The Government Report That Blamed Whites For Black Riots

The Kerner Commission is a testament to the perfidy of American liberalism

Race riots devastated America in 1967. The Newark riot killed at least 26 people. The Detroit riot killed 43. Several other cities also witnessed violence that resembled ghetto insurrections in ‘67 and in the years before. A terrified nation looked to the federal government for a solution to this urban menace.

Lyndon B. Johnson, the man who enacted the Civil Rights Revolution, was at a loss for what was going on. He had done more than any president since Abraham Lincoln to lift up blacks; and they paid him back with race riots. A disoriented and beleaguered LBJ settled on handing off a solution to a presidential commission. He hoped the body’s report would vindicate his civil rights policies and make a few minor, inoffensive suggestions for containing the problem.

Instead, the Kerner Commission offered a radical, far-left broadside to a troubled nation. It declared the riots a result of white racism, and demanded America redistribute white wealth to the ghettos. The commission report embarrassed LBJ and helped Richard Nixon paint Democrats as out of touch with the Silent Majority. Americans wanted law and order, but the Kerner Commission insisted on coddling the rioters. LBJ, knowing the national mood, didn’t want to embrace it. But the left wing of the Democratic Party championed it, with Robert F. Kennedy making it part of his presidential campaign.

Today, the report is remembered by academics and journalists as a missed opportunity that could’ve made America a better country. PBS’s 2024 documentary on the Kerner Commission emphasized this point ad nauseam. But only an idiot would think that. The Kerner Commission shows how many of the “woke” tendencies we decry in our era are nothing new; they’ve been with us for a long time and inspired officials to make insane recommendations all the way back in the 1960s. The report was not prophetic in the least. Race riots died down in the 1970s in large part due to law enforcement cracking down on black militants. Claims the report could’ve made America better overlook the tremendous level of resources and privileges this country gave to blacks after the 1960s. Yet, the PBS documentary and modern textbooks imagine America cruelly left blacks behind.

This must be imagined in order to defend liberalism. Horrific race riots undermined support for further civil rights legislation and social welfare programs. The Kerner report offered a convenient villain for this change: whites. That fact, along with its radical solutions, makes the Kerner Commission worthy of left-wing veneration. But it doesn’t deserve that. Any right-thinking person should look upon it with contempt.

The commission wasn’t stacked with radicals. LBJ sought to make it a bipartisan body with moderate politicians and respectable public figures. It was nominally led by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner Jr., a middle-of-the-road Democrat. The rest of the commission, whether Republican or Democrat, would’ve been considered “centrists.” There were only two blacks on the commission: NAACP head Roy Wilkins and liberal Republican Senator Edward Brooke. Both were mocked by black militants and were more moderate than Martin Luther King Jr. LBJ ensured that all of its members supported his civil rights legislation, mostly in the hope that the commission would vindicate his agenda.

But, as Steven M. Gillon outlines in Separate and Unequal, the commission was taken in a different direction by two unlikely Anglo-Saxon figures. New York Mayor John Lindsay was an archetypal WASP patrician. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed Lindsay was born to a wealthy New York family and went to Yale for undergrad and law school. His good looks made some journalists see him as the Republican answer to JFK. In spite of his WASP background and GOP affiliation, Lindsay was a bleeding-heart liberal. He would go on to switch parties and wreck New York City.

His primary ally on the commission was Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris. Harris was a salt-of-the-earth Middle American. He grew up in rural poverty and had a populist streak. His background made him an unusual champion of black militant demands, but he came to see this as one of the central issues of his political career. It would come to alienate him from his own voters.

Harris lived long enough to participate in the PBS documentary. I couldn’t help but loathe him. Here’s this folksy gentile from Oklahoma talking about how the government needs to spend billions to reward rioters and how bad “white racism” is. It’s expected to hear this from coastal liberals and black columnists. But to hear from it an “my pappy always said…” type is too much to take.

