The Kerner Commission Report

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Back. In early our colleague Christopher Hasiotis sent an email around to a bunch of us at work suggesting that one of us cover the Kerner Commission Report. At that point, the reports fiftieth anniversary was just a few weeks away. But the basic conclusion of this report, which is probably the most widely quoted thing out of it that still felt really relevant, that was quote, our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal um. So at that point, all of our episodes between getting this email from Christopher and the anniversary of the report coming out, uh, those were already spoken for. So it didn't make it into the calendar. And then last year the report made headlines again in the wake of the international protests against racism and police brutality that followed the murder of George Floyd, and for various reasons, it just didn't get into the calendar at that point either. Uh. In this July though, just this past July, listener Taylor sent us a note after seeing a very brief, as in three paragraphs post about this on Instagram, and Taylor noted once again that this report as just ongoing relevance, this time in the context of the backlash against what some people are calling critical race theory. To be clear, the backlash is not against actual critical race theory. It's become just like catch all descriptor for any conversations about racism that somebody doesn't like. A new condensed version of this report also came out just last month, so there's been some talk around it in that context. So it seemed like finally, finally, time I'm getting it into the calendar for real after three years of people asking about it. The Kerner Commission was formally known as the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. It was established by President Lyndon Johnson during a period of widespread unrest in the United States beginning in the early nineteen sixties. Between nineteen sixty five and nineteen sixty seven, there were more than three hundred incidents in more than two hundred fifty cities. They varied in how long and how severe they were, but they were mostly described as riots. Today, they are sometimes characterized more as uprisings because they developed in response to ongoing racism and oppression. To quote from the report, the civil disorders of nineteen sixty seven involved Negroes acting against local symbols of white American society, authority, and property in Negro neighborhoods, rather than against white persons. One of the most well known incidents from the beginning of this period of time time took place in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles from August eleven through sixteenth, nineteen sixty five. This started after the arrest of twenty one year old Marquette Fry for suspected drunk driving. A crowd gathered during this arrest, and Fry and police physically struggled. Accounts on exactly what happened during this struggle are really contradictory. During the commotion that followed, rumors also spread that police had assaulted a pregnant woman. The details of this are also contradictory, although many accounts described one woman being arrested while wearing a billowing smock that made her appear pregnant. Regardless, these arrests and the rumors surrounding them tipped off multiple days of violence and arson in Watts At least thirty four people died and more than a thousand were injured, most of them Black residents of the neighborhood. Hundreds of buildings burned to the ground. Incidents like this really seemed to reach a peak. In the summer of nine seen sixties seven, which was nicknamed the Long Hot Summer. Violence broke out in predominantly black neighborhoods of multiple cities in the US, and sometimes this violence went on for days, escalating in intensity from things like looting and throwing rocks and bottles and vandalism to arson and gunfire, including sniper fire. The National Guard was called out in cities like Tampa, Cincinnati, in Atlanta to try to restore order. These uprisings were national news, part of an ongoing developing story that characterized the whole country as being nearly consumed by rioting. It was during this period that Miami Police Chief Walter Headley used the phrase quote when the looting starts, the shooting starts. But in July twelfth, in Newark, New Jersey, a black cab driver named John Smith was pulled over for a traffic violation and was beaten by police. Later, witnesses saw him being pulled from a police car and basically dragged into the precinct headquarters. He apparently was not able to walk on his own. Rumors spread that he had been beaten nearly to death or even killed. When civil rights leaders were allowed to see Smith and jail, they felt that his injuries called for a medical exam, and they demanded that he'd be taken to a hospital. Tensions between the black residents of New Work and the predominantly white police force escalated rapidly, with residents marches and demonstrations being met by increasing numbers of officers. This progressed to looting, fires, gunshots, with police implementing roadblocks and mass arrests, and the National Guard being called out to try to restore order. At least twenty six people were killed in Newark between July twelfth and seventeenth, including one white detective, one white fireman, and at least twenty four black residents. Several of them were children or teenagers. Some of the people who were killed were shot by police eats, or by the National Guard while they were in their own homes or vehicles. In some cases, these were stray bullets and in others, they were shooting at places they thought snipers were hiding. Somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand people were injured during all of this, and hundreds of fires and other destruction around the city caused roughly ten million dollars in damage. Then, in Detroit, Michigan, on July, police rated several after hours drinking clubs, which were known as blind pigs. That nickname probably comes from the Prohibition era, when proprietors would charge money to see an animal like a pig, and then throw in the alcohol for free to skirt the law. We're not selling alcohol, We're selling viewings of pigs. Police arrested roughly eighty people in these raids. Most of those people were black. Some of them had been celebrating the return of two veterans from the Vietnam War, much like what had happened