"The Riot Report": PBS Documentary Shows What Happened When a U.S. Government Commission Came to Grips with Racism in America

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Tuesday, May 21) I watched an oddly compelling documentary on PBS called “The Riot Report,” an American Experience episode on the Kerner Commission, charged by then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to study the race riots that took place throughout major U.S. cities that summer and analyze why they’d happened and what could be done to keep them from happening again. The commission, officially named the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was chaired by Kerner, who was then the Governor of Illinois, with New York Mayor John Lindsay (a moderate Republican who later switched parties and ran unsuccessfully for President as a Democrat in 1972) as vice-chair. The Commission had 11 members, eight of whom were white men. One was a white woman (Katherine Graham Peden, commissioner of commerce in Kentucky), and two were African-American: U.S. Senator Edward Brooke (the second Black person to serve as a Senator, and like the first – Hiram Revels of Mississippi, elected during Reconstruction – he was a Republican) and NAACP head Roy Jenkins. The commission’s charge, as expressed by President Johnson in the statement he made announcing it, was to answer three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?”

The main source for the PBS documentary on the actual inner workings of the Commission was one of its few surviving members, U.S. Senator Fred Harris (D-Oklahoma, and the fact that a Democrat could be elected as a Senator from Oklahoma is in itself a major index of how much American politics and society have changed). Between them, Harris and Lindsay formed a “liberal axis” on the Commission that took on the relatively Right-wing politics of some of the other members, notably Charles “Tex” Thornton, founder of the defense contractor Litton Industries. According to historian Steven Gillon, it was apparent from the first day of the Commission’s meetings that “John Lindsay and Fred Harris wanted to push the committee into dealing with the root causes of racial unrest, which they believed was poverty and a sense of powerlessness. Tex Thornton sees the commission's purpose solely to help law enforcement to crush future uprisings. And in every debate, just about those two on opposite sides.” One big division within the Commission was over the racial makeup of law enforcement in general and the National Guard, the agency generally called in to restore order during or immediately after a riot, in particular. Commission members quickly concluded that, by being almost all white, the local police and National Guard appeared to Black ghetto residents more like an occupying force than a group there “to protect and serve” the local community.

According to Gillon, “African Americans made up less than 2% of National Guard members. Lindsay and Harris both thought that it was important to make that statement. Tex Thornton doesn't want to do it. This is the first big battle. And Tex Thornton argues vehemently against the Commission making any kind of a statement.” Another unusual tactic the Commission adopted was to hold field hearings instead of just talking to Washington, D.C. insiders like long-time Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was the Commission’s first witness, and he predictably told them that the riots were part of a gigantic conspiracy organized by the Communist Party, U.S.A. to bring down the U.S. government and replace it with a Communist system. Later, when the Commission members started holding hearings in Black areas of major cities and meeting with ordinary people, their points of view changed. For him, as Senator Harris recalled, meeting with actual Black people “really put faces on these problems. And I know that it had the same effect on other members of the commission. Tex Thornton said himself, ‘[A]fter going out to riot cities and talking to people there, I have moved about 90 degrees to the Left.’”

Unfortunately, the Kerner Commission’s deliberations came about at a time when American politics were moving decisively to the Right. Lyndon Johnson’s great legislative successes on racial issues – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – had come about thanks to Johnson’s accession to the Presidency following the assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Johnson had pledged himself to carry forward Kennedy’s agenda – in Kennedy’s inaugural address he had said, “Let us begin,” and in Johnson’s first speech as President he said, “Let us continue.” As a Southerner himself, he was determined to break the stranglehold on civil-rights legislation held by the long-serving Southern Democrats, the so-called “Dixiecrats,” who had successfully either blocked altogether or watered down previous civil-rights bills, including one Johnson had sponsored himself in 1957. A master at legislative tactics, including intimidation, he was able to push through the Civil Rights Act; Richard Russell (D-Georgia), the Senator who led the opposition, said afterwards, “We could have stopped John Kennedy. We could never stop Lyndon.” Johnson had won an overwhelming victory in the 1964 election against hard-Right Republican Barry Goldwater, and in the wake of that victory he was able to push through the Voting Rights Act, largely due to public revulsion at the way nonviolent civil-rights protesters in Selma, Alabama and other Southern cities had been beaten, sprayed with fire hoses and attacked by police dogs while the TV cameras showed it all to the American people.

