Home / Full timeline / Experts on race and urban affairs, some of whom worked with the Kerner Commission in producing the 1968 Report of the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders, announce that the prediction of the Commission twenty years ago that the United States was moving toward two societies—one White and affluent, the other Black and impoverished—was becoming a reality.

Experts on race and urban affairs, some of whom worked with the Kerner Commission in producing the 1968 Report of the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders, announce that the prediction of the Commission twenty years ago that the United States was moving toward two societies—one White and affluent, the other Black and impoverished—was becoming a reality.

1988 (Mar 1)

Experts on race and urban affairs, some of whom worked with the Kerner Commission in producing the 1968 Report of the President's Commission on Civil Disorders, announced that the prediction of the Commission twenty years ago that the United States was moving toward two societies—one White and affluent, the other Black and impoverished—was becoming a reality. A new report, published after a seven-month study following widespread racial rioting in the summer of 1987, proclaimed that “segregation by race still sharply divides American cities in both housing and schools for Blacks, and especially in schools for Hispanics.” It also contended that the nation was being torn apart “by quiet riots”: unemployment, poverty, crime, and housing and school segregation. It claimed that “less than one percent of the federal budget is spent for education, down from two percent in 1980” and that "the gap between rich and poor has widened, and there is a growing underclass.” One of the former members of the original Kerner Commission, former senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, and the co-chairman of the new panel, former Justice Department official Roger Wilkins, offered comments on the new report at a news conference in Washington, D.C., as the new study was presented. Harris said that “twenty years later, poverty is worse, more people are poor. ... It is harder to get out of poverty now.” Wilkins added that the "quiet riots” of 1987 were caused "by racism in American culture” and economic discrimination. The original fourteen-hundred-page Kerner Report had also said that “White racism” was largely responsible for the “explosive mixture” of “poverty and frustration" in the Black communities that erupted in violence. Both Harris and Wilkins blamed the administration of President Ronald Reagan for "cutting back funds on social programs and not taking a stronger stand for equal rights in employment and housing.” The new report concluded its findings with this statement: “We know what should be done. . . . Jobs are the greatest need. Full employment is the best anti-poverty program.”