Definition
The Kerner Report is the February 29, 1968 final report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner Jr. and commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson in July 1967 after a summer of uprisings in Newark, Detroit, and more than 150 other American cities.
Its central conclusion: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal." The Commission diagnosed the urban uprisings not as criminal disorder but as the predictable consequence of white racism in housing, employment, schools, and police practice. The 426-page report became an unexpected bestseller and a foundational document of late-1960s American social policy.
Why it matters
How it works
Johnson convened the commission in July 1967 with 11 members: Governor Otto Kerner (chair), New York Mayor John Lindsay (vice chair), Senators Fred Harris and Edward Brooke, NAACP head Roy Wilkins, Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins, business and labor leaders, and the only woman, Katherine Peden. The Commission staffed up rapidly, sent investigators into the riot cities, took testimony from thousands of witnesses, and worked through the fall and winter.
The report's diagnosis was unsparing. It surveyed the 1967 uprisings city by city — Newark (23 dead), Detroit (43 dead), Plainfield, Cincinnati, Atlanta — and found a common pattern: long-standing Black grievances about police brutality, unemployment, housing, and education; a triggering incident (typically a police encounter); a cascading response of looting, arson, and confrontation; an overwhelming and often indiscriminate police and National Guard response. The Commission rejected the prevailing theory that the uprisings were organized by outside agitators or conspiracy — no evidence of such organization existed.
Its policy recommendations were correspondingly sweeping. Massive job creation for the urban poor. Expansion of welfare and the introduction of a guaranteed income floor. Construction of six million units of housing over five years. School integration through busing and metropolitan-area solutions. Reform of police hiring, training, and community relations. Federal funding to enable cities to absorb these changes.
Johnson received the report on March 1, 1968 and never met with the Commission to discuss it. He felt — and his domestic-policy aides confirmed — that the report's recommendations would require shifting funds from the Vietnam War, which he was unwilling to do. The book was published by Bantam in paperback at the urging of Commission staff (who feared exactly this kind of shelving) and sold more than two million copies in its first months — making it perhaps the most-read federal report in American history. The Fair Housing Act of April 1968 incorporated some of its recommendations on housing discrimination; most of the broader agenda was never enacted.