Jelani Cobb Re-examines Kerner Commission’s Findings as They’re Playing Out in 2021

The Kerner Commission was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 to investigate the causes of urban uprisings in Detroit, Newark and other American cities in the 1960s. Upon its completion in 1968, the commission report famously stated that America was, “moving towards two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” More than 50 years later, Jelani Cobb says this warning is just as robust today. 

“I think one of the reasons that the Kerner Report was so shocking, was because it called white people on racism … They placed the responsibility of the situation directly on the doorstep of white America.” –Jelani Cobb, author of “The Essential Kerner Commission Report” 

Listen: The lasting legacy of the Kerner Commission.

Guest 

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for the New Yorker and Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. He’s the editor of “The Essential Kerner Commission Report,” a new re-issue of the report that includes his introduction re-examining its findings in a present-day context. 

Cobb says the Kerner Commission examined major urban crises prompted by the decades-long mass disinvestment of cities. “After [World War II] people started to get opportunities in suburbia, they built highways,” he says. “There was an opportunity hoarding that turned cities into a reservoir of disadvantaged and forgotten people.” Cobb says the commission suggested a major source of urban violence was the institutionalized racism of white America. “I think one of the reasons that the Kerner report was so shocking, was because it called white people on racism … They placed the responsibility of the situation directly on the doorstep of white America.” 

He says in today’s context, the Kerner Commission is valuable for its study of policing and other systemically prejudiced American institutions. “The police are the only ones that physically touch you … the violence of poor housing and low-quality education … all of those things are abstract. But the actual violence we see [with the police] … that is concrete.”

Cobb says it’s important to revisit the Kerner Report because it highlights the historic inequities purposefully embedded in our society, which can’t simply go away with time. “We can have all the policies about prosecution of police for criminal conduct or excessive use of force … but unless you have grand juries that are willing to hand down indictments, those laws don’t matter.”