Lindsay and Harris demonstrate how the Civil Rights Revolution came to be accepted in the country. It wasn’t just some trick pulled by ethnic outsiders and black militants. The Anglo core of the nation (southern whites excepted) largely acquiesced to it. They felt it was the “right thing to do.” They thought the legislation, which would undermine the Constitution and racially discriminate against whites, was in line with what the Founders intended. They respected MLK (at least in the early 60s) and some even sympathized with the Black Panthers.

Lindsay and Harris are two completely different sides of “Heritage America”--and they both blamed black riots on white racism and demanded massive government expenditures to placate black radicals. While they didn’t represent the Silent Majority in 1968 (Nixon and George Wallace were closer to public opinion), they weren’t outliers. Without “Heritage Americans” like Lindsay and Harris, we wouldn’t have had the Civil Rights Revolution or the Hart-Celler Act.

You could say they were duped into supporting these changes. But they genuinely believed in them. They felt it was truly American to do so and made the country better.

They were dead wrong.

Their agenda did not go unchallenged on the commission. Their primary opponent was Tex Thornton, a Texas businessman and LBJ associate. Thornton was a rare source of common sense among the liberal majority. The critic opposed using the commission to push for radical social reforms and blaming the riots on white racism. He felt the body should focus on how law enforcement should respond to the riots rather than trying to change society. But the commission was more interested in assailing the police for somehow causing the violence than providing federal aid to law enforcement. Thornton was incensed by the commission seemingly excusing the riots by blaming white racism and poverty. In Thornton’s opinion, that gave a permission slip to 30 million Americans to riot whenever they pleased. The businessman was troubled by the conditions within the black community, but believed they were the result of black culture rather than intentional oppression.

While Thornton was extremely critical of the commission, he lent his approval to its final report. He was persuaded to do so after threatening to offer his own minority opinion dissenting from the consensus. Lindsay and the other liberals threatened to offer their own separate opinions–which would be even more radical than the final report–if he did so. That convinced Thornton to sign off.

Thornton could’ve been a hero. Instead, he chose the path of least resistance, making him an accurate representative of the Silent Majority. Many Americans were fed up with the riots and the demands of civil rights activists. But they weren’t about to revolt over it. A number were still willing to go along with left-wing demands, so long as they were left alone. That seemed to be Thornton’s primary reason for accepting a report he strongly disagreed with–and it provides another reason why middle America uneasily accepted the Civil Rights Revolution. They were left with few alternatives. When faced with no choices, most just went with the flow. But when given a choice to reject the radical changes, as they would be given in the ‘68 election, they would take it.

Thornton wasn’t the only critical member to sign off on the report. Another skeptic, Republican congressman William McCulloch, didn’t agree with the commission’s recommendations for extravagant government spending. The fiscal conservative, however, agreed with the report blaming white racism for the riots.

The report offered a searing indictment of white America.

“What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the Kerner report argued. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

It warned that America “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.” This dire prospect inspired the commission to demand the government spend incredible amounts of money to provide employment, housing, and additional welfare to the ghettos. It also urged for even more money to be doled out for education in black communities. Instead of requesting additional resources and tough-on-crime laws to back local police, the commission recommended that lawmakers work to eliminate “police brutality.”

The commission was a product of its members and staff meeting with black militants, community activists, and other progressives. It didn’t really care for the opinions of law enforcement. Unsurprisingly, it ended up as a far-left document meant to cater to the most radical elements of the hood.

The report could’ve even been worse. The commission reached out to academics to help study the problem. The academics produced an even crazier paper, called The Harvest of American Racism. This report explicitly defended the rioters and argued that the violence was a rational response to white racism. Its conclusion, written by sociologist Lou Goldberg, sounded like a Black Power manifesto. It threatened America would face a race war if it did not embark on “highly accelerated social change.” That would require the government to hand over control of these communities to black militants and directly fund the radicals. According to Goldberg, only they knew what to do with that money.

The academics’ report was too much for the commission to stomach and was rejected.

The Kerner report immediately captured public attention when it was released in early 1968. The book version became a massive bestseller. Newspapers throughout the country covered it and debated its findings. So did politicians. LBJ was agitated by the report and didn’t even bother thanking the commissioners for their work. He would later come to tout most of its findings after his Democratic rivals championed the report, in particular Robert F. Kennedy. Elite opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of the report, but the people weren’t. Republicans would pick up on that disconnect for the ‘68 election, with Nixon holding up the report as evidence of liberals losing touch with the Silent Majority.