in Newark less than two weeks earlier. These arrests set off increasing confrontations between residents and police, progressing to vandalism, looting, and arson. Civilian snipers fired from rooftops and the thefts of large numbers of firearms from looted stores made this whole situation seem even more threatening police started making mass arrests. The National Guard was called out once again, and President Johnson actually sent in army troops. Between July July, at least forty three people were killed in Detroit, thirty three of them black and ten white. Some of the civilians killed were by standards or were in their own homes or vehicles, but many were either looting or fleeing from looting. Later analysis has suggested that law enforcement's use of deadly force in response to looting became increasingly indiscriminate and random as the uprising went on, with reports characterizing the deaths as overwhelmingly needless. More than drid buildings were also burned down during those six days. In Detroit, firefighters had to withdraw repeatedly as they were attacked or caught in crossfire or pinned down by snipers while they were trying to fight the fires. About five thousand Detroit residents were left homeless. These uprisings in both Newark and Detroit also sparked similar incidents in surrounding cities in New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio. By this point, the president was under huge pressure to take action. On the morning of July ninety seven, Johnson told his staff that that night he would be announcing a commission to investigate these incidents. The members of this commission were selected and contacted over roughly the next ten hours, with the commission's funding coming from the President's Emergency Fund. The following day, he issued Executive Order one one three six five establishing a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which specified that the Commission would issue an interim report by March first, nine eight, with a final report do not later than one year from the date of the order. The commission had eleven members, intentionally selected to be bipartisan and to represent multiple viewpoints for we're members of Congress to Republicans and two Democrats. Business leader Charles B. Thornton, known as Tex was on the commission, as was labor leader I w Abel, who was president of the United steel Workers of America. Since many of the questions that the commission was trying to answer were related to policing, one of its members was Atlanta Chief of Police Herbert Jenkins. The commission had only two black members, Roy Wilkins, executive director of the nub A c P, and Edward W. Brook, Republican Senator from Massachusetts. It also had only one woman, Kentucky Commissioner of Commerce, Catherine Graham Paton. The commission's chair was Otto Kerner, Junior Governor of Illinois, and his name, of course, is the one that became most associated with the commission and its work. But the vice chair, New York City Mayor John Lindsay, became far more involved in setting the commission's direction and its scope. And we're going to talk more about the committee itself after we pause for a sponsor break. Establishing the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was a strategic move for President Lyndon Johnson. The commission's stated purpose was to determine what happened, why it happened, and what could be done to prevent it from happening again. But beyond that, establishing a commission let the President look like he was taking action without actually having to take any specific action yet, especially without having to take any action that might jeopardize or pull focus from his existing at agenda. After all, this commission's deadline for preliminary findings was months away when he announced it, so it was possible, maybe not likely, but possible, that by that point things would no longer seem so urgent. Even though the Commission was pulled together over a single day, Its members had also been chosen very strategically. Nobody on it was seen as particularly radical. Although Roy Wilkins was executive director of the Double a c P. The a CP was seen as far more conservative than organizations that had arisen along with the Black Power movement. There were no academics, There were no black nationalists, no militants. There were also no young people. On average, the civilians who had participated in violence or vandalism in these uprisings were between the ages of fifteen and twenty five, but the youngest member of the Commission was in his late thirties, and most were decades older than that. Otto Kerner, Jr. Was also a strategic choice to chair the commission. He was hoping that the President would appoint him to a federal judge ship, so Johnson thought Kerner would lead the commission towards findings that praised his existing initiatives and programs that included things like the Civil Rights Act that Johnson had signed into law in nineteen sixty four and the set of reform programs known as the Great Society, which also connected to Johnson's War on Poverty. So he's hoping that he's going to get a report that praises things like the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, the Food Stamp Act of nineteen sixty four, the Economic Opportunity Act of nineteen sixty four, Project head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of nineteen sixty five, and the Housing and Urban Development Act of nineteen sixty five. This did not work out according to Johnson's plan, though. Although the Commission was named for Kerner, as we said, New York City Mayor John Lindsay took a far bigger role in setting its direction. And while the President had hoped the Commission would basically rubber stamp his existing agent death, the Commission instead did what the President had actually directed it to do. It examined what had happened, why it had happened, and what steps could be taken to prevent it from happening again. Members of the Commission personally toward cities where riots had taken place. They spoke directly to people who were involved and affected. They heard witness testimony. They hired investigators, and built out a field team that worked under the guidance of Social scientists, including about twenty graduate student researchers. Advisory panels provided knowledge on insurance in riot affected areas and on private enterprise. While the members of the Commission were mostly in their forties and up, the field