People are failing to appreciate that in fact
I did do more for this country than many other presidents."
With American sons in the fields far away,
with America's future under challenge right here at home,
I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day
of my time to any personal partisan causes
or to any duties other
than the awesome duties of this office.
Accordingly, I shall not seek,
and I will not accept, the nomination of my party
for another term as your president.
(indistinct chatter)
♪ ♪
(people chattering)
ROBERT F. KENNEDY: Ladies and gentlemen...
(clears throat)
I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so
this evening because I have,
I have some very sad news for all of you,
and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens
and people who love peace all over the world.
And that is that
Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight
in Memphis, Tennessee.
(crowd screams in anguish)
♪ ♪
CARTER: So many Americans felt this sense of
our last best hope
for the prospects of nonviolence has been taken away from us.
(indistinct talking)
♪ ♪
In the aftermath of King's assassination,
when you see a replay
of the kind of violence that had taken place
in the summer of 1967,
it feels as though the Kerner Commission's prophecies
are simply being fulfilled.
(siren blaring)
HINTON: At least a hundred cities erupted
in the days and weeks after.
Martin Luther King, the king of love,
the king of nonviolence and peace,
for him to get assassinated
really made the entire future of Black Americans
seem as uncertain as ever.
FLAMM: The country is truly in flames.
The U.S. military has to send thousands and thousands
of troops to the capitol
to protect Congress and the White House.
You have angry and fearful members of Congress
pleading with Johnson
to issue shoot-to-kill orders to the U.S. soldiers
who are in Washington, D.C.
(siren wailing)
CHAMBERS: We were all,
all of us extremely depressed about the assassination
that had just occurred, but I also felt,
well, this is, of course, exactly what you expect, right?
And later that night, I went downtown,
and as we turned off of 14th Street,
we were looking straight ahead
at a tank coming toward us, and...
I remember thinking
this just can't be the America that we live in.
Soon after the National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders published its report last month,
members of the commission received a telegram,
which concluded with the following words,
"My only hope now is that white America
"and our national government will heed your warnings
"and implement your recommendations.
"By ignoring them, we will sink inevitably
"into a nightmarish racial doomsday.
"God grant that your excellent report will educate the nation
and lead to action before it is too late."
The telegram was signed by Martin Luther King Jr.
Now, just six weeks after that telegram was sent,
it's too late to answer the martyred Dr. King.
It could be that out of this tragedy,
as sorrowful it has... as it has left
most of us, would come a jolt,
a kind of a realization that we cannot continue,
again to quote the report, on the present course.
GILLON: Liberals in Congress had been trying
to pass the Fair Housing Act for years.
But in the wake of the King assassination
and in light of the report's recommendations,
there's new momentum.
So if there's one significant piece of legislation that is
the direct result of the Kerner Commission,
it's the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
CARTER: But those who know the Fair Housing Act of 1968 well
know that it is at best a toothless attempt
to deal with the worst aspects of housing discrimination.
It doesn't begin to address the fundamental things
that are keeping Blacks from being able to break out
of what someone called an encircling noose,
these white suburbs around Black inner-city areas.
It's too little and too late.
CHAMBERS: When I ask myself what the commissioners thought
would be the impact of the report
and whether it would produce the kind of change
that they were calling for, I suspect very few of them
were naive enough to believe that, "Well, goodbye racism.
We're gonna have a new world here."
I think they just hoped
it would be a small nudge in the right direction.
The report did have its impacts here and there.
For instance, the commission had critiqued the media,
saying they tended to look at these issues
through the eyes of white men.
And you did see news organizations
diversifying their ranks.
They did pledge to cover urban issues with more nuance,
and more balance.
But, by and large, the political and moral will
that the report had hoped to summon,
it doesn't really come to pass.
HARRIS: Virtually all of my mail was really mean and hate mail.
But a lot of people were, I think, kind of puzzled,
sort of, sort of like my dad.
The way he heard the Kerner Report was, "Mr. Harris,
"out of the goodness of your heart,
"you ought to pay more taxes
to help poor Black people who are rioting in Detroit."
He said this to me,
he said, "The hell with that.
"I'm having a hard enough time myself.
"I'm already paying too much tax,
and not getting anything for it."
And that, that was true.
A new white backlash is plainly visible in the country.
The lead story in today's "Wall Street Journal" is headed,
"Ghetto Violence Brings Hardening of Attitudes
Toward Negro Gains."
FLAMM: Law and order broadly defined becomes the most pressing,
most powerful political issue
for white voters in America by early 1968.
Urban unrest is the number one concern.
(gun firing)
REPORTER: The sale of firearms has doubled in the last year.
The tension of Negro disillusionment is in the air,
and so is white anxiety,
with both sides fearing an incident that will escalate.
Why buy it?
Because I want to be able to shoot through a car at somebody
if they bomb my house.
I'm going to be prepared; I got food, I got water.
Right now, I got about 150 rounds of shells.
My whole neighborhood's that way.
(crowd clamoring)
ROBERT F. KENNEDY: What we're going to do in the year 1968
is going to determine the future of this country
for decades and decades ahead.
POWELL: Very little in history is inevitable.
