Editing Kerner Commission (section)

== Report summary ==
{{More citations needed section|date=June 2020}}

The Commission's final work, ''Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders'' or Kerner Report, was issued on February 29, 1968. The Report became an instant bestseller, and more than two million Americans bought copies of the 426-page document. Its primary finding was that the riots resulted from Black frustration at the lack of economic opportunity and the manner in which they were treated by white society, especially by the police. [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] pronounced the report a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life."<ref name="africanaonline">{{cite web |author=Toonari |title=Kerner Report |url=http://www.africanaonline.com/reports_kerner.htm |url-status=usurped |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100107022536/http://www.africanaonline.com/reports_kerner.htm |archive-date=7 January 2010 |access-date=23 November 2009 |website=Africana Online}}</ref>

The report was made available through the [[United States Government Publishing Office|US Government Printing Office]], but it was [[Bantam Books]] who published the full report that most people purchased or read. Bantam published it in an inexpensive, mass-market paperback book format with an introduction written by [[Tom Wicker]] of ''The New York Times''.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last=McLaughlin |first=Malcolm |date=May 23, 2021 |title=The story of America: the Kerner report, national leadership, and liberal renewal, 1967-1968 |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17541328.2021.1928827 |journal=The Sixties |volume=14 |issue=1 |pages=20–52 |doi=10.1080/17541328.2021.1928827 |s2cid=235812315 |access-date=June 1, 2022 |via=Taylor & Francis Online}}</ref>

The report berated federal and state governments for failed housing, education, and social-service policies. The report also aimed some of its sharpest criticism at the media. "The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and white perspective."<ref>{{cite book|title=The Kerner Report|author=National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders|page=389|publisher=Princeton University Press|year=2016}}</ref> The report combined a detailed description of how eight riots unfolded and ended with governmental statistics that demonstrated the differences in living conditions between America's Black and white populations.  It also included a chapter on African American history and a chapter on how the European immigrant experience differed from what Blacks were experiencing and a vast array of recommendations pertaining to the police, the justice system, property insurance, the media, employment, education, welfare, and housing".<ref name=":0" />

The report's best-known passage warned: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."

It concluded that the main cause of the violence was [[White people|white]] [[racism]] and suggested that white America bore much of the responsibility for Black rioting and rebellion. Its study of arrested rioters found that these individuals were not transients, habitual criminals, or unemployed troublemakers. In fact, these individuals were usually lifelong residents of the city where they rioted, they had actually stayed in school a little longer and had previously been arrested no more than the average person from their neighborhood, and they had a job (albeit one that did not pay particularly well).

It is also important to note that neither the Commission nor the FBI found any evidence that the rioting was the result of a local, national or foreign conspiracy.

The Report called for an end to de facto segregation, the creation of new jobs, the construction of new housing, major changes to the welfare program, and the diversification of local police and the media.

The Commission further noted that:

* "Unless there are sharp changes in the factors influencing Negro settlement patterns within metropolitan areas, there is little doubt that the trend toward Negro majorities will continue."
* "Providing employment for the swelling Negro ghetto population will require ...opening suburban residential areas to Negroes and encouraging them to move closer to industrial centers..."
* "[c]ities will have Negro majorities by 1985 and the suburbs ringing them will remain largely all white unless there are major changes in Negro fertility rates, in migration settlement patterns or public policy."
* "[w]e believe that the emphasis of the program should be changed from traditional publicly built slum based high rise projects to smaller units on scattered sites."

Findings from the Hughes Panel were also published separately from the Kerner Report under a report titled, ''Meeting The Insurance Crisis Of Our Cities'', in January 1968.<ref name=":4">{{Cite book |last=President's National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas |url= |title=Meeting The Insurance Crisis Of Our Cities |publisher=United States Government Printing Office |year=1968 |location=Washington, D.C. |pages= |via=HaithiTrust}}</ref> This panel found that insurance not being available was a contributor toward creating the conditions that spawned these civil disturbances. It specifically found that, from a survey of 3,000 businesses and homeowners in six major cities, 30% of homeowners and 40% of businesses had "faced serious insurance problems".<ref name=":32">{{Cite book |last=Horan |first=Caley |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YII6EAAAQBAJ |title=Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=2021 |isbn=9780226784410 |pages=140 |chapter= |via=[[Google Books]]}}</ref>