Throughline - The Long Hot Summer (2020)

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Things in the U.S. feel tense right now. Two years after a police officer killed George Floyd outside a Minneapolis corner store, videos of police violence still appear regularly – and protests follow. Maybe the closest parallel to what's happening today is the so-called "long hot summer" of 1967, when more than 150 cities across the country experienced civil unrest. That year, President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission to diagnose the root causes of the problem and to suggest solutions. What the so-called "Kerner Commission" concluded — shocking to many Americans – was that the fires in America's cities could be traced back to inequality, white racism, and police brutality. This week, the Kerner Commission's report and its consequences, nearly six decades later.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Early Sunday morning in July of 1967, there was a raid of an after-hours bar in Detroit. Police had it under surveillance for several weeks. In the early hours of Sunday morning last, they raided the premises and discovered an after-hours drinking establishment. It was crowded. There were dozens of people there. They came together to celebrate someone who had been fighting in Vietnam. And they tried to arrest everybody. A large crowd gathered. Their curiosity turned to hostility.

They began shouting their disapproval. There were bottles thrown. Several store windows were shattered. Garbage cans were upended. The contents set on fire. Eruption of violence and that simply spread. Several hundred rounds squeezed off now and all of a sudden it's silent. Hence quiet, everybody looking around. The fire has been raging for more than 30 minutes.

The people have been evacuated and yet the firemen are unable to respond. They appear they couldn't control the situation. The local police simply are overwhelmed. The entire city appeared to be burning. It went on for days and days. There was television coverage. The mayor's hopes for containing the outbreak proved to be unrealistic. The governor calls out the National Guard.

No matter what the police wanted to do, there's nothing they could do about it. It was in the hands of the people, the mob. The federal government should not intervene except in the most extraordinary circumstances. And then eventually pleads with Lyndon Johnson to send in really hardened troops from Vietnam. The fact of the matter, however, is that law and order have broken down in Detroit, Michigan. Behind two tanks and at least 200 guardsmen, maybe more. And they've got a searchlight up on... I've never seen a war like that with little kids, women, mothers. I've just seen wars with men on men. The fifth largest city in the country has earned a regrettable new title,

a cradle of the bloodiest and costliest civil disturbance in the history of the American nation. Hey, I'm Ramteen Arablui. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And on this episode of ThruLine from NPR, the Kerner Commission. Things in the U.S. feel tense right now. Two years after a police officer killed George Floyd outside a Minneapolis corner store. Videos of police violence still appear regularly, and protests follow. Maybe the closest parallel to what's happening today is the so-called long, hot summer of 1967, when the culmination of mid-1960s racial unrest swept through more than 150 American cities. Some called them riots,

others rebellions or uprisings. American cities burned. Nearly all were provoked by growing inequality in employment, housing, education, and police brutality. In Detroit, the damage was particularly bad. 43 people dead, hundreds injured, thousands arrested, and countless people homeless. Time magazine called it the bloodiest uprising in half a century and the costliest in terms of property damage in American history. All of this forced a national reckoning, a hard look at the state of race relations and segregation in American life. When we come back, we're digging into that moment to figure out what happened, why it happened, and what we did and did not do to set us on the path we're on today. Hi, this is Kwabri from Beggars Nigeria. You are listening to True Line on NPR. I love the show. Bye. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money

internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. During the summer of 1967, the headlines were filled with news of unrest in cities across the country. It even inspired some songs. My hometown's running down to the ground. Western and Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson was unsure exactly how to respond to all this unrest. Yes, things were getting chaotic, but he was kind of offended. After all, he was the one who'd passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race.

And he'd launched a war on poverty, putting in place a set of progressive programs enacted throughout the mid-60s known as the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we're totally committed in our time. He couldn't understand, given everything he had done, that African Americans would reward him by taking to the streets and participating in these riots. You know, I think he's thinking,

we're making progress. What am I missing here? This is Susan Gooden. I serve as dean of the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. And Steve Gillen. I am the scholar-in-residence at the History Channel and also a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. And I wrote a book called Separate and Unequal, The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American liberalism. As things heated up in the summer of 1967, Johnson's aides were getting more and more nervous that he was losing control of the situation. They pleaded with him to make a speech to the nation.

