The fires in Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and elsewhere last summer drew immediate comparison to the “long, hot summer” of 1967. Urban uprisings had erupted during every summer of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, but the unprecedented property damage and civilian casualties in Newark and Detroit that July demanded immediate action. Less than a week after deploying federal troops in Detroit, Johnson established a special National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, whose goal was drafting “measures to prevent or contain such disasters in the future.”
Known by the name of its chairman, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, the Kerner Commission released its 431-page report in February 1968. It famously observed that the United States was moving toward “two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal,” and offered policy options to manage the “problems of race relations.”
The remedies began with the “enrichment” of the separated society, then moved toward “the integration choice.” Aiming to achieve “freedom for every citizen to live and work according to his capacities and desires, not his color,” the commission recommended the creation of 2 million jobs for low-income Americans, continued federal intervention to ensure school desegregation, year-round schooling for low-income youths, the construction of hundreds of thousands of public housing units and a guaranteed minimum income.
Unfortunately, Johnson and subsequent federal policymakers did not follow that path. And despite the crisis of urban unrest that inspired the commission’s work, the administration did not even address the basic police reforms it outlined. Instead, policymakers escalated the use of aggressive patrol strategies from the War on Crime that Johnson launched in 1965, eventually fostering the mass criminalization of low-income Americans of color.
As in the 1960s, the nation today stands at a turning point. A growing mandate for racial justice has been propelled by the massive demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. At the same time, the escalation of white-supremacist violence threatens to further divide the public. The moment demands that policymakers rethink priorities and, in the process, right the wrongs of history. This urgent transformation must start with the nation’s policing and prisons systems, which have functioned as the engine of racial inequality since the fall of Jim Crow.
In 1968, the Kerner Commission warned that the aggressive enforcement of misdemeanors encouraged arbitrary “stop-and-frisk” interrogations and racial profiling. Yet this strategy became entrenched in urban policing and remains so in many cities today. Moreover, under Johnson’s War on Poverty, law enforcement officials came to assume greater influence in the administration of all social programs. Community-based welfare initiatives were defunded and replaced with neighborhood police stations, such as the police-run recreation center that replaced the health clinic in the National Capital Authority Housing Projects in Southeast D.C. Through the 1970s, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration created by Johnson granted state and local governments what amounts to $25 billion in today’s dollars to expand and modernize their police forces, courts and prisons.