Can America finally change?

As Black Americans described their state of heart and mind over the last week, there were — beyond the visceral pain and outrage — variations on a theme. “I’m tired.” “We’re fed up.” “We’ve had enough.” How could it be otherwise? The roots of America’s racial schism track back centuries. The brutalization by police of Black Americans in the country’s cities has been replicated decade upon decade upon decade.

The public execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis descends in a hateful line from chains to lynching to the Algiers Motel to Eric Garner, Michael Brown and names beyond counting.

There’s been much reference in these days of fury to the tumult of the 1960s.

In the summer of 1967, the cities of America erupted in flame and fury. Within eight months, a national advisory commission into the convulsion had, with admirable dispatch, delivered a frank diagnosis and warnings that stand as prophecy.

“This is our basic conclusion,” the Kerner commission said. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”

Of all the contributing factors to the quagmire of discrimination, segregation and inequality that made mock of American aspirations and self-regard, one dominated, it said.

“The most fundamental is the racial attitude and behaviour of white Americans toward black Americans.

“White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”

What sustained the corruption, moreover, was not the overt racism of open bigots, but a white, moderate, responsible America that gave tacit approval to an enterprise rotten at its core.

Kerner said Black people were burdened by overt discrimination, high unemployment, poor schools, inadequate housing, lack of adequate health care, systematic police bias and brutality.

And that last factor invariably topped the list, with police brutality and a double-standard in justice symbolizing “white power, white racism and white repression.”

About the same time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Hersey produced a searing book on the police killings in 1967 of Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard and Fred Temple at the Algiers Motel in Detroit.

There were four main causes of racial violence, Hersey concluded. Unequal justice, unequal employment opportunities, unequal housing, unequal education.

The first of those was most urgent, he wrote, because unequal justice — what happens with the cop on the street, what happens with the prosecutor and judge in court — “is at the cutting edge of irritation in the inner cities.”

The Kerner report — foreshadowing President Donald Trump’s wish to set American troops against American protesters — warned that the stakes were existential.

“To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values,” it said.

“If we are heedless, we shall none of us escape the consequences.”

After some improvement, the Kerner report was basically shelved. And as Sen. Fred Harris — the youngest member of the Kerner commission — wrote on its 20th anniversary, the “quiet riots” of high unemployment and poverty, segregation and unequal justice endured. And here we are, a half-century on. Unarmed Black men are dying in the streets at the hands of police. And U.S. cities have again been gripped by rage and protest.

As the commentator Van Jones told CNN, the fight for social justice has been like “running a marathon through mud,” every step laborious and hard won.

If the country is truly at a moment of truth, it is the product of simultaneous forces.

The difference this time might be that it is not Black America, but also large elements of white America that has awakened to the depth of the emergency and the urgency of the moment.

The malignancy that is the Trump presidency has rendered racism undeniable and inescapable.

The coronavirus pandemic, like the consequences of hurricane Katrina before it, has made clear that marginalized communities of colour bear the heaviest burden of the hardest times.

The technology of smartphone cameras has shoved the slow, horrible dying of George Floyd in the world’s face, the life squeezed from him by a cop with blood-chilling matter-of-factness.

“If this is not a lesson to all of us, then we’re beyond a tipping point in this country,” an anguished Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told CNN.

Her elders likely thought the same after Kerner, which stands to this day as the unheeded clarion call to America’s conscience, a rebuke to its manifold national conceits.

Some time after the latest chaos of a distressed nation settles, another commission of inquiry will likely be struck.

But that work has already been done. Those findings have already been written.

More than 50 years ago, Hersey wrote that America’s remedy is, as it has always been, “in the minds of men.”

And once again Black America waits, hope triumphing over experience, daring to believe that relief might finally be hand and that George Floyd’s death will not have been in vain.

Sometime after the latest chaos of a distressed nation settles, another commission of inquiry will likely be struck. But that work has already been done