To show that he's in charge. Johnson just refuses to do it. He just doesn't want to deal with it. So day after day, Johnson refused. And finally, on Thursday, July 27th, Johnson shows up at the White House and he says to Joe Califano, his domestic policy advisor, that he wants to do two things. He wants to give a speech to the nation that night and he wants to announce the creation of a national commission to look into the causes of the riots. Okay, so why the 180? Well, Johnson might have thought that if the commission's report linked the unrest to poverty, it might boost support for his Great Society programs. Johnson is that he was genuinely concerned, I think, about urban communities and really understood

that Black Americans had significant disadvantages than white communities. And so it was really sort of a natural extension. A lot of Johnson's aides objected to him creating the commission. Califano told him he'd be creating a Frankenstein, that once you create a commission like this, you have no control over it. But Johnson overrode those objections and went ahead with creating the commission. But here's the thing. Creating a commission of this kind usually takes a few months. And Johnson's staff had less than 24 hours. So there's a frantic effort to make phone calls, to figure out who should be on the commission. It was clear that Johnson wanted a mainstream commission.

He didn't want young, radical African-Americans on the commission. He didn't want really hardcore conservatives on the commission. So he wanted to create a commission that was broad-based, but he also wanted a commission that he could control. My fellow Americans, we have endured a week such as no nation should live through, a time of violence and tragedy. By 10.30 that night, Johnson had his list of names ready. I'm tonight appointing a special advisory

commission on civil disorders. Governor Octo Kerner of Illinois has agreed to serve as chairman. Johnson chose him because he knew Kerner wanted a federal judgeship, and he thought he could use that as leverage to hold over him so that he would do what he wanted. Mayor John Lindsay of New York will serve as vice chairman. He chose reluctantly John Lindsay, the liberal mayor of New York, to try to provide some balance on the commission. Its other members will include Fred R. Harris. A moderate to liberal senator from Oklahoma. Edward W. Brooke.

Who was an African-American senator from Massachusetts. James C. Corman, the United States representative from California. I.W. Abel, the labor leader was there. William M. McCullough, the U.S. representative from the state of Ohio, the 4th District. Tex Thornton, a fairly conservative businessman from Texas who is now living in L.A. Herbert Jenkins, the chief of police, Atlanta, Georgia. Roy Wilkins. The executive director of the NAACP. Catherine Peden. Roy Wilkins.

Catherine Peden. But she rarely speaks. She rarely says anything at the commission. If you lost count, that's 11 commissioners in total. Eight white men, two black men, and one white woman. And this was their objective. The commission will investigate the origins of the recent disorders in our cities. So Johnson asked the commission to answer three questions.

One is, what happened? Second is, why did it happen? And third, how can we prevent it from happening again? So that's all the instructions the commission got. They were given no instructions as to how they go about answering those questions. They also weren't given much money, initially about $100,000. So they were handcuffed initially from a resource standpoint. And even though Otto Koerner was technically the chairman,

it became clear from day one who was really in control. On that very first day, John Lindsay takes charge of the commission, and he continues to run the commission right up until the final day when the report is issued. Lindsay was much more liberal than Kerner. He had his own political ambitions and wasn't interested in pandering to Johnson's agenda. He and other commissioners pushed for more independence from the White House in order to figure out the answer to the first question. What happened to cause the riots? They hire a whole bunch of investigators, field teams, that would go into these areas where there was unrest. These field teams would interview local residents,

every day working class African American citizens, local leaders and elected officials, about their experiences in life and learning about their stories and seeing their communities and all of that. There would then be a team of social scientists, and the social scientists were charged with answering the second question, why did they happen? And then the commissioners were going to obviously filter all this information and come up with the answer to the third question,

which is what should be done. The press was watching all of this very closely. When these field teams go out to these places, a lot of reporters show up and it's a really a high profile thing. Meanwhile, Johnson was getting angrier by the day. This wasn't the commission he'd expected. It was highly ambitious and being led by a liberal. He tried to throw a wrench in the investigation by blocking any more funding for it. But the commissioners managed to recruit help from other departments. As information started to come in from the field, the commissioners traveled to different cities to see for themselves what was going on. And those firsthand upfront personal conversations, I think,

