Kerner Commission

I wanna touch on some of the key touchstones for that.

There is the Kerner Report in 1968 and Robert L. Allen's Reluctant Reformers in 1974.

What were the arguments in those texts and how did they inform some of our ideas about racial justice now?

Okay, yeah, and that's really important.

And it's funny because I'm doing another cut on that stuff now for the last chapter of the book.

So the Kerner Report is kind of an interesting study in how ideology works.

So President Johnson impaneled the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.

And the committee took its name from its chair, who was then the governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, who became the first of many new governors of Illinois to go to jail after his term was over.

Yes.

And so if you want to do a quick walkthrough, there was in the late 60s, something called a Kerner Commission Report, because there were all these riots after Martin King was assassinated and the Kennedys were assassinated.

And there were urban riots all around the country.

Watts, Chicago, Detroit blew up.

And part of what the Kerner Commission looked at was, like, what are some of the core causes for all of this upheaval around the country? And among other things, like police brutality and lack of jobs for primarily Black and Latino communities, one of their findings was that the news industry writ large, coast to coast, had not been accurately and fairly covering these communities, right? That was a really signature finding.

And it became, by the time I entered journalism school in the 80s in San Francisco, my hometown, you know, they put that in front of us.

And our instructors walked us through that part of the Kerner Commission findings and said, this is why we take seriously.

And at the time, they called it minority affairs coverage.

So they created a commission that came up with some plans, but they never carried through those plans from 1964, even up until right now.

So then there was another commission called the Kerner Commission.

Now, this Kerner Commission in the United States, the study does the civil unrest.

That probably, and I haven't seen one since that time, that's probably the most accurate and best study, at least done by the government, as far as to detail the effects of the racism, white racism, upon Black people.

but, you know, people of color in general.

And there were, you know, disturbances all over the United States because people were just tired of Jim Crow.

And So President Johnson wanted to find out what was going on, how they could stop it.

And the Kerner Commission came up with some ways to do that.

We can talk a little about that.

But there's also a strong connection to the Kerner Commission, which was led by a former Illinois or then Illinois governor, Otto Kerner.

And this was the big Lyndon Johnson administration response to all the urban protests, riots, however you want to phrase it, in the late 1960s.

So talk a little bit about the origins of 9-1-1 and how it really came to be.

But there seemed to be, you know, sort of more to that story.

And so as we started to dig in, what we learned was that there were two commissions that were happening at the same time.

There was the Kerner Commission and then there was also the Cotton Botch Commission.

And the Cotton Botch Commission was designed in order to sort of help understand the administration of justice.

We don't think about, even though there's like reams of evidence, academic research.

I mean, we knew this back in the 60s with the Kerner Commission, which was commissioned by the Johnson administration, which basically found that most of the racial turmoil of the civil rights era was due to material conditions.

It was due to the fact that there are all of these like police riots and race riots and whatever else of the 60s come from the fact that there's a structural inequality and that the best way to address that is not by increasing spending for the police, which Nixon would do in 68 and going forward, but rather in addressing those kind of root causes and trying to create a more equitable and just society.

But we don't want to do that because that's a lot harder and also because there are a lot of I think people also don't think of the police, I think we've kind of been getting around it in this part, but policing capital as a political entity who are putting their thumb on the scale and trying to tell their story.

They're not going to just lay down and take it.

If the Kerner Commission says we should be spending less money on the police and spending more money on social welfare, the police are not going to just be like, yeah, okay, take our money.

I don't care.

Like, They're going to fight for that in a very understandable way, even if I disagree with them.

However, in response to the criticism of that model, largely, I mean, this has been an ongoing debate and it was really brought to the fore following the death of George Floyd.

States have sort of layered on additional mechanisms of So beginning around the 1960s, particularly following some pretty prominent urban uprisings that prompted what was called the Kerner Commission, policymakers were increasingly recognizing that communities lacked confidence in police departments' ability to investigate their own officers.

And the Kerner Commission itself highlighted the tensions between police departments and minority communities.

And they called for a greater level of responsiveness and greater accountability.

So in the decades that followed, cities began experimenting with civilian review boards, with auditors, with inspectors general, with independent monitors, special prosecutors, attorney general investigations, and eventually the federal government actually got involved too with federal consent decrees and pattern or practice investigations through the civil rights unit at DOJ.

Are you aware of the political climate upon which the film kind of arose? Between 1967 and 1972, there were over 300 urban rebellions across the country.

So when you say the, when we say the film was pulled out of theaters, and the book had difficulty being published, do we understand the context in which, what was going on in America? I mean, literally, the Kerner Commission report was published in nine- I believe 1968 or '69.

Lyndon Johnson thought that the Soviet Union was aiding Black America in trying to develop a covert revolution, so, so much so that he actually empaneled a federal commission, Senate Commission, to do an investigation on what was the cause of these urban rebellions.

So in consideration of those realities- Can you see why a film like The Spook Who Sat by the Door, it not only would be not surprising why they pulled it, it's almost surprising as how it could've been made at that particular time.

I am America, and I'm so much so an American that the Founding Fathers put in place for all of us, the journalists, to be able to ask questions of the White House, of the government, for accountability.

And then I wanna take you back to the Kerner Commission report when-- if we wanna talk about special groups, if we wanna consider someone a special group.

The Kerner Commission report, at the back of the report, it talked about journalists.

It talked about Black journalists being in spaces and places like the White House, City Hall, the State House, so that we could ask questions to get answers to quell any kind of upset.

That was in 1968.

But the history, history is real, but the history would be just kind of dry sawdust without the, the relationships, and these are the most important things, you know? Um, yeah.

And hey, like I, I will tell you, like I didn't know about the Kerner report, which then I immediately downloaded because-

[laughs]

... you know, that's which comes up, and I thought, "All right." Again, something I love about books is when they teach you something else that you had no idea about.