Consider that President Lyndon Johnson formed the eleven-member Commission on Civil Disorders in July 1967 in response to a report he received from the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, that the wave of urban riots and uprisings taking place in urban America was a coordinated attack by “outside agitators,” and Black militants to overthrow the US government. Hoover told Johnson that forces within Black communities were in cahoots with communists hostile to America and that, in order to repel the communist threat, Johnson should authorize arming urban police departments with tanks, machine guns, and automatic rifles.

In response, Johnson formed the Kerner Commission and charged them with finding and reporting on the reasons for the urban riots that had plagued cities each summer since 1964.

The resulting Kerner Commission Report, clocking in at over 400 pages was published in March of 1968 and became an instant hit, selling almost two million copies. It also fully and totally repudiated Hoover’s assertions about communist agitators as responsible for the riots. Instead, they found that the causes were usually aggressive and abusive police practices often involving brutal beatings, or the shooting of unarmed Black men. They noted that these police behaviors triggered protest from the community and, in response, the police became even more aggressive and further inflamed the situation. This then led to even more deaths of unarmed citizens. In short, the committee found no communist agitators, only hostile police officers and they didn’t believe that giving them more firepower was a good idea. They wrote, “The Commission condemns moves to equip police departments with mass destruction weapons, such as automatic rifles, machine guns, and tanks. Weapons which are designed to destroy, not control, have no place in densely populated urban communities.”

As if that wasn’t controversial enough, the report went on to memorably conclude that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” It indicted “white society” for isolating and neglecting African Americans, but also for profiting from the system of racial and economic segregation, saying, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

As a result, instead of over-arming the police, the commission members recommended that the President focus on job creation, job training programs, affordable housing, the equalization of the public education system, the overhaul and equalization of the administration of the criminal justice system, expanded opportunities for Black people to participate in the formation of public policy, efforts aimed at enlarging the Black middle class, and increased efforts to integrate American society. They also called for greater accountability on the part of mainstream media who, they said, misrepresented the reality of Black life and humanity, leading many outside of Black communities—including the police—to have and maintain incomplete and harmful views of Black people.

It was an expansive and expensive list of recommendations, and far beyond the scope of what Johnson had expected.

Accordingly, despite the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. pronounced the report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life,”and the fact that it is comprehensive, gracefully written, and a compellingly convincing read, President Johnson rejected all of the recommendations except for one calling for an expansion of undercover police and government surveillance of Black communities in order to gather information on potential, as well as actual, civil disorders. The federal government also gave urban police departments the tanks and guns Hoover had requested.

Today, though the list of recommendations is still expansive and still expensive, we should at least consider using some of the 230 million dollars that President Obama is planning to spend on “police reform” in response to this recent spate of killings, and instead invest in at least one of the Kerner Commission recommendations instead. I would vote for creative mechanisms to promote greater levels of direct community involvement in the making of public policy, but would be happy with serious attention aimed at almost any one of the commission’s main recommendations.

We should try this because it is hard to imagine that President Obama’s new commission, nor any subsequent effort, will be more prescient than the Kerner Commission, which ends its report by acknowledging, “We have provided an honest beginning. We have learned much. But we have uncovered no startling truths, no unique insights, no simple solutions. The destruction and the bitterness of racial disorder, the harsh polemics of black revolt and white repression have been seen and heard before in this country. It is time now to end the destruction and the violence, not only in the streets of the ghetto but in the lives of people.”

At least once, we should finish what we have started instead of circling back to the beginning again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Noliwe M. Rooks is the author of three books, including White Money/Black Power. She is an associate professor and interim director of graduate studies in Cornell University’s Africana Studies department.