[How government commissions became alibis for inaction.]
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THE HISTORY OF THE “RIOT” REPORT  
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Jill Lepore
June 15, 2020
The New Yorker
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_ How government commissions became alibis for inaction. _

Detroit, July 25, 1967. Thousands of U.S. troops were deployed to the
city., AFP / Getty

 

On February 14, 1965, back from a trip to Los Angeles, and a week
before he was killed in New York, Malcolm X gave a speech in Detroit.
“Brothers and sisters, let me tell you, I spend my time out there in
the street with people, all kind of people, listening to what they
have to say,” he said. “And they’re dissatisfied, they’re
disillusioned, they’re fed up, they’re getting to the point of
frustration where they are beginning to feel: What do they have to
lose?”

That summer, President Lyndon B. Johnson
[[link removed]] signed the Voting
Rights Act. In a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda attended by Martin
Luther King, Jr
[[link removed]]., Johnson
invoked the arrival of enslaved Africans in Jamestown, in 1619:
“They came in darkness and they came in chains. And today we strike
away the last major shackles of those fierce and ancient bonds.”
Five days later, Watts was swept by violence and flames, following a
protest against police brutality. The authorities eventually arrested
nearly four thousand people; thirty-four people died. “How is it
possible, after all we’ve accomplished?” Johnson asked. “How
could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?”

Two years later, after thousands of police officers and National Guard
troops blocked off fourteen square miles of Newark and nearly five
thousand troops from the 82nd and the 101st Airborne were deployed to
Detroit, where seven thousand people were arrested, Johnson convened a
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by
Illinois’s governor, Otto Kerner, Jr., and charged it with answering
three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done
to prevent it from happening again and again?” Johnson wanted to
know why black people were still protesting, after Congress had
finally passed landmark legislation, not only the Voting Rights Act
but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a raft of anti-poverty
programs. Or maybe he really didn’t want to know why. When the
Kerner Commission submitted its report, the President refused to
acknowledge it.

There’s a limit to the relevance of the so-called race riots of the
nineteen-sixties to the protests of the moment. But the tragedy is:
they’re not irrelevant. Nor is the history that came before. The
language changes, from “insurrection” to “uprising” to the
bureaucratic “civil disorder,” terms used to describe everything
from organized resistance to mayhem. But, nearly always, they leave a
bloody trail in the historical record, in the form of government
reports. The Kerner Report followed centuries of official and
generally hysterical government inquiries into black rebellion, from
the unhinged “A Journal of the proceedings in the Detection of the
Conspiracy formed by some White People, in conjunction with Negro and
other Slaves, for burning the City of New-York in America, and
murdering the Inhabitants,” in 1744, to the largely fabricated
“Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes, charged with an
attempt to raise an insurrection in the state of South-Carolina,” in
1822. The white editor of the as-told-to (and highly dubious) “The
Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in
Southampton, Va. . . . also, An Authentic Account of the Whole
Insurrection, with Lists of the Whites Who Were Murdered . . . ,”
in 1831, wrote, “Public curiosity has been on the stretch to
understand the origin and progress of this dreadful conspiracy, and
the motives which influences its diabolical actors.” What happened?
Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again
and again?

After Reconstruction, Ida B. Wells, in “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law
in All Its Phases,” which appeared in 1892, turned the genre on its
head, offering a report on white mobs attacking black men, a litany of
lynchings. “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more
sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do
so,” Wells wrote in the book’s preface, after a mob burned the
offices of her newspaper, the _Free Speech_. White mob violence
against black people and their homes and businesses was the far more
common variety of race riot, from the first rising of the K.K.K.,
after the Civil War, through the second, in 1915. And so the earliest
twentieth-century commissions charged with investigating “race
riots” reported on the riots of white mobs, beginning with the
massacre in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, in which, following
labor unrest, as many as three thousand white men roamed the city,
attacking, killing, and lynching black people, and burning their
homes. Wells wrote that as many as a hundred and fifty men were
killed, while police officers and National Guardsmen either looked on
or joined in. Similar riots took place in 1919, in twenty-six cities,
and the governor of Illinois appointed an interracial commission to
investigate. “This is a tribunal constituted to get the facts and
interpret them and to find a way out,” he said.

