How a New Study on Race Relations Echoes LBJ’s 1968 Kerner Report

Blacks and whites in America are “worlds apart,” says a new study on race, which has a familiar tone to a report made decades ago, the Kerner Report.

Blacks are searched at a bayonet point by National Guardsmen in Newark, New Jersey, July 17, 1967. The National Guardsmen entered the riot-torn area of the city at daybreak and searched all cars leaving the riot zone. A white policeman was shot and died after being beaten and stomped by a gang following the shooting of a 22 year old black man. AP Photo/Eddie Adams

A man holds a sign during a civil disobedience action on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 10, 2015. Protests occurred after unrest and a shootout in Ferguson on August 9 that led county officials to declare a state of emergency on August 10. Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

Black Lives Matter Movement

The majority of African Americans, 65 percent, support the Black Lives Matter movement. The study says 41 percent of blacks strongly support the campaign, while 24 percent say they somewhat support it, and 12 percent of blacks say they do not support it.

Forty percent of whites say they somewhat or strongly support the Black Lives Matter campaign, with 14 percent saying they strongly support it.

Echo From the Past

Treitler noted the riots occurring these days are similar to those that took place in 1967.

“Fifty years later, we’re almost in the exact same position,” said Treitler. “There are many similarities.”

After the 1967 riots, President Lyndon B. Johnson established an 11-member advisory committee to investigate the incidents. The report, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (The Kerner Report), was completed just a few years after the Civil Rights Act.

 

“This deepening racial division is not inevitable,” the Kerner Report said.

FILE - A National Guardsman moves a man towards the wall as police search others in riot-torn Newark, N.J., in this July 15, 1967, file photo. AP Photo

The tense relationship between police and non-whites was also highlighted in the Kerner Report.

“The abrasive relationship between the police and the minor­ity communities has been a major-and explosive-source of grievance, tension and disorder,” said the report.

“The blame must be shared by the total society.”

Future

Treitler doesn’t see racism going away soon, especially with rising xenophobia and anti-immigrant views.

“Racial relations won’t get better,” she said, “Racists won’t do better themselves, how is it supposed to disappear?”

“We’re in the same spot as 1967.”