AL: This conversation about how the report’s authors defined riots versus protests, but more broadly about how we define violence in terms of physical violence against other people versus destruction of property, let’s say. This has colored the debates over the anti-ICE protests and going back to 2020, going back decades further to the civil rights movement.

One argument being: How can you police the response to institutional violence being waged by the government? The other being, if you do something like light a cop car on fire, you’re ruining the optics for everyone else — creating this kind of false binary between nonviolent or violent protests. You talked about the suppression of one part of the report that characterized the unrest, including the act the commission considered violent as an expression of political power. Can you talk about what the controversy was there? 

RL: President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission at the end of July 1967 to investigate why there had been more than 150 riots in the U.S. that year. And what the social scientists concluded was that there was this political bent to the rioting.

People who were rioting weren’t just letting off steam. They were concerned that they had no future. They had a sense that they had no power. And they put that together in a report and delivered it in December of 1967. The report was written by some very, very capable individuals, but they will openly admit they were sort of inexperienced at that point in their career, and they had just either gotten their PhDs or they had just begun teaching at colleges and they were teaching at places like Harvard. So these were very well respected, accomplished individuals. 

Their writing tended to reflect their youthful exuberance, as one of them would say, and also the times. There was a lot of “the power of the people” kind of statement in their draft study. And when the senior staff read this, it was like: Nope, can’t do it. It’s just not working. 

As one of the senior staff members told me — first of all, he wished it had been better edited. If it had been better edited and some of the rhetoric had been toned down, it would’ve been a much easier fit. Staff members told me, though, we were already going out on a limb saying that it was racism that was causing the rioting.

No other riot report in the 20th century had made that conclusion before. It had always been the riffraff. And so now we’re blaming white society and white institutions. We felt like we couldn’t go any further and actually say this was a political protest because then it would look like the country was falling apart 

AL: Even if it was true. I mean, what do you say to people who say, “Who cares if people are being turned off?” Who don’t think that it should be a primary concern. 

RL: Words do matter. They really, really do. And I was lucky enough to be a part of some key decision making processes with our county commissioners and got to administer a lot of the major types of programs that the Kerner Report recommended.

And it doesn’t take very long to realize words do matter. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a public or a private discussion over a contract, over a program, over a proposed statute or ordinance, and it boils down to words. We have to be so mindful of when we’re having a conversation about any difficult topic, but especially something like race right now. You cannot be afraid to say the truth, but you need to make sure that you say it in a very straightforward manner. 

I go back to one of the things that we can learn from the Kerner Report and the commission that wrote it is: These 11 individuals had their disagreements. And if you look at the composition of the commission, you never would’ve thought they would’ve been a group that would’ve unanimously concluded that the rioting was a result of white racism. You had a white southern police chief. You had a small town Republican congressman from Ohio who never voted for any of the Great Society’s social legislation and only had about two percent of his district being Black. He was on the commission. You had a senator from Oklahoma. Can you imagine a senator from Oklahoma today taking any progressive stance? 

You had a self-made millionaire from West Texas who believed in the bootstrap mentality as much as he believed in the American flag and apple pie. Yet you had that kind of group of individuals who came together and somehow crafted, I think, the most boldly, starkly worded report on race in our nation’s history.

And one of the ways they did that is the way they communicated with each other. They had the utmost respect for each other. They had their disagreements and they would pound the table, but they didn’t say, “well, you’re a racist.” And the other one didn’t respond by saying, “you’re woke” or “you’re a socialist.”

And what they chose to do is they chose to emphasize and focus on what they had in common and then work from there. And when they did that, they found that, again not surprisingly words mattered. That it was maybe only a difference in tone or emphasis that they had, and I think that’s one of the things we have to do here now [when] talking about race. 

AL: The bipartisan consensus that you’re talking about, a big part of this, at least in the book, is possible because these commission members actually visited the cities.

RL: Yes. 

AL: You kind of alluded to this, but could something like that ever happen today? Like, do members of Congress supporting these ICE raids just need to visit other cities? Are we past that point and this is just purely political? 

RL: All movements — all changes in the wind — start at an individual level and it only takes one. And when you have — and we’ll use the Senate as an example — when you have such an even split between Democrats and Republicans, all it takes is a handful on either side to change the outcome and the same thing would happen in the House as well. So yeah, that’s a very good idea. 

AL: You also dig into the influence of riot theory on the writing of the report among other disciplines in the social sciences. The report went out of its way to avoid the appearance that it was condoning the unrest or any form of destruction of property, emphasized support for “law and order,” and avoided saying the riots were rational or justifiable, even though that belief was shared by some of the members.

