American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 14
Part 14 of a Series
Newark and Detroit, 1967
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,"
- George Santayana
Fewer than four years after Martin Luther King shared his dream from the steps of the Lincoln memorial, inner cities burst into flames across America. It wasn’t the first time. There had been deadly race riots in New York City in 1863, Memphis and New Orleans in 1866, in Chicago in 1919, Harlem in 1935 and 1943, Watts in 1965. Nor would it be the last. In the summer of 1968, in the aftermath of King’s assassination and with the ink barely dry on the “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders,” riots again broke out in more than 100 cities across the nation.
President Lyndon Johnson had charged the commission, chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, to investigate the 1967 riots, primarily in Newark and Detroit, and to answer three questions:
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What can be done to prevent it from happening again?
The Kerner Commission produced a 440-page report. It boiled down to one sentence: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”
It was that simple. But it was hardly new. Hadn’t that sentence described America in 1963? In 1863? In 1776? Even in 1619? The results have been devastating. “Segregation and poverty,” the commission reported, “have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.” Ignorant perhaps, but not innocent: “white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
Newark, New Jersey, an American City, July 12-17, 1967
I don’t believe you could find a more succinct definition of “systemic racism.” Yet, even now, half a century later, local school boards and governments are bent on eradicating those two words from curricula and textbooks across America. They want to rewrite our history precisely so we will forget what happened. George Santayana’s famous saying was clearly meant to be a warning. For those intent on whitewashing our past, particularly in our schools, it has become an aspiration. But if four centuries of American history have proved anything, it is that, unless we deal with our past openly and honestly, we will continue to repeat it.
Already we witness politicians and other pundits describe the urban unrest after the murder of George Floyd, and other police killings, as the efforts of radicals and other bad people to sow chaos and undermine the rule of law. So, it’s worth noting that 56 years ago the Kerner Commission found that the number-one grievance in the communities it studied were the practices and attitudes of the local police – who had “come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression. And the fact is that many police do express and reflect these white attitudes.” Unfortunately, the official response from many city governments was “to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons.”
These words, let’s not forget, were written in 1968. How much had changed by 2020, when George Floyd was killed?
And yet, for all the anger and violence and despair the commission discovered in our inner cities, it found something else, something surprising: the rioters were not “rejecting the American system,” the report noted. Rather, “they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.” As I hope this series has illustrated, that has long been so. “Black people have seen the worst in America,” wrote Nicole Hannah-Jones, ”yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.”