The notion that white folks are responsible for fixing this mess is one Johnson, who had signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law by that time, should have embraced. The year 1967, though, was a tough time for him. Beleaguered near the end of his presidency by both “law and order” Republicans who saw violent racial protest as the main problem and black militants who felt that he wasn’t doing nearly enough, the president wasn’t prepared to tell his fellow white Americans that racism was their problem to fix. He had his own problems. His Vietnam misadventure was already political gangrene, so he insured that the commission would ignore the war’s budgetary impact and inherent contradictions with the mission of social justice. The president needed a big win, and fast. Politically speaking, the race riots were a considerable inconvenience to him, and this report didn’t give him a quick fix. Instead, outside of the landmark housing act he signed the following year, the report recommended solutions that he no longer had the political willpower or wherewithal to enact.
It may sound cynical to talk about the commission this way. However, though its final report provided a scathing indictment of white America and the systemic racism that it enabled, both the commission and the report must first be understood as instruments of politics. The commission was loaded with politicians loyal to the president, and light on people doing the work of civil rights. Though bipartisan, Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, was the only activist among the 11 in the group. Most were chosen because Johnson felt that he could count on them to deliver him a final result that would be politically palatable. According to historian Julian Zelizer, the entire commission had an “establishment feel,” and included loyalists like Litton Industries head Charles “Tex” Thornton, a conservative. The man who was leading the group, former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, was hoping that Johnson would appoint him to the federal bench. In a further exercise of control, Johnson severely restricted the funding for the group — so much so that, as Zelizer notes, the commissioners lacked adequate meeting space to stage their own hearings.