The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, composed of six whites and
six blacks, who engaged the work of as many as twenty-two whites and
fifteen blacks, heard nearly two hundred witnesses, and, in 1922,
published a seven-hundred-page report, with photographs, maps, and
color plates: “The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a
Race Riot.” It paid particular attention to racial antipathy:
“Many white Americans, while technically recognizing Negroes as
citizens, cannot bring themselves to feel that they should participate
in government as freely as other citizens.” Much of the report
traces how the Great Migration brought large numbers of blacks from
the Jim Crow South to Chicago, where they faced discrimination in
housing and employment, and persecution at the hands of local police
and the criminal-justice system:

The testimony of court officials before the Commission and its
investigations indicate that Negroes are more commonly arrested,
subjected to police identification, and convicted than white
offenders, that on similar evidence they are generally held and
convicted on more serious charges, and that they are given longer
sentences. . . . These practices and tendencies are not only unfair
to Negroes, but weaken the machinery of justice and, when taken with
the greater inability of Negroes to pay fines in addition to or in
lieu of terms in jail, produce misleading statistics of Negro crime.

Very little came of the report. In 1935, following riots in Harlem,
yet another hardworking commission weighed in:

This sudden breach of the public order was the result of a highly
emotional situation among the colored people of Harlem, due in large
part to the nervous strain of years of unemployment and insecurity. To
this must be added their deep sense of wrong through discrimination
against their employment in stores which live chiefly upon their
purchases, discrimination against them in the school system and by the
police, and all the evils due to dreadful overcrowding, unfair rentals
and inadequate institutional care. It is probable that their
justifiable pent-up feeling, that they were and are the victims of
gross injustice and prejudice, would sooner or later have brought
about an explosion.

Who was to blame?

The blame belongs to a society that tolerates inadequate and often
wretched housing, inadequate and inefficient schools and other public
facilities, unemployment, unduly high rents, the lack of recreation
grounds, discrimination in industry and public utilities against
colored people, brutality and lack of courtesy of the police.

In Detroit in 1943, after a riot left twenty-five blacks and nine
whites dead and led to the arrest of nearly two thousand people,
Michigan’s governor appointed the commissioner of police and the
attorney general to a panel that concluded, without conducting much of
an investigation, that responsibility for the riots lay with black
leaders, and defended the police, whom many had blamed for the
violence. A separate, independent commission, led by Thurgood
Marshall, then chief counsel for the N.A.A.C.P., conducted interviews,
hired private detectives, and produced a report titled “The Gestapo
in Detroit.” The group called for a grand jury, arguing that “much
of the blood spilled in the Detroit riot is on the hands of the
Detroit police department.” No further investigation took place, and
no material reforms were implemented.

That’s what usually happens. In a 1977 study, “Commission
Politics: The Processing of Racial Crisis in America,” Michael
Lipsky and David J. Olson reported that, between 1917 and 1943, at
least twenty-one commissions were appointed to investigate race riots,
and, however sincerely their members might have been interested in
structural change, none of the commissions led to any. The point of a
race-riot commission, Lipsky and Olson argue, is for the government
that appoints it to appear to be doing something, while actually doing
nothing.

The convulsions that led to the Kerner Commission began in Los
Angeles, in 1965. Between 1960 and 1964, the nation enjoyed unrivalled
prosperity, but in Watts, among the poorest neighborhoods of L.A., one
in three men had no work. In Los Angeles, as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener
write in a new book, “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties
[[link removed]],”
“the LAPD operated the nation’s most successful negative
employment scheme.” Police stopped black men for little or no
reason, and, if they talked back, they got arrested; left with an
arrest record, they became unemployable.