But Goldwater’s nomination was a warning signal for the future; he would break the Democratic Party’s Southern monopoly, carrying five Southern states (as well as narrowly winning his home state, Arizona). Goldwater made the Republican Party acceptable to Southern voters by voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and on the campaign trail he said things like, “While the President of the United States speaks of the Great Society, our cities and suburbs are turning into the lawless society. … Nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.” In August 1965, three days of rioting sweep through the streets of Watts, Los Angeles’s Black ghetto, and according to New Yorker journalist Jelani Cobb, President Johnson took the riots as a personal insult. “This is just days after he's cashed in all of his political chips to shepherd the Voting Rights Act through Congress,” Cobb said. “It's kind of indignation, almost a sense of being slapped in the face.” At the same time Johnson was also pushing forward America’s inexplicable commitment to the Viet Nam War, which he regarded as a personal priority. In appointing the members of the Kerner Commission, he’d insisted that no one on it be opposed to, or even publicly skeptical about, the Viet Nam War. Johnson and the Democrats lost big in the 1966 midterm elections – though they maintained Congressional majorities until Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate in 1980 and the House of Representatives in 1994 – and even before those elections, in the wake of Watts Congress unanimously passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965. This made huge amounts of federal government funding available to local police departments, including military-grade hardware and technology. This facilitated what libertarian writer Radley Balko would call, in his 2013 book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.

Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad described first-hand what the police were doing with this new money: “Setting up virtual checkpoints on the borders of these communities, doing hostile drives through Black neighborhoods, as a show of force for Black people to so-called stay in their place. They're policing the boundaries of Black life.” Another historian, David C. Carter, said the riots marked “a fundamental transition where media simply can't resist the spectacle of urban disorder. The camera simply cannot look away. And as much as it unsettles white viewers, there's also this sort of fixation. In some ways it's confirming their darkest prejudices about Black Americans. Now they're seeing a more menacing face of Black America, and they emphatically do not like what they're seeing.” So when the Kerner Commission came out with a broad program of recommendations, including a guaranteed annual income and major investments in jobs and housing in the African-American ghettoes, much of white America responded with vehement opposition. Senator Fred Harris recalled that his own father gave him hell about the report: “The way he heard the Kerner Report was, ‘Mr. Harris, out of the goodness of your heart, you ought to pay more taxes to help poor Black people who are rioting in Detroit.’ He said this to me, he said, the hell with that. I’m having a hard enough time myself. I’m already paying too much tax, and not getting anything for it. And that, that was true.”

Millions of Americans came to the same conclusion as Harris, Sr. had: enacting all these expensive programs to help Black people would essentially be rewarding them for rioting. President Johnson himself was a savvy enough politician that he responded to the Kerner report basically by ignoring it – and he was typically blunt as to why: the cost of implementing the commission’s recommendations was $2 billion per month. While that was about what America was spending on the Viet Nam War, Johnson complained that the Commission had made all these expensive proposals and hadn’t given him any way to fund them. Johnson’s own popularity was in free fall by then; his Presidential approval rating was down to 36 percent (about where President Biden’s rating is today), and within a month of the Kerner Commission report’s release he announced that he was withdrawing from his re-election campaign. Though a few of the Kerner Commission recommendations were actually implemented, albeit in weakened form – in 1968 Congress passed a bill against racial discrimination in housing (which Donald Trump’s father, former Ku Klux Klan member Fred Trump, would be prosecuted for violating and he agreed to a negotiated settlement), and both police departments and media organizations began hiring more African-Americans and other people of color – for the most part the Kerner Commission and its recommendations got swept into the dustbin of history. At least among white Americans; journalists covering the 1992 riots in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the four police officers accused of beating Rodney King, recalled that Blacks interviewed after the riots frequently invoked the name “Kerner” as a kind of talisman, a souvenir of a long-lost time when at least one mostly white government entity acknowledged the longevity of American racism and the deep-seated harm it had done to Black Americans.

The immediate result of the riots – including the ones in April 1968 after the murder of Black America’s great apostle of nonviolence, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – was a near-total reversal in American politics. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson had been elected with 61 percent of the vote to 39 percent for his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater; in 1968 Right-wing candidates Richard Nixon (Republican) and George Wallace (American Independent) got 57 percent of the vote between them to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. That gave rise to the Right-wing coalition that essentially, with a few partial exceptions, has dominated American politics since. At least four of the six Republicans who have served as President since Lyndon Johnson – Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump – have run with the explicit aim of dismantling the changes of the 1960’s in civil rights and social culture, and each one has pursued this agenda more aggressively and explicitly than the last. Though at the moment there is a Democratic President and Senate, the Republicans utterly dominate the current U. S. Supreme Court – whose justices are bent on using their power to impose a radical Right-wing revolution on American society. They also are in control of the House of Representatives, and current polls suggest that this November 5 they will retake both the Presidency and the Senate. And Donald Trump’s increasingly fascistic, authoritarian rhetoric says that what they will do with that united power if and when they get it is, among other things, end all this “nonsense” from the 1960’s about civil rights and racial equality.