team included a lot of young activists. A lot of them had been trained through or had otherwise participated in the civil rights movement. This work yielded hundreds and hundreds of pages of supplemental studies that were related to specific issues, which the Commission than had to work to distill down into one report that would be unanimously acceptable to all of them. It was critically important to the Commission that like they have something they could all sign off on, Otherwise they thought it would just be doomed to failure. Even though they were all generally mainstream figures, they definitely did not all agree on everything, so creating a document that they were all willing to sign off on took a huge amount of revision and compromise. A big part of this process was David Ginsburg, the Commission's executive director, who was head of the Commission's staff. He used the skills that he had honed as a lawyer to try to mediate between commissioners, for example, between Text Thornton, who came from a law and order mindset and thought the basic answer to civil unrest was more policing, and John Lindsay, who was more focused on improved social services to address those underlying factors that had contributed to the unrest. So along those lines, the Commission identified some common traits in most of the cities that they studied. Most of them had seen an influx of black residents in the first half of the twentieth century, and then especially in the years after World War two, white residents had moved from these cities into the suburbs. By the nineteen sixties, about a third of the total black population of the United States was living in the nation's twelve biggest central cities. Often, the people who had moved into these cities had moved from really impoverished rural areas, so they were arriving without a lot of money, looking for work that sometimes just did not exist there. The resulting predominantly black neighborhoods were desperately underserved. In the report, they're referred to almost exclusively as ghettos. Residents of these neighborhoods had ongoing serious grievances related to things like unemployment and the inadequate housing, poor schools, a lack of recreation facilities and other program discrimination, and problems with police practices. Often residents had tried to address those issues through the city's grievance procedures and they have been ignored. These cities also had overwhelmingly white governments and police forces, so a lot of black residents felt like their interests were not being represented and that they were being excluded from participating in the government. They also felt like they had no recourse when they faced racist treatment from police, and every person the commissioners talked to who had participated in the rioting had either experienced or witnessed police brutality. This report really didn't put a lot of focus on organizations that were working from within these communities to try to make improvements. But many of the issues at work also just weren't things that citizens could fix themselves, Like community groups could distribute breakfast to school children or provide job training and literacy programs to their neighbors, but they couldn't fixe were systems that were literally crumbling and backing up waste into their homes, so the result of all of this together was just a years long sense of futility and intense frustration from cities black residents, and then, in a pattern that repeated itself over and over again in the nineteen sixties, some kind of incident triggered a mass uprising. Sometimes these precipitating events were major, like an uprising in Harlem, New York in nineteen sixty four that started after an off duty police lieutenant named Thomas Gilligan shot and killed fifteen year old James Powell in front of witnesses. But in other cases, the precipitating incident seemed random and almost trivial, like on a particularly hot day in July of nineteen sixty six, police in Chicago turned off some illegally opened fire hydrants in a black neighborhood, and then rumors started to spread that police were leaving the high rents alone in white neighborhoods. Regardless of the scale of that initial incident, it typically followed months or years of building tensions, and it also typically happened during hot weather. Most of the homes in these neighborhoods had no air conditioning, so residents would spend their free time on stoops and in the streets just to try to get a little relief from the heat. That meant that when something happened, whether it was large or small, people were already outside, so angry crowds of already hot and frustrated people gathered very quickly. The Commission also noted that of the one hundred sixty four incidents they reviewed, eight of them were major. Those are ones that they described as lasting for more than two days, with fires, looting, reports of sniper fire, and the use of the National Guard or even the army to try to restore order. They described twenty three of the incidents as serious. So there was some looting, some throwing rocks and bottle some fires, but not nearly as many as in those eight major incidents, and those serious incidents lasted a day or two. But then they described the remaining one hundred thirty three incidents as minor. Only a few people were involved, they lasted for less than a day, with local police being the only law enforcement who were involved, although sometimes with the help of police from a neighboring town. In the Commission's view, these minor incidents only became national news because the nation had already primed with this idea that there was an overwhelming tide of violence in American cities. One of the President's directives to the Commission had been to study whether there was a national organization or conspiracy at work, some kind of outside agitators who were stirring up trouble in cities all around the country, and the Commission found that while some people in organizations did use violent rhetoric or even called for violence, there was no conspiracy and no organized national campaign for violence. The Commission also reported that in each of these cities, the vast majority of the residents hadn't participated in the rioting, and that in almost all cases there were other residents who had tried to discourage violence or to quote, cool things down. In some places, these efforts became an organized, official or semi official effort. For example, counter riot squads made up of local residents in Dayton, Ohio and Sampa, Florida were nicknamed the white Hats because of the white protective helmets they were issued. The Commission pulled all of this information together and came to a striking conclusion. Quote segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. 