1967: The Long, Hot Summer and the Buried Commission Report

1900-1999: A New Divide
Written By Stephanie Brizee

Big Idea

Although Congress passed new laws to expand civil rights for Black Americans, everyday life for many remained the same. African Americans started to protest more actively to demand their rights.

What’s important to know?

  1. New Laws, Same Treatment: Despite new laws supporting civil rights for Black Americans, daily life largely remained unchanged and often worsened due to neglected urban infrastructures, increased police brutality, and reduced educational and employment opportunities.

  2. In Saint Louis: Violence broke out in St. Louis in response to the lack of affordable housing and economic opportunities for Black residents.

  3. Civil Rights Act of 1968: In 1968, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination based on “race, color, religion, or national origin” a federal crime.

1: New Laws, Same Treatment

Despite the fact that Congress had passed news laws supporting expanded civil rights for Black Americans, daily life for many did not change. In many ways, it deteriorated as crumbling urban infrastructures went unattended to by city governments, police “crackdowns” and brutality increased, and educational and employment opportunities diminished (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 153).

In 1967, growing tensions erupted into what came to be known as “the Long, Hot Summer of 1967.” Race uprisings—167 of them in large and small cities across America—began in Newark, New Jersey. The increasingly public police brutality against African American communities also drove much of the public outcry. Scholar Albert Bergensen noted that, “racial violence has been isolated as an important underlying and precipitating cause for the riot” (p. 261). In Newark alone, 26 people died; nationwide, the protests caused more than 100 deaths (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 150). Interestingly, many of the largest uprisings occurred in Northern cities rather than Southern, as Black Americans responded to decades of ongoing segregation and economic desolation (Sugrue et al, 2017, p. 569).

Listen

Listen to an NPR interview about the 1967 summer with Jelani Cobb.

2: In Saint Louis

In East St. Louis, Black working-class people began protesting the lack of affordable housing, and “evening disturbances erupted in the city’s downtown, with at least two hundred people involved in the destruction of white-owned property, looting, and firebombing” (Lang, 2009, p. 192). Protests continued the next day in response to police shooting a nineteen-year-old man “as he fled police in a stockyard parking lot just outside the city limits” (Lang, 2009, p. 192).

This racially charged situation contributed to the nationwide response to Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, which was devastating. The demonstration, known as the Holy Week Uprising, that occurred in U.S. cities was more destructive than the 1967 uprisings. Cities were torn apart, and Black communities that were already stressed by decades of systemic racism suffered further isolation. Yet in St. Louis, White and Black leaders were able to work together to avoid the violence and destruction that had crippled many cities across the U.S.

Watch

Watch video archive footage which shows news coverage in St. Louis from the night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, as well as footage from events that took place over the following days.

3: Civil Rights Act of 1968

In response to the Civil Rights movement and to the 1967 and 1968 race uprisings, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which made discrimination based on “race, color, religion, or national origin” a federal crime. However, despite the new law of the land, African Americans still suffered race-based discrimination in most areas of their lives. Feagin (2014) found that, “After the 1968 Civil Rights Act went into effect, residential segregation across the color line became unofficial and informal, as it remains today” (p. 172). 

When the 1968 Civil Rights Act was passed, the country was still embroiled in the “war on crime,” which continued to disproportionately single out African American men. This “war on crime” evolved into its extension, the “war on drugs” which continued to target Black communities. The war on drugs came out of the racially charged and anti-war environment of the 1968 presidential election and introduced a new set of racially influenced laws that disadvantaged Black people in the criminal justice system.

Think about It!

The “Harvest of American Racism,” the Kerner Commission Report, and Confronting White Racism

After the summer of 1967, President Johnson commissioned a group of 11 individuals to research three questions: “1) What happened?, 2) Why did it happen?, and 3) What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?” (Johnson, 1967).

The commission quickly expanded its staff and dug into the materials related to the summer uprisings in 23 cities. The initial report, tentatively titled, “The Harvest of American Racism,” was presented to the President. It concluded that the riots were not an act festered by any foreign agents, nor were they coordinated and orchestrated primarily by Black leaders. The report lays the blame for the uprisings at the feet of American White racism.

This report has only recently become available. Michael Dawson wrote about this report, “The [Harvest of American Racism] report was rejected by Johnson administration functionaries as being far too radical—politically ‘unviable’… Social science can play an extremely positive role in fighting racial and other injustice and inequality, but only if it is matched with a powerful political will to implement the findings.  That will has never come from within an American presidential administration—that will has only been forged in black and other radical communities’ movements for justice. The political power for change, as incremental as it has been, has come from within those communities. Washington responds, it does not lead” (Shellow, ed., 2018).

The public report that did come out under what became known as the Kerner Commission Report did outline White racism as causative, but did not draw the distinction as bluntly as the draft report. The Kerner Commission did call attention to the need for American political leaders to enact changes. They wrote:

“This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

Reaction to last summer's disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.

This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution….

Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget--is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.

It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens-urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group. Our recommendations embrace three basic principles:

* To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems:
* To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance;
* To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society” (Kerner Commission, 1968, p. 1).

The conclusion of the report is equally as stark as the introduction: “One of the first witnesses to be invited to appear before this Commission was Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, a distinguished and perceptive scholar. Referring to the reports of earlier riot commissions, he said: I read that report. . . of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of '35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of '43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot. I must again in candor say to you members of this Commission--it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland--with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.

These words come to our minds as we conclude this report. We have provided an honest beginning. We have learned much. But we have uncovered no startling truths, no unique insights, no simple solutions. The destruction and the bitterness of racial disorder, the harsh polemics of black revolt and white repression have been seen and heard before in this country. It is time now to end the destruction and the violence, not only in the streets of the ghetto but in the lives of people” (Kerner Commission, 1968, p. 25).

President Johnson largely ignored the report — and Dr. Clark’s assessment rings out loudly we face “the same moving picture re-shown over and over again” (Kerner Commission, 1968, p. 25).

Your Turn

Can you articulate the dilemma that many Black activists faced in demanding equal rights? After years of working through accommodating, lobbying, non-violent activities, and awareness raising, how frustrating must it have been to see very little change in people’s attitudes and actions toward African Americans? What do the reports from the investigation and Kerner Commission say about White America’s willingness to confront their own culpability?

Stephanie Brizee
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1964: President Johnson’s “War on Crime” and the Black Panther Movement
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1970: The War on Drugs and the Triumph of Shirley Chisholm