allowed commissioners to hear, see, and understand the realities of deeply entrenched structural racial inequalities. They were struck by just how horrible the conditions were in these areas, how unresponsive local officials were. Everything from housing to education to sanitation was in desperate need of repair. Keep in mind, most of these commissioners had spent little to no time in Black urban neighborhoods. So this was all really shocking for them. There is this proverb that says, you know, only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. And I think members of the commission, through those visits, began to feel a little bit more what that shoe felt like. There was one issue in particular that kept coming up in almost every city. denominator that united all the riots. They were all initiated either by police brutality or by someone who believed they had witnessed police brutality. They were hearing stories from some

of the local residents about how the police would beat people up for no reason at all, how they were constantly being harassed by the police. And one young kid said to them that the police are just thugs with badges. This finding set off a lot of debate among the commissioners. And the word riot was part of that debate. Given the issues Black Americans were facing, some of the field investigators thought those riots might be warranted. If you decide that they're rational, they're not riots anymore. They're uprisings. They are a form of protest.

And it was the only thing that was available to them because all the other avenues of change were blocked off. But the more conservative members of the commission refused to support any report that condoned riots as rational. As the commissioners began to put pen to paper, they were determined to accomplish two things. Come up with a report that had unanimous approval from the commissioners, but still conveyed their findings accurately, and write it in a way that the average American could understand. So they meticulously went through draft after draft,

rewriting sections, cutting others, making compromises, finessing language, especially when it came to policing. The evidence suggested that police brutality was at the heart of the unrest. But finding the words proved contentious. Very disappointed in this section. It condemns all police.

Early drafts emphasized just how rampant police brutality was and how poorly police officers were trained to deal with racial unrest. And some commissioners thought the language was too strong. Police have human fears too. And they got caused to be fearful in the ghetto. Back to the drawing board again and again. Finally, after eight months, it was ready. A version of the report that every member of the commission agreed on. When we come back, the Kerner Commission goes public, and the police fight back.

Hello, my name is John Elliott. I'm calling from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Thank you very much. Bye now. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, offering over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Hand-selected for their inherent craft, each hotel tells its own unique story through distinctive design and immersive experiences, from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Let's ride, man. Let's go for a ride. For the law enforcement officer, the question of attitudes, his and those he will deal with, is of tremendous importance.

This is a police training film from the 1960s. It's called Play It Cool, A Question of Attitudes. In this scene, the narrator is breaking down an interaction between the police and a few guys hanging out next to a parked car. From this point of view, it looks like this. A group of young men having a little innocent fun on a street corner. Then a couple of police officers approach them. The nightstick, the uniform, creates a hostile, menacing image. One of the officers randomly jabs one of the guys with his nightstick. The film pauses, and the narrator jumps in to critique the interaction.

Unnecessary physical contact further escalates the sense of hostility. Get off the car! I told you to get off the car! I don't care whose car it is. Get off the car. contact further escalates the sense of hostility. During the 1960s, films like this were made in collaboration with the International Association of Chiefs of Police to encourage different approaches to police work, one more geared towards social service. Under both Kennedy and Johnson, several landmark Supreme Court cases mandated police reforms, which meant more training and more checks on police.

Not everyone was happy about these reforms, especially police officers and their union reps. They see themselves as second-class citizens, as victims, as people whose rights have been denied. This is Aaron Beckemeier. He's a PhD candidate at Harvard whose research focuses on the history of police unions. They look at reform efforts. They look at the pressure they're under from civil rights and Black Power protesters and

from other sort of protest movements in the 60s. And they say, we're just trying to, you know, as they understand their work, we're just trying to do our jobs. And you have all these people who are showing up and telling us we can't do them and often succeeding in placing restrictions on our ability to do them. This was a pivotal moment when the police union movement and the reform movement came to a head. I think it's important to think about the 60s not as a moment where sort of out of the blue all this happens, but it's the culmination of decades of changes that have been taking place. Police reform efforts had been in the works for years, and many police departments had been resisting those efforts.