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 instituteations created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. It is time now to turn, with all the purpose at our command, to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens, urban and rural, White and black, Spanish surname American, Indian, and every minority group. At another point, the report read quote race prejudice has shaped our history decisively. It now threatens to affect our future. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War Two. This report called the state of affairs in cities black neighborhoods a failure of all levels of government, and it called for a quote commitment to national action, compassionate, massive, and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on earth. Those resources would include, if necessary, new taxes. We'll talk more about the commitment that the report was calling for. After a quick sponsor break, the full report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders walked through multiple uprisings that had taken place in the early to mid nineteen sixties, focusing primarily on the summer of ninety seven. It documented ongoing inequity, crime, poor housing, crumbling infrastructure, pay disparities, racism, and other issues that had been affecting these communities, as well as the city's either inability or refusal to address those issues. It established that it's and uprisings had developed after months or years of ongoing, escalating tensions, including long term social issues and serious underlying grievances. The report also said, quote the events of the summer of nineteen sixty seven are in large part the culmination of three hundred years of racial prejudice, and then it walked through an overview of that three hundred year history. It called for broad, sweeping changes to try to address all of this. This included seventy pages of specific recommendations based on three core objectives. Those objectives were quote opening up all opportunities for those who are restricted by racial segregation and discrimination, and eliminating all barriers to their choice of jobs, education, and housing, Removing the frustration of powerlessness among the disadvantaged by providing the means to deal with the problems that affect their own lives, and by increasing the capacity of our public and private institutions to respond to those problems. Increasing communication across racial lines, to destroy stereotypes, halt polarization and distressed and hostility, and create common ground for efforts towards common goals of public order and social justice. The cost of all of these proposed efforts was estimated at thirty billion dollars. It included the creation of two million new jobs over the course of three years, along with job training programs and educational improvements. There's educational improvements included ending school segregation, which was still persisting more than a decade after the Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education, and frankly still exists today. There were also early childhood educational proposals, adult literacy programs, housing reforms, and welfare programs, including a call to quote establish uniform national standards assistants at least as high as the annual poverty level of income. Welfare reforms also included removing requirements that were forcing the mothers of young children to work. Some of the recommendations related to policing in the criminal justice system. Recommended court reforms included plans to administer justice during riots and other emergencies, both making emergency provisions to deal with increased numbers of arrests and trials and seeking alternatives to making mass arrests. The report also made a lot of recommendations that were related to policing itself. To quote from the report, quote, the police are not merely a spark factor to some negroes. Police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a quote double standard of justice and protection, one for Negroes and one for whites. Later on the report, read quote, the abrasive relationship between the police and the minority communities has been a major and explosive source of grievance, tension, and disorder. The blame must be shared by the total society. The police are faced with demands for increased protection and service in the ghetto, yet the aggressive patrol practices thought necessary to meet these demands themselves create tension and hostility. The resulting grievances have been further aggravated by the lack of effective mechanisms for handling complaints against the police. Special programs for bettering police community relations have been instituted, but these alone are not enough. Police administrators, with the guidance of public officials and the support of the entire community, must take vigorous action to improve law enforcement and to decrease the potential for disorder. So the Commission's recommendations related to police included things like eliminating abrasive practices, establishing fair standards for dealing with citizens grievances, recruiting more black people to the police force, and developing programs meant to encourage community support of law enforcement. The Commission also made recommendations specifically about policing during periods of disorder, including making sure police were trained in riot response, which many responding officers and National Guard who were called out during these incidents were not The Commission also recommended establishing methods to dispel rumors and spread accurate information, and provide alternatives to lethal weapons for police to use in the field. The report also argued against the militarization of police quote the Commission believes that there is a grave danger that some communities may resort to the indiscriminate and excessive use of force. The harm full effects of overreaction are incalculable. The Commission condemns moves to equit police departments with mass destruction weapons such as automatic rifles, machine guns, and tanks. Weapons which are designed to destroy, not to control, have no place in densely populated