Editing Kerner Commission (section)

== Legacy ==
In April 1968, one month after the Kerner Report was published, [[assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.|Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated]] and [[King assassination riots|rioting]] of protest and grief broke out in more than 100 cities.<ref>{{cite web |title='Our Nation Is Moving Toward Two Societies, One Black, One White—Separate and Unequal': Excerpts from the Kerner Report |website=History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web |publisher=George Mason University |url=http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6545/ }}
</ref> Although this rioting seemed to indicate that America was on its way to successive years of racially-oriented urban violence, which many feared, the rioting largely disappeared after 1968.  It was not until 1980 that such rioting returned, and it was only in one city—Miami.  It was then another twelve years until the Rodney King riot in Los Angeles that another significant disorder occurred.

It is generally thought that much of the Report has been ignored and that its recommendations have not been implemented.<ref>See, for instance, Lindsay Lupo's ''Flak-Catchers'' (2011, page 151), Alice George's "The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened" (''Smithsonian'', March 1, 2018), and John F. Gardener's "Forward" in ''One Year Later'' (1969, page v).</ref> 

A number of its "National Action" recommendations have been addressed to questionable effectiveness, as per the criticism of each policy: Congress passed the Fair Housing Act about one month after the report's completion, and within a few years, funding for the nation's two largest urban aid programs (Model Cities and urban renewal), as well as federal aid for education, had been doubled. In addition, Congress passed the Community Development Act to build on the Fair Housing Act towards helping housing equality. Many of its major policing and riot control recommendations were also adopted: police forces are much more racially diverse than they were in 1967, formal grievance processes are now in place in almost every city, many cities utilize community policing programs which seek to get officers out of the patrol car so that they can build a rapport with the people on their beats. [[Police brutality]] is a massive social issue as evidenced by the many protests against them, such as those for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Freddie Gray. Mental disorders are now handled much differently than they were in 1967, police utilize new crowd control techniques like banning the firing of weapons over the heads of the crowd as a dispersal technique. Funding for mental asylums has been decimated as a result of the deinstitutionalization trend in public policy of the 1980s and austerity measures.<ref>{{Cite news | url=https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/05/truth-about-deinstitutionalization/618986/ | title=The truth about deinstitutionalization | first=Alisa | last=Roth | date=May 25, 2021 | work=The Atlantic }}</ref> The report itself has been cited in major housing discrimination and desegregation court cases and in economic studies.  Its "two societies" warning has become a form of socio-political shorthand that is frequently used whenever there is a tragic police incident.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Rick Loessberg and John Koskinen |date=September 2018 |title=Measuring the Distance: The Legacy of the Kerner Report |journal=Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences |volume=4 |issue=6}}</ref> Presidents Richard Nixon, [[Gerald Ford]], Ronald Reagan, and [[Donald Trump]] espoused a [[Law and order (politics)|law and order]] platform that favored strong policing and suppression of riots. As the Report predicted, incidents of police brutality continued to spark riots and protest marches even after the 1960s had ended, although substantially much smaller in number, frequency and intensity, including the [[1980 Miami riots]], [[1989 Miami riot]], [[1992 Los Angeles riots]] and [[West Las Vegas riots]], [[1992 Washington Heights riots]], [[St. Petersburg, Florida riots of 1996]], [[Cincinnati riots of 2001]], 2013 [[Flatbush Riots]], 2009 and 2010 riots associated with the [[Shooting of Oscar Grant#Protests|shooting of Oscar Grant]], [[2014 Oakland riots]], 2014 [[Ferguson unrest]], [[2015 Baltimore protests]], [[2016 Charlotte riot]], [[2016 Milwaukee riots]], [[2017 Anaheim protests]], [[2017 St. Louis protests]] and the 2020 [[George Floyd protests]].

Many of its recommendations have not been enacted as of 2024.  Head Start has never been funded at the level that the Commission desired nor has the Commission's major welfare and job training recommendations been adopted. What may be more accurate to state about the Report is that instead of it being ignored or forgotten is that its implementation has not been "consistent with the scope and urgency" of its recommendations.

=== Continuation of the Commission ===
The [[Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation]] (the Eisenhower Foundation) was formed in 1981 to support the findings of the Kerner Commission and of the 1968 [[National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence]] (the National Violence Commission).  Kerner Commission Executive Director Ginsburg, Kerner Commissioner and Senator [[Fred R. Harris|Fred Harris]] (D-OK) and Kerner Commissioner and Senator [[Edward Brooke]] (R-MA) were among the founding trustees of the Eisenhower Foundation.  The Foundation has released 25 year, 30 year and 40 year updates of the Kerner Commission's final report.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the Kerner Report, the Eisenhower Foundation in 1998 sponsored two complementary reports, [[The Millennium Breach]] and [[Locked in the Poorhouse]]. The Millennium Breach, co-authored by commissioner Harris, found the racial divide had grown in the subsequent years with [[inner city]] unemployment at crisis levels.<ref name=Harris1998>{{cite book |editor1-last=Harris |editor1-first=Fred R. |editor2-first=Lynn A. |editor2-last=Curtis |title=Locked in the Poorhouse: Crisis, Race, and Poverty in the United States |location=Lanham, MD |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. |date=1998 }}</ref>
The Millennium Breach found that most of the decade that followed the Kerner Report, America made progress on the principal fronts the report dealt with: race, poverty, and inner cities. Then progress stopped and in some ways reversed by a series of economic shocks and trends and the government's action and inaction.

Harris reported in ''Locked in the Poorhouse'', "Today, thirty years after the Kerner Report, there is more poverty in America, it is deeper, blacker and browner than before, and it is more concentrated in the cities, which have become America's poorhouses."<ref name=Harris1998/>