It was an ongoing and escalating battle. So when reformers gained more significant ground in the 1960s, police unionists began to push back hard. They lobbied for more power, more protections. And in some cases, they got it. All the while, police brutality remained a massive problem. As the Kerner Commission members had discovered, it was the match that sparked the unrest of the long hot summer of 1967. And the tension between reformers and police unionists would ultimately shape what happened when the Kerner Report was released. So before we get back to the Kerner Commission,

we're going to take a little detour into the history of police unions. It was 1919, Boston, and 80% of the city's police department was on strike. They were demanding better wages, better hours, better working conditions. And the mayor of Boston wasn't having any of it. With the police on strike, robberies and riots were breaking out across the city. He sent in the militia to quash the protests.

And the governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, called for a return to law and order. There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime. Boston was placed under military watch for the first time since the Revolutionary War. Things escalated. Troops opened fire on the crowd, killing several people. And the strike is totally crushed. All the officers are fired.

It's national news, and it dampens what little nascent momentum police unionism as a whole might have had at that period. After the failure of that strike, police wouldn't attempt to unionize again in any meaningful way until after World War II. For a lot of people, police and unions were like oil and water, two things that should not mix. In fact, one of the main roles of the police during the first half of the 20th century was to suppress worker strikes. In other words, to resist unions. So there was a clear contradiction there. Meanwhile, millions of Black Americans were fleeing the Jim Crow South and settling in northern cities, where they faced intense segregation and discrimination. And the police department was, in some sense, a very general and kind of blunt mechanism of enforcing that. Around the middle of the century, the police and their mistreatment of Black communities started to come under scrutiny.

On the one hand, you have reformers who are sort of good government types who are interested in municipal reform and fighting corruption in various forms, breaking up the old political machines that have dominated city politics and all these big cities in the U.S. And then on the other hand, you have a sort of broad civil rights movement-type coalition who are interested in curbing police brutality. My own personal opinion is that they usually are brutal. They like the instant authority that comes with the badge and the uniform. Many of the African-American groups in that umbrella, but also some white liberal groups and radical groups of various kinds. Their motto is to protect and serve.

But they don't protect the black cats off in the ghetto. They more or less harass them. Over the course of the 1940s and 50s, more mayors in cities nationwide began implementing police reforms. The reform movement was gaining momentum. And this didn't sit well with a lot of police officers. So for the first time in a long time, they began to unionize again. During the 1960s, this tension between reformers and police unions was at a boiling point. It was no longer

just a local issue. Under President Johnson, the Supreme Court mandated more widespread police reforms, which made it a national issue. Police unionists are saying, we're sick of all these reforms that have been going on for so long, and we really need a political project that is going to stop them and roll them back. Well, the chaos of the civil rights era and the uprisings in the summer of 1967 gave them that political project. The tension of Negro disillusionment is in the air, and so is white anxiety. Things seemed out of control. Many Black Americans were taking to the streets, cities were literally burning, and a lot of the white public was scared. Some politicians adopted a law and order platform.

The people sitting in their homes across America know it. People in taverns watching television know it. These people are revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the government of the United States of America. And police unionists also seized on that fear. And say, look, there are so many disruptive and threatening things going on right now.

And what our job is, is to protect the fabric of society from all of these various disruptive threats. We are here to protect you. And in order to do that, we need the sort of protections and funding and everything that we would achieve through police unionism to make sure that we can actually do our jobs. It worked. Police unions managed to flip the script.

They were granted more power in cities across the country than they'd ever had before. And so they go from seeming like a sort of particular interest that might threaten the public interest to saying, no, our work is the essence of the public interest. And there are many people who sort of vigorously rise to support them and say that's right. The mood of the country was shifting in favor of police, just as the Kerner Commission was preparing to release its report. And this set up a dichotomy that would be hard for politicians especially to navigate. You were either on the side of police and law and order, or you were on the side of

social justice reform. In February 1968, the commissioners were all set to deliver the report to Johnson and the world. They were supposed to have a reception at the White House, a big press event where all the press would come and they would officially hand the report to Johnson. But Johnson caught wind of what was in the report. And it made him mad. Really mad. So Johnson cancels the public event.