urban communities. The Commission's recommendations also related to the news media. It found that much of the news reporting of the uprisings had been generally accurate, though sometimes sensationalized, but it had also focused mostly on violence without exploring the cause of the violence, and often the only news being reported about black neighborhoods was about violence. The report called for media outlets to have reporters on permanent assignment to cover issues related to black communities and urban areas, and to make this coverage a standard part of reporting. The report also recommended recruiting more black journalists at every level of news organizations. So the Commission's final report, including that seventy plus page list of recommendations, which of course we have not read all of the recommendations here seventy pages as a whole lot, uh, this total report was more than four hundred pages long. And even though the Commission's goal was to produce a document that they could all agree to, and they planned to sign that document in a public ceremony, that almost did not happen. Text Thornton threatened not to sign it because he felt that the document was anti police, and at that point John Lindsay said he would not sign it either, because he had made a lot of concessions to make that final report acceptable to Thornton. In the end, though they did present their unanimously approved report to the President at the end of February. You may remember that the Commission's preliminary findings were due by March first, ninety eight, but the deadline for the final report wasn't until the end of July. But this was the Commission's only report. President Johnson had realized that its work was not going the way that he had hoped, and he had eventually cut its funding. The Commission had reduced its staff to a skeleton crew just so it could finish a report with what it had left. The Kerner Commission report was dramatically different in its scope and its tone from other reports that had been produced in the nineteen sixties related to some of the same topics. So, for example, the Maccone Commission had investigated the nineteen sixty five Watts riots, and while it's report did note the existence of issues like unemployment and complaints about police brutality, it concluded that the riots were essentially meaningless outbursts started by quote riff Raff Lyndon. Johnson's assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Monahan, had also produced The Negro Family, the Case for National Action in nineteen sixty five. This report had put a huge focus on black families, specific offically how many black families had a single mother as the head of the household, and it had framed this as an almost pathological root of the problem, the problem kind of in quotation marks within black communities. So with precedents like those in mind, Johnson did not expect the Kerner Commission to produce the kind of report that it did, one that did not praise his initiatives in programs and in fact barely even mentioned them, and instead called for massive new programs that would require huge amounts of money, while also repeatedly citing white racism as an urgent problem. It did not help that the report came out as Johnson was facing increasing backlash over the US role in the Vietnam War, which had its own massive price tag. So johnasan refused to accept this report. He canceled the ceremony where he was supposed to accept a specially bound copy of it. He had established roughly twenty different commissions during his presidency, and for each of them he had personally signed letters of thanks to the commission's members, but he refused to do that for the members of the Kurner Commission. He did a point otto Kerner to the Federal Court of Appeals, but he blamed Lindsay for the direction the Commission had taken. And then, just as a side note, Karner's career came to an end in nineteen seventy four thanks to a corruption scandal his way outside the scope of this episode. But I thought, if we didn't mention it. People would say, why didn't you mention Auto Kurner's massive corruption scandal. Johnson had announced the creation of the Commission on National Television in nineteen sixty seven, but when its report came out in ninety eight, he essentially buried it. The only piece of legislation that's generally connected to the report is the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty eight, also called the Fair Housing Act of ninety eight, and that was revived after the report came out. The public response to the report was also divided. Bantom Book published the full report, and it became an immediate bestseller, selling seven hundred and fifty thousand copies in the first week and one point six million copies by June of nine. That is an enormous number of copies of books for any book, but especially for a government report. And also though faced a huge backlash because of its focus on white racism and its findings related to policing. Beyond that, though critics noted that it mirrored parts of the Moynihan Report, it sort of framed single motherhood among black women is almost pathological. In fact, women were barely mentioned in the report aside from being the victims of violence or mentioned as being single mothers. Another criticism was that the future goal of the report was really envisioning quote, a single society and a single American identity, So in other words, this report was proposing that black communities assimilate with and conform to white norms, which the report just took for granted as the one acceptable standard. The report also focused only on cities that had experienced some kind of civil disturbance, and not on the ones that didn't, so there was no examination of why those cities didn't see similar disturbances, even if they had similar underlying factors at work. Similarly, this report was focused almost exclusively on disturbances in which the civilians committing crimes were black. The chapter of the report that summarized three hundred years of US history mentioned various incidents of violence that white mobs enacted against black communities, but there was really no suggestion that that violence needed a thorough investigation into its causes and what could be done to prevent that in the future. Since Johnson didn't accept this report or specifically add its recommendations to his administration's goals in his final months and off, this sometimes the Kerner