Then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan also skewered the report. But he said his fellow Republicans needed to take the commission’s indictment of white racism seriously, claiming “prejudice” caused many of the problems of the 60s. He said they needed to offer conservative solutions to the issue of “equal rights,” trusting that the free market and individual initiative could handle the matter.

Reagan’s response shows how many Americans were willing to accept white racism’s alleged responsibility for the riots. Even back then, public figures were already beholden to the Left’s dictates.

While Congress did pass the Fair Housing Act in 1968, the government didn’t carry out the Kerner report’s recommendations. And the Fair Housing Act wasn’t enough to satisfy the Left’s demands for housing support. LBJ privately griped that he had no way of finding the billions the commission demanded. Nixon won the presidential election, and that effectively buried the report.

Liberals today see that as a tragedy. The PBS documentary laments that RFK didn’t become president and save the country from the ruin promised by the Kerner report. The report’s authors thought it was possible America would turn into Algeria or Northern Ireland if its solutions weren’t accepted. But we didn’t take up the recommendations, and blacks apparently remained second-class citizens with no opportunities, no jobs, no schools, and no welfare. At least that’s what the viewers of the PBS doc are supposed to believe.

None of this is true, of course. America did not experience a guerrilla insurrection like Algeria. In fact, tough law enforcement prevented one from breaking out. The FBI cracked down hard on black militants, breaking up their networks, and discrediting their leaders. The Kerner report insisted there was no connection between militant leaders and the riots. But once the feds undermined these leaders, race riots died down.

Instead of a race war, America experienced a massive crime wave that pushed whites out of the cities. Several cities came to be dominated by black power. As we can see with Detroit, Cleveland, and other cities, it was for the worst. John Lindsay tried to govern New York City with the spirit of the Kerner Commission–and he turned the Big Apple into a hellhole. Soft-on-crime policies, socialist housing initiatives, and more generous welfare did nothing but make the city’s problems worse. No other person deserves more blame for New York’s sorry, pre-Giuliani state than John Lindsay.

The PBS documentary conveniently overlooked Lindsay’s attempts to enact the Kerner agenda in his own city.

It also failed to mention all that America did for blacks after the 60s. Public housing was expanded, affirmative action was enshrined, billions were spent on urban public education, welfare was generously doled out, government jobs went overwhelmingly to blacks, and they received two federal holidays to celebrate themselves. In spite of all this, blacks as a whole didn’t advance much. In some ways, the community got worse, with the explosion of out-of-wedlock births and the ghettos getting even more violent. But some took these opportunities, got out of the hood, and achieved the American Dream–all while still feeling this country is irredeemably racist.

It’s popular to believe America did nothing for blacks, which is why the media still propounds this line. It’s a great myth we tell ourselves to support such notions as the 1619 Project and other nonsense.

The racial violence the report predicted didn’t come to pass, at least not like the authors expected. The liberal experts thought blacks may launch an insurrection against the state and we may have Belfasts all over the country. Instead, blacks just ethnically cleansed whites from many urban neighborhoods and stuck to gang violence rather than political terrorism. This made many cities hellholes, but it didn’t threaten the prevailing order that much. America got used to it, built a semi-segregated society around it, and moved on. The ghettos were dangerous and made people think twice about moving to urban areas, but they didn’t sustain a political insurrection. One could argue that what happened to America was much worse…

This government report was not a missed opportunity. Its solutions would’ve just bankrupted America and made the entire nation look like the hellscape that was John Lindsay’s New York. The Kerner Commission should stand as a testament to the long-standing naivete and idiocy of American liberals. The morons who marched for Black Lives Matter and cried over George Floyd in 2020 followed an ignominious tradition. They will always refuse to blame the black community for its own misdeeds. They will always blame whites, “whiteness,” “white supremacy,” and/or “systemic racism.”

This mentality has been with us for awhile–and it’s always been the enemy.

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