50 years, minimal racial progress

In 1967, young black men rioted in more than 150 cities, often spurred by overly aggressive policing. The worst disturbances were in Newark, after police beat a taxi driver for having a revoked permit, and Detroit, after 82 partygoers were arrested at a peaceful celebration for returning Vietnam War veterans.

President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission to investigate. Chaired by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner (New York Mayor John Lindsay was vice chairman), it issued its report 50 years ago today. It attributed the riots to pent-up frustration in low-income black neighborhoods, indicting discrimination in housing, employment, health care, policing, education and social services. Residents’ lack of ambition did not cause these conditions, it said. Rather, “white institutions created (the ghetto), white institutions maintain it and white society condones it.”

So little has changed since 1968 that the report remains worth reading as a near-contemporary description of racial inequality.

Of course, not everything about race relations is unchanged. Perhaps most dramatic has been growth of the black middle class, integrated into mainstream corporate leadership, politics, universities and professions. Such progress was unimaginable in 1968. Today, 23% of young adult AfricanAmericans have bachelor’s degrees, still considerably below whites’ 42%, but more than double the black rate 50 years ago.

In the mid-1960s, I assisted in a study of Chicago’s power elite. We identified some 4,000 policy-making positions in the nonfinancial corporate sector. Not one was held by an African-American. Today, any large corporation would face litigation if no African-American man or woman had achieved executive responsibility.

In other respects, things are pretty much as dismal now as then. The commission condemned “stop-and-frisk” policies and equipping police with military weapons. And some conditions are now worse.

The commission said we faced three alternatives. First, continue present policies, which would result in more riots, economic decline and the splintering of our common national identity. This is the course we have mostly followed.

Second, improve black neighborhoods, something we’ve halfheartedly tried, including through enterprise zones, charter schools and more. These, the commission correctly predicted, would never get sufficient political or financial support and would fail to reverse our trajectory.

Third, we could actively embrace programs to integrate black families into white neighborhoods. We’d have to remove discriminatory and financial barriers that prevented African-Americans from moving out of overcrowded, low-income places that lacked access to good jobs, schools with high-performing students, adequate health services, even supermarkets with fresh food.

It was this alternative the Kerner Report strongly favored.

The report was unanimous, even gaining support from commission conservatives like Charles Thornton, CEO of Litton Industries, then one of the nation’s most powerful corporations. Johnson had appointed him to ensure modest recommendations, but even commissioners initially inclined to blame riots on “outside agitators” were radicalized by visiting black neighborhoods.

The report’s integration proposals need updating, but not much. One was a law banning discrimination in housing sales and rentals. Two months after the report’s release, horror over the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination gave Johnson political support to pass the Fair Housing Act.

But enforcement provisions waited an additional 20 years, and remain weak.

The report also suggested rent supplements for low-income families and tax credits for developers serving them. These were adopted; supplements are commonly termed Section 8 vouchers, and the government now issues developer tax credits.

Yet these programs now reinforce segregation because most recipients can use vouchers only in low-income neighborhoods, and developers mostly use credits to build in such areas.

Both programs could instead prioritize rentals and construction in integrated communities. For this to happen, we’d need to prohibit suburban zoning ordinances that bar townhouses, low-rise apartments, even single-family homes on modest lot sizes.

The commission also recommended subsidies for black homebuyers, something we’ve never seriously considered. They are needed because in the mid-20th century, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration prohibited African-Americans from purchasing affordable suburban homes.

Suburban property appreciation now makes those homes unaffordable to working-class families of either race.

We’ll never desegregate if this historic wrong remains unremedied.

Is it too late to adopt the Kerner Commission’s third alternative? Racial polarization may make it so. But re-reading the report can awaken a passion to reform what the commission didn’t hesitate to term an “apartheid” nation.