Reports impact is summed up as kind of None of its recommendations were ever enacted. It is absolutely true that there was no massive bill that tried to put all of these recommendations into play at once, but over the decades, some of its recommendations did come to pass through other legislation. For example, this report had a big focus on job training programs and the creation of new jobs. The Comprehensive Employment Training Act the c e t A was enacted in nineteen seventy three, and tax credits were passed in the nineteen seventies and eighties that led to the creation of about seven hundred thousand new jobs. The report also called for things like more funding and power for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and that did get a bigger budget and more oversight. There were also changes to policing which started long before the report was finalized. Johnson had declared a war on crime in nineteen sixty five and had established the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice also called the Katzenbach Commission, whose report was delivered in nineteen sixty seven. Johnson had established an Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, which became the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in night, and in June of that year, Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of nineteen sixty eight. So it's hard to trace a one to one path from the Currenter Commission report to the way policing has evolved because there were so many other laws and programs already in the works before and during the time that the Commission was working. None of its recommendations about police reform were really all that radical either, but the Commission's argument against the increasing militarization of police was obviously not heated at all. One note about the Commission's recommendations about law enforcement. The Commission insulted numerous members of law enforcement when doing its work, three of whom were big enough contributors that the Commission thanked them by name. One was Darryl Gates, Deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who had been one of the commanders in the field during the Watson Uprising. Gates later became chief of the l a p D, and his tenure was incredibly controversial, everything from founding the ubiquitous but ineffective drug Abuse Resistance Education program to making racist comments about black people's physiology to how he led the l A p D and its response to the uprising in Los Angeles. Who's precipitating factors included the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Yeah, it's it's it's weird that somebody who wound up being that notorious is one of the people UH personally thanked Uh in the footnotes of this report. About a month after the Coroner Commission report was released, the assassination of Mark and Luther King Jr. Sparked a wave of riots and other unrest all across the United States, and then in November of nineteen sixty eight, Richard Nixon won the presidential election. He had run on a law and order platform, focusing on increased policing and a restoration of order rather than the types of widespread social programs and reforms that the Kurner Report had really been advocating. Nixon took office in nineteen sixty nine. So even if Johnson had really tried to push all this very hard in the last few months of his presidency, full pessimistic that that would have been continued into the next presidential administration. Every ten years since nineteen sixty eight. Various organizations and institutions have done retrospectives on the Kerner Report, looking back at what's changed and what hasn't, and of those changes, what worked and what didn't. And generally those reports have been mixed both in terms of the changes and whether those changes led to overall positive or negative outcomes. But we're are less of the details. They generally note how much inequality and how many of these social conditions outlined in the report still exist today. Yeah, there there are definitely aspects that you can see some improvement, Like, uh, A lot of the communities that were looked at are not as heavily segregated as they were um A lot of times, though it is still a community of uh, like it has become instead of an almost exclusively black community, it has become us um a community of like black and Hispanic and Latino people, still under a city government that is overwhelmingly white. So it's it's a lot of the changes that these reports look into have like that degree of nuance, like here is a here is a change that has happened, not necessarily something that that addressed core issues that were at work. Do you have a bit of listener mail for us I do. It's about something completely different from all of this. Uh. This is from Sonia, who says, Hi, tracing Holly, I recently listened to the Swill Milk scandal episode and was tickled and how you kept trying to reassure the audience how spent beer grains being fed to cows was safe. I thought you might be interested to know that spent beer grain is not only a great nutrition source for cows, but also humans. Companies like Regrained are part of the growing up cycled food movement, specializing in creating delicious and nutritious food products from spent beer grains. Up Cycled feed uses ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment. The Regrain Supergrain plus has three point four times the amount of fiber than wheat flour and two times the protein of oats, so it's a highly nutritious ingredient and keeps this low carbon food source from ending up in landfills. Sonia talks about knowing the owners of Regrain when they were developing their product. Um. I wanted to read this particular email because I just completely forgot about how when we were doing more brewing at home, we were using our spent grains to make all kinds of stuff. We were having spent grain pancakes and spent grain bread and spent grain muffins. Um, it's been a while since we brewed anything. I don't know why that is. We have the stuff to do it, but yes, spent grains can be delicious for people as well as for non human animals. Um. Yeah, So we'd like to send us an email right to us about this or any other podcast where History podcast at i heart radio dot com. We're all over social media ad missed in History. That's where we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeart radio app and anywhere else to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.