He refuses to accept his copy of the report. He won't even sign the thank you letters to the commissioners for having served on the commission. Johnson was so furious. He felt betrayed by Kerner. He believed that Lindsay was using the report to launch a campaign against him in 1968 where he was going to run for president. He's paranoid. At the end of the day, Cal found out he was right.

Johnson had created a Frankenstein monster. What was in the report that made Johnson so mad? And how would the rest of the country react to it? We'll unpack those questions when we come back. This is Jay Oz out on Oregon's North Coast, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Rock on! In February of 1968, the Kerner Commission completed its report. And man, was it a report. The comprehensive 426-page document was intentionally written as a compelling narrative in the hopes that its policy proposals would really pop and catch the public's attention.

The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities and with them shock, fear, and bewilderment to the nation. The report's proposals were big. For the time, they were deep and systemic. It proposed major changes to housing policies, urban planning, education, anti-poverty programs, and policing. With a price tag ranging between $30 to $100 billion. We have visited the riot cities. We have heard many witnesses. We have sought the counsel of experts across the country.

A lot of these proposals aligned with President Johnson's priorities. heard many witnesses, we have sought the counsel of experts across the country. A lot of these proposals aligned with President Johnson's priorities. However, at the heart of the report was something Johnson and many others did not see coming. The commission's belief that white racism was the cause of urban unrest. The Kerner report said, and I quote, 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. Good evening. Not quite two months ago, as we reported, the President's Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder warned that race hatred threatened to tear this country apart.

The report was said to be released on March 1st. But what happens is it gets leaked to the Washington Post the day before. The members of the commission were so afraid that Johnson was going to try to bury the report that someone leaked it to the press. And the Washington Post leads with a headline that says white racism is blamed in riots or very close to that. And so that becomes the headline that gains a lot of momentum in the media. It made a huge splash. It was remarkable that a presidential commission got the type of attention that it got. The president's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders gave this warning to Americans tonight. Front page of every major newspaper. Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.

Long stories inside detailing the findings of the commission, the recommendations for change. Unless drastic and costly remedies are begun at once, the commission said, there will be continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values. And when the report was officially released through a publisher, let's just say it did better than most novels do today. The report turned out to be a runaway bestseller. 740,000 copies were sold the first three weeks.

More than a million are now in print. Bantam Books, which published the first edition, calls it the fastest-selling paperback since Valley of the Dolls, which it does not precisely resemble in style. Major newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, all praised it. Liberals also sort of embraced it and embraced its recommendations.

But President Johnson wasn't so happy about the report's findings. Even though he had to give Teppit support publicly, privately, he was enraged. The main reason for his anger was the price tag and the scope of the report's recommendations. Things like creating 2 million jobs within three years, giving loans to high-risk business ventures, drastically increasing support to schools and Black communities, producing six million new housing units in five years, and putting in place specific police reforms to curb police brutality. President Jack Johnson felt that the report did not give enough credit for the work

that he and his administration had done through their great society programs and the war on poverty. He thought it was so unrealistic for these people, this commission, to ask him to spend $30 billion when Congress is cutting funding for his existing programs. And he just felt that it made him look bad.

When Roy Wilkins, one of the two Black members of the commission, was interviewed a few years after the report came out. He said, I think that the word racism, and particularly white racism, frightened President Johnson. He didn't feel like the president wanted to go down in history as the president who had pointed his finger at his own people. But Lyndon Johnson wasn't the only person who was unhappy with the commission's report. There was a significant portion of the country who responded negatively, not only to its recommendations, but to the report's emphasis on police brutality. Those newspapers in the South and the West were just dismissed it as another liberal grab bag, another expensive government program that was unrealistic, that spent too

much time criticizing the police and not criticizing the protesters themselves. Richard Nixon, who's gearing up for his presidential campaign, develops that line of attack, arguing that it spent too much time criticizing the police. This is part of his platform, is the law and order platform. It dials back completely any implications for white Americans. It's more on behavior, individual behavior, lawlessness. So it's while overall its impact was enormous in terms of the amount of coverage it got. It also revealed these deep cultural divisions that were emerging coming out of the 1960s. And you might be wondering what the police unions make of all this. How did they respond,

given the fact that they'd been pushing hard to counteract a lot of the reforms the report was advocating to expand. Well, according to Aaron Beckemeier, not well. So I mean, insofar as the kind of policing specific kind of recommendations and projects that come out of the Kerner Commission play out, the prescription is more professionalization, you know, different, better standards, more training, higher educational standards, community relations programs, all these kinds of things. But the, you know, the way the police unions figure into that is that these are problems from that, for them, from their point of view, that they have been fighting against for decades already.