The window for acceptable forms of protests — the scale from like riot to protest has in many ways closed significantly since 1967. Like I just think of campus protests against the genocide in Gaza, the police response to protests in 2020. What forms of civil disobedience or protest does that leave us with?

RL: That’s the hard part about protests in general. And when you go back and you look at, for instance, the movements that were done in the ’60s with the Freedom Riders in Martin Luther King’s march and the March on Washington, how meticulously planned they all were, and oftentimes they were confronted with extreme violence, yet they kept their composure.

If you’re going to have a demonstration, it needs to be very well planned and orchestrated and led like any organization, like any movement, so that it doesn’t go off in the wrong direction. But that’s— it’s easier to say than to do, I think. 

AL: I really wanted to talk about this because I think this is one of the most important links to what we’re seeing today.

You discussed the debate around the chapter in the report on Black history in America as being both a preview and a guide to the hysteria over critical race theory and attacks on DEI. How are they related? 

RL: The commission realized early on that to be able to really reach America and bring about the change that it thought it was needed, that it was going to have to explain how far reaching discrimination had been.

So they went back and they commissioned several of the country’s leading American historians. One of which was John Hope Franklin, who’s regarded as perhaps the most preeminent African American historian of our time. And they asked them to put together this chapter on African American history and really what that was in this case was to what extent discrimination had existed and what had been done to perpetuate it and continue it, and what efforts had been made to try to combat it during the time. And that became a key chapter. 

Now when the commission staff presented the first draft of that chapter to the commission, you got a lot of the reactions that you get today when talking about critical race theory. You had comments about, “How can you say this about Abraham Lincoln? He’s one of the greatest presidents we ever had” and “I don’t think we’re giving whites enough credit in the abolitionist movement” and “This part of the chapter reads like some sort of political manifesto.” And again, it looked like you were listening in on some school board meeting in some city somewhere.

The fact though, that they were able to work through those comments and concerns, just like the ones we hear right now, gives me hope that if people have the opportunity to sit down and have a mature conversation about what the facts are and how you can present it. That you can present the part of our history that makes us uncomfortable. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we hate our country, and it doesn’t mean that we’re embarrassed to be Americans, but it’s something that we can acknowledge that’s who we were once, but that’s not who we are now. 

AL: I think one of the differences, at least, I mean I wasn’t alive in 1967, but we’re saying critical race theory, but really we’re using the language of the people who are claiming that anything that talks about racism or Black history is critical race theory — using it as a stand-in to set the levels that this is something that we should be worried about. It’s concerning that 58 years later we’re still having the conversations, but there’s maybe less good faith in the room.

RL: Exactly.

AL: I mean, I don’t know how to square that. 

RL: In many respects, what we’re hearing today has always been there, or was there even in the ’60s. Now there’s more of a national effort to point out these incidents and turn it into more of a protest movement against, as you said, the teaching of anything having to do with African American history.

AL: The report made a number of recommendations, several of which it followed through on. Can you tell us what it would look like today in America if we’d followed through on more of those recommendations? 

RL: Well, if you look at a lot of the accounts written about the report since 1968, everyone laments that it never really was implemented and it perhaps wasn’t implemented at a pace and at a scale that the commission desired.

But when you go down through the checklist and you made a reference that there’s almost hundreds of recommendations that it made from the national level to the local level, to the private sector, a great many of them were implemented and they were substantial recommendations. They weren’t minor details. They were major reforms.

Now, one of the things that I think a lot of us forget, myself included, until I had one of the commission staff members point this out to me is that the world’s not static. And that it’s always changing, and that even in 1968 when the report was released, this individual told me he believed the report had already been overcome by events that were occurring.

A month after the report was released, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Two months after that, Robert Kennedy was killed. So after that the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. [At] the end of that month, you had the riot at the Chicago National Democratic Convention. And that was just for one year.

And when you think about what the next decade was, where you still had the Vietnam War, then you had Watergate, then you had the energy crisis and AIDS and homelessness, so many other things began competing for our national focus. It’s hard to say, “What would the world be like if Kerner had been more vigorously enacted the first year or two?”

AL: All of those issues that sort of, I mean, not every single one, but like homelessness, the housing crisis, everything — all of these things are also tied. 

RL: Yes. And, and again, that’s what makes this so difficult sometimes, is that one problem it’s not just isolated — it’s in conjunction with so many other things.

AL: Right. 

RL: You know, it’s not just lack of education, it’s lack of health care, it’s lack of adequate housing. 

AL: Right. 

RL: Just go on down the list. 

AL: Thank you for joining us on the Intercept Briefing, Rick. 

RL: Thank you for having me. As we mentioned at the very beginning, the report is still so relevant and the last few months have pointed that out. And I appreciate the opportunity to talk about what’s happening now and why. 

AL: That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

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