The Essential Kerner Commission Report

by Jelani Cobb (Editor), Matthew Guariglia (Editor), Jelani Cobb (Introduction)

Overview

Recognizing that an historic study of American racism and police violence should become part of today’s canon, Jelani Cobb contextualizes it for a new generation.

The Kerner Commission Report, released a month before Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, is among a handful of government reports that reads like an illuminating history book—a dramatic, often shocking, exploration of systemic racism that transcends its time. Yet Columbia University professor and New Yorker correspondent Jelani Cobb argues that this prescient report, which examined more than a dozen urban uprisings between 1964 and 1967, has been woefully neglected.

In an enlightening new introduction, Cobb reveals how these uprisings were used as political fodder by Republicans and demonstrates that this condensed edition of the Report should be essential reading at a moment when protest movements are challenging us to uproot racial injustice. A detailed examination of economic inequality, race, and policing, the Report has never been more relevant, and demonstrates to devastating effect that it is possible for us to be entirely cognizant of history and still tragically repeat it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631498923
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/27/2021
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	169,745
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

A staff writer at The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb was a former student of Stanley Crouch.

A staff writer at The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb was a former student of Stanley Crouch.

Table of Contents

Introduction Jelani Cobb ix

The Essential Kerner Commission Report

The following table of contents is a redacted version of the original contents page of The Kerner Commission Report

Summary 7

Preface 29

Part I What Happened?

Chapter 1 Profiles of Disorder 37

Chapter 2 Patterns of Disorder 87

Part II Why Did It Happen?

Chapter 4 The Basic Causes 137

Chapter 6 The Formation of the Racial Ghettos 141

Chapter 7 Unemployment, Family Structure and Social Disorganization 156

Chapter 8 Conditions of Life in the Racial Ghetto 169

Part III What Can Be Done?

Chapter 11 Police and the Community 187

Chapter 12 Control of Disorder 218

Chapter 15 The News Media and the Disorders 235

Chapter 17 Recommendations for National Action 264

Conclusion 275

Appendix: Frequently Asked Questions 277

Additional Reading 285

Editorial Reviews

06/28/2021

New Yorker staff writer Cobb (The Substance of Hope) presents an astutely abridged and incisively contextualized version of the 1968 Kerner Commission Report on the racial uprisings that roiled U.S. cities between 1964 and 1967. Cobb’s concise introduction delves into the origins of the commission and highlights key findings, including the insight that even though police violence provoked the uprisings, “police were simply the spear’s tip of much broader systemic and institutional failures” in low-income Black neighborhoods. Cobb also details how “white racial resentment” over the unrest fueled a conservative backlash that led to the decadeslong “war on crime,” and sketches subsequent “conflagrations” sparked by the 1992 acquittal of four L.A. police officers in the beating of Rodney King and the 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The report itself is startlingly blunt (“White institutions created , white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it”) and remarkably prescient—readers will even find precursors to today’s movement to “defund” the police. In the appendix, Cobb briskly and persuasively tackles “frequently asked questions,” such as “Why do people burn down their own neighborhoods?” The result is an essential resource for understanding what Cobb calls the “chronic national predicament” of racial unrest. (July)

Publishers Weekly

07/01/2021

This condensed version of the 1967 report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (popularly known as the Kerner Commission Report) is a telling document of the long history of racial and social unrest in the United States, and of the need to make fundamental structural and institutional change. With a perceptive introduction by historian Cobb (staff writer, The New Yorker), this version of the report, co-edited by historian Guariglia, is indeed essential for what it presents and why its findings still matter. This edition includes the vital parts of the original report; it largely omits individual accounts of many examples of unrest in the 1960s and lets the accounts from Detroit and Newark stand for the rest. As the original report insisted, and as this version does as well, white American society must understand these issues and act immediately and forcefully to correct these wrongs. VERDICT The Kerner Commission Report was in its day a tour de force of investigation and recommendation, with a sense of urgency that still echoes in this edition. What was true in 1967 remains so in the 21st century, and this version of the report might point the way toward a national resolution, if the United States summons the will and wherewithal to make change.—Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

Library Journal

★ 2021-05-19
A timely distilled version of the powerful report on racism in the U.S.

Created by Lyndon Johnson’s executive order in 1967, the Kerner Commission was convened in response to inner-city riots in cities like Newark and Detroit, and its findings have renewed relevance in the wake of the George Floyd verdict and other recent police brutality cases. The report, named for Otto Kerner, the chairman of the commission and then governor of Illinois, explored the systemic reasons why an “apocalyptic fury” broke out that summer even in the wake of the passage of significant civil rights and voting acts—a response with striking echoes in recent events across the country. In this edited and contextualized version, New Yorker staff writer Cobb, with the assistance of Guariglia, capably demonstrates the continued relevance and prescience of the commission’s findings on institutionalized discriminatory policies in housing, education, employment, and the media. The commission was not the first to address racial violence in the century, and it would not be the last, but the bipartisan group of 11 members—including two Blacks and one woman—was impressively thorough in its investigation of the complex overarching social and economic issues at play. “The members were not seeking to understand a singular incident of disorder,” writes Cobb, “but the phenomenon of rioting itself.” Johnson wanted to know what happened, why it happened, and what could be done so it doesn’t happen “again and again.” Of course, it has happened again and again, and many of the report’s recommendations remain unimplemented. This version of the landmark report features a superb introduction by Cobb and a closing section of frequently asked questions—e.g., “How come nothing has been done about these problems?” The book contains plenty of fodder for crucial national conversations and many excellent ideas for much-needed reforms that could be put into place now.

A welcome new version of a publication that is no less important now than it was in 1967.

Kirkus Reviews