Kerner Commission 40 years ago and today: problems and solutions for America’s inner city poor and what Obama can do about it

The last time there was a Democratic majority of this kind in national politics was in the 1960s in Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Johnson would pass more legislation then almost any other president in American history. It would include Medicare, civil rights laws and the War on Poverty. But the Great Society, a sort of new New Deal, some say, didn’t fulfill its promises.

Dr. Allen Curtis was working in the summer of 1968 when the National Violence commission was summoned. Curtis served as the task force’s co-director and later as the urban policy director in the Carter administration.

“Whenever hell would break loose, President Johnson would convene a new commission,” Curtis said.

Hell broke loose in the late 1960s when riots that broke out in black neighborhoods all over the country, most famously in Detroit, Newark and Watts in Los Angeles. The Kerner Riot Commission (1967 to 1968) and Eisenhower National Violence commission (1968 to 1969) was charged with finding out why.

“LBJ thought there was a conspiracy going on. He found out it wasn’t. It was just a response to the conditions of the cities,” he said.

Perhaps the most famous stinging revelation from the original report was that “Our nation is moving towards two societies – one white, one black – separate and unequal.”

Some of the original report’s most critical findings:

- One in five African-Americans lived in “squalor and deprivation in ghetto neighborhoods.”

- The unemployment rate was double for African-Americans, as compared to whites.

- Infant mortality rates among African American children was triple the rate of white children.

“What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that the white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it. White institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

The Eisenhower Foundation, named after Milton Eisenhower, a liberal or progressive Republican, was founded in 1981 to continue the work of the Kerner and Eisenhower commissions, investigating the root of problems and to suggest solutions for America’s inner city poor.

Curtis now serves as the Foundation’s president. Reports have been released every few years since then but was revised four times this year, most recently after the Nov. 4 election.

So whats changed since 1968? Here are five major areas of concern summarized by Curtis then and now.

Poverty