They see these as exactly the sort of things that are, in some cases, they even use this terminology, handcuffing them and preventing them from doing their jobs. And so this only kind of further spurs the resistance of police unions to these kinds of reforms. It's not sort of framed in a way that they're sympathetic to at all. It was clear that neither President Johnson nor Congress was going to champion most of the proposals set

forth by the commission. And Mayor Lindsay was vocal about his disappointment. As the vice chairman of that commission, which spent seven long months analyzing last summer's riots and drawing up solid proposals to stop them at the source, I'm severely disappointed by the failure of the federal government to implement the commission's bipartisan recommendations. We are not moving fast enough or far enough. We are not convincing the people in the slums that our government truly wants to help them. And Otto Koerner echoed these sentiments. Well, there's been no action. There's really been no discussion about it in the committees in the Senate. It's just lied fallow.

No movement at all. Pro or con. In my judgment, the primary responsibility for absence of action rests with the Congress of the United States. Most were disappointed that despite all the attention that it got, that most of the programs, the ambitious programs that they called for were not enacted. In terms of major initiatives that came out of the Kerner Commission that lasted, you know, there's just not a whole lot. But I do think one of the lasting impacts of the report is that it does put white racism as a factor into structural inequities that we see and differences in outcomes that we see between white Americans and Black Americans. And that was huge to have a presidential commission report making those claims.

The Kerner Commission came along in a time of great upheaval in America. In addition to the unrest in many cities, there was the anti-Vietnam War movement and a series of political assassinations. And the findings of the Kerner Commission just added to this volatile environment. It created a sense in America that was unraveling, that was falling apart, and it allowed Nixon to create this language of cultural populism. That was his appeal to law and order. So it definitely set the stage for not just Richard Nixon, but the modern Republican Party. Every Republican candidate or president since then has their appeal to law and order in many ways is sort of a hammer tap below the knee to bring back memories of racial unrest in the 1960s. I think the Kerner Commission believed that having a bipartisan commission of mainstream people

to produce a report like this, they really hoped that it would change the conversation in America about race and unrest, but it did not. In fact, following the Kerner Commission report, the police force in the United States became more powerful, not more regulated. Nixon's war on drugs gave police more leeway to arrest drug dealers and users. And many police forces began their steady process of militarization

by acquiring surplus equipment and weapons from the military. And the harsh reality is that the diagnosis of the problem laid out in the Kerner Commission would be accurate in many American cities today. Raj Chetty, an economist from Harvard University, says, quote, We still live in an environment 50 years later where African Americans are still living in And according to Steve Gillen, perhaps the problem with the Kerner Commission report wasn't just that its diagnosis of racial injustice came along at the wrong time, but also that the expectation from commission members was that its findings would be a game changer,

that somehow it would fundamentally make a difference. I think that one of the problems the commissioners had was the problem of hubris. Given how deeply ingrained racism is in the American DNA, to believe that you could create a report that would significantly change the conversation, that would get people together and search for common solutions was just a little naive. And I think it would be just as naive today. I just don't see how any report today, whether the Kerner Commission came out today or there's another report that says something very similar.

The interest groups are so dug in. The partisanship is so hardened that I just don't see, think we need a report to tell us what the problem is. The problem is still the same as it was in 1967. And I don't think another report would really have a significant impact on the way we talk about race in America. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randabin Fattah. I'm Ramtin Adablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and...

Jamie York. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Kia Miyaka-Nutis. Natalie Barton. Nigery Eaton. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal.

Special thanks to Alex Curley, Austin Horn, and Alex Chong for their voiceover work. Thanks also to Camille Smiley and Anya Grunman. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... If you have an idea or like something on this show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. Or find us on Twitter at ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. Thank you. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data.

Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.