It's important to remember, because sometimes,
in our more cynical states, we think nothing matters
and it's all gonna be bad.
And actually we don't know how it's gonna matter,
but it matters.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY: I run because it is
now unmistakably clear
that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies
only by changing the men who are now making them.
For the reality of recent events in Vietnam
has been glossed over with illusions.
Report of the Riot Commission has been largely ignored.
The crisis in our cities
and in our ghettos have all been met
with too little and too late.
POWELL: I think Robert Kennedy really cared about the country.
And increasingly to him,
that included marginalized people,
including African Americans.
CROWD (chanting): RFK! RFK! RFK! RFK!
(crowd whistling, cheering)
So my thanks to all of you,
and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there. Thank you.
(cheers and applause)
(people screaming)
(screaming, panicking)
(screaming, sound dissipates)
MAN: What do I think about the future?
There ain't no future, that's all there is to it.
WOMAN: No future at all.
REPORTER: Why don't you think there's a future?
YOUNG MAN: Kennedy-- they killed Kennedy, they killed King,
they killed Evers. Who's they?
They're killing all the, all the people that do something...
Malcolm X. White people.
Yeah, that do something for the Black man,
you know, that stood up for 'em. Thank you, thank you.
I have to believe, maybe 'cause I wanna believe,
that if, um, Kennedy had lived,
uh, the Kerner Commission would've lived
and the country would be in such a different place.
(crowd chanting)
But instead,
Nixon comes along and says, "We're not doing this."
For the past five years,
we have been deluged by government programs
for the unemployed, programs for the cities,
programs for the poor, and we have reaped from these programs
an ugly harvest
of frustration, violence, and failure across the land.
I say it's time to quit pouring billions of dollars
into programs that have failed in the United States of America.
GILLON: Richard Nixon repeats all the things
that, that the conservatives were saying
about the Kerner Commission Report.
That it seems to reward rioters,
that there needs to be a greater emphasis on law and order.
And that becomes the central theme of his,
of his campaign in 1968, was law and order.
NIXON: Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American
is to be free from domestic violence.
CARTER: Richard Nixon will very skillfully tap into this
sense of what about the non-protestors?
(ominous music playing in ad)
We've lost sight of the fact that many Americans
still see America as a land of opportunity.
Why all this focus
on unhappy people, people demanding things,
and worse, burning things down to further their agenda.
♪ ♪
This is not the American way.
♪ ♪
HINTON: Lyndon Johnson had introduced
a new punitive element in national policy.
Of course, Johnson did this
alongside his ambitious social welfare program.
But when Richard Nixon took office, he abandoned
the social welfare part and really seized
on the punitive elements of the Great Society and expanded them.
RICHARD NIXON: I, Richard Millhouse Nixon, do solemnly swear...
HINTON: So we begin to see even more aggressive
policing tactics being embraced by national policy makers.
We begin to see
more draconian laws
and sentencing provisions being enacted.
And the carceral state continued to expand.
HARRIS: The disturbances unfortunately had a short-term effect,
if you were going to demagogue about it
and was very helpful to Nixon.
And to other conservative politicians since then.
We began to turn backwards on desegregation
and on virtually everything else.
BOESEL: There was a long period of
social conservatism after the riots,
prompted by the riots.
They issued in a racially conservative political era
in which law and order and repression
pretty much prevailed,
and that suited most of the white citizenry of the country.
♪ ♪
MUHAMMED: I've talked to a lot of people about this and heard,
consistently heard, people my age, early 50s say,
"You know, I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit.
"My parents always said,
you can't go to Detroit, it's not safe."
Which was just code word for saying Black people live there.
The ghetto was reinforced.
HARRIS: The commission told the truth, but it was a harsh truth.
The secretary of labor back then
said, you can capsulize the commission's report
in the words of that great American philosopher, Pogo,
who said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
♪ ♪
My service on the Kerner Commission
and the advocacy which followed it,
in a way kind of ruined me as a senator.
Hubert Humphrey was vice president
when I became a senator at age 33,
and he said that compromise is the essence
of the operations of a legislative body.
He said, "I don't mean compromise on principle,
but I mean on how we do it or how much we do this year."
And I came to a time after the Kerner Report that I,
I just...
I couldn't compromise.
I, I knew that's what we had been doing
and that that had got us in the mess we're in.
♪ ♪
We had people around the Senate, even, who said,
"Well, Black people in America are much better off
than they are anywhere else in the world."
You know, in Zambia or somewhere.
The answer to that is, these are Americans.
They're not in Africa.
And they're not trying to tear down the system.
They want to be a, a part of it.
They're trying to get the country to do
what it says it believes in.
They're trying, trying to make democracy work.
COBB: My first serious engagement with the Kerner Report was in 1992,
in the aftermath of the Rodney King uprisings in Los Angeles.
And you heard the word Kerner again and again and again.
And it has remained this touchstone, you know,
this vitally important document, that unfortunately
has retained its relevance over the span of history.
♪ ♪
The Kerner Commission did not deign to take the easy way out.
They told the nation what exactly the problem was.
Even if it meant that no one was going to listen to them.
♪ ♪
ANNOUNCER: "American Experience: The Riot Report"
is available with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video.
♪ ♪