On August 11, 1965, a Wednesday, a motorcycle cop pulled over a car
with a driver and a passenger, two brothers, Ronald and Marquette
Frye, about a block from their house, near 116th Street. Their mother,
Rena, all of five feet tall, came over. Marquette resisted
handcuffs—he would strike those fierce and ancient shackles. The
motorcycle cop called for backup; twenty-six police vehicles raced to
the scene, sirens screaming. “Does it take all these people to
arrest three people?” an onlooker asked. When Rena Frye tried to
stop the police from beating her sons with billy clubs, they pinned
her to the hood of a patrol car and, after a crowd had gathered,
arrested another of her sons and dragged away a woman in a
stranglehold. “Goddam! They’d never treat a white woman like
that!” someone called out. The crowd protested, and grew, and
protested, and grew. What came to be known as the Watts riot lasted
for six days and spread across nearly fifty square miles. On Friday
night, a man said:

I was standing in a phone booth watching. A little kid came by
carrying a lamp he had taken out of a store. Maybe he was about
twelve. He was with his mother. I remember him saying: “Don’t run
Mommy. They said we could take the stuff because they’re going to
burn the store anyway.” Then, suddenly, about five police cars
stopped. There were about 20 cops in them and they all got out. One
came up to the booth I was standing in. The cop hit me on the leg with
his club. “Get out of here, nigger,” he yelled at me. I got out of
the booth. Another cop ran up to the boy and hit him in the head with
the butt of a shotgun. The kid dropped like a stone. The lamp crashed
on the sidewalk. I ran out of the phone booth and grabbed the cop by
the arm. I was trying to stop him from beating the boy. Two cops
jumped on my back. Others struck the boy with their clubs. They beat
that little kid’s face to a bloody pulp. His mother and some others
took him away. That’s when I thought, white people are animals.

Johnson could barely speak about what was happening in Watts. An aide
said, “He refused to look at the cable from Los Angeles describing
the situation. He refused to take the calls from the generals who were
requesting government planes to fly in the National Guard. . . . We
needed decisions from him. But he simply wouldn’t respond.”

The same Friday, the National Guard arrived. “More Americans died
fighting in Watts Saturday night than in Vietnam that day,” an
observer wrote. On Sunday, fifteen police officers fired eleven
shotgun rounds into Aubrey Griffith, inside his own house, where he
and his wife had been in bed while their son, on leave from the Air
Force, was watching TV. The officers banged on the door, and Griffith
told his wife to call the police. An inquest ruled his death—and
every other death at the hands of the National Guard or the police
during the days of protest—a justifiable homicide.

Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived on Tuesday. “All we want is
jobs,” a man said to him, at a community meeting in Watts. “We get
jobs, we don’t bother nobody. We don’t get no jobs, we’ll tear
up Los Angeles, period.” Later, King recalled that one man told him,
“We won!” King had replied, “What do you mean, ‘We won’?
Thirty-some people dead, all but two are Negroes. You’ve destroyed
your own. What do you mean, ‘We won’?” The man said, “We made
them pay attention to us.”

Paying attention, at that point, only ever really took this form: the
governor appointed a commission, this time headed by John A. McCone,
a lavishly wealthy and well-connected California industrialist who, in
1961, had been made director of the C.I.A. by President Kennedy but
had resigned in April, 1965, in part because he objected to
Johnson’s reluctance to engage in a wider war in Vietnam. The McCone
Commission report, titled “Violence in the City,” celebrated the
City of Angels: “A Negro in Los Angeles has long been able to sit
where he wants in a bus or a movie house, to shop where he wishes, to
vote, and to use public facilities without discrimination. The
opportunity to succeed is probably unequaled in any other major
American city.” It called for the creation of fifty thousand new
jobs, but, first, “attitudinal training.” It blamed the riots on
outside agitators and civil-rights activists: “Although the
Commission received much thoughtful and constructive testimony from
Negro witnesses, we also heard statements of the most extreme and
emotional nature. For the most part our study fails to support—and
indeed the evidence disproves—most of the statements made by the
extremists.” Fundamental to the McCone thesis was the claim that
peaceful demonstrations produce violent riots, and should therefore be
discouraged. In a devastating rebuttal, Bayard Rustin laid this
argument to waste:

It would be hard to frame a more insidiously equivocal statement of
the Negro grievance concerning law enforcement during a period that
included the release of the suspects in the murder of the three
civil-rights workers in Mississippi, the failure to obtain convictions
against the suspected murderers of Medgar Evers and Mrs. Violet
Liuzzo . . . and the police violence in Selma, Alabama. . . .
And surely it would have been more to the point to mention that
throughout the nation Negro demonstrations have almost invariably been
non-violent, and that the major influence on the Negro community of
the civil-rights movement has been the strategy of discipline and
dignity.

By the summer of 1967, when protests against police brutality had led
to riots in Newark and Detroit, Johnson was facing a conservative
backlash against his Great Society programs, and especially against
the Fair Housing Act, which was introduced in Congress in 1966. He’d
also been trying to gain passage of a Rat Extermination Act, to get
rid of urban infestations; Republicans called it the Civil Rats Bill.
Johnson had long since lost the right; now he was losing the left. By
April, King had come out against the war in Vietnam. Beleaguered and
defensive, Johnson launched an “Optimism Campaign,” in an effort
to convince the public that the U.S. was winning the war in Vietnam.
George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan, who was expected
to run against Johnson in 1968, asked for federal troops to be sent to
Detroit, which would be the first time since F.D.R. sent them in 1943.
Johnson wavered. “I’m concerned about the charge that we cannot
kill enough people in Vietnam so we go out and shoot civilians in
Detroit,” he said. In the end, he decided to authorize the troops,
and to blame Romney, announcing, on television, that there was
“undisputed evidence that Governor Romney of Michigan and the local
officials in Detroit have been unable to bring the situation under
control.” Twenty-seven hundred Army paratroopers were deployed to
Detroit, with Huey helicopters that most Americans had seen only in TV
coverage of the war in Vietnam.

On July 27, 1967, Johnson gave a televised speech on “civil
disorders,” announcing his decision to form a national commission to
investigate race riots. Protests had taken place, and turned violent,
in more than a hundred and fifty cities that summer, and they were
being televised. Were they part of a conspiracy? Johnson suspected so,
even though his advisers told him that he was wrong. “I don’t want
to foreclose the conspiracy theory now,” he said. “Keep that door
open.”

Johnson loved Presidential commissions: people called him, not
affectionately, “the great commissioner.” In the first decade
after the Second World War, U.S. Presidents appointed an average of
one and a half commissions a year. Johnson appointed twenty. In
“Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of
American Liberalism
[[link removed]]”
(2018), Steven M. Gillon observes that “commissions became a
convenient way for presidents to fill the gap between what they could
deliver and what was expected of them.” To his new commission,
Johnson appointed a Noah’s Ark of commissioners, two by two: two
congressmen, one Republican, one Democrat; one business leader, one
labor leader. Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the N.A.A.C.P.,
was, with Edward Brooke, a Republican senator from Massachusetts, one
of two African-Americans. The commission included no political
radicals, no protesters, and no young people. The President expected
the commission to defend his legislative accomplishments and agenda,
and to endorse his decision to send the National Guard to Detroit.
When he called Fred Harris, the thirty-six-year-old Oklahoma senator,
to discuss the appointment, he told Harris to remember that he was a
“Johnson man.” Otherwise, Johnson said, “I’ll take out my
pocket knife and cut your peter off.” Nearly as soon as he convened
the commission, Johnson regretted it, and pulled its funding.

Otto Kerner, born in Chicago in 1908, went to Brown and then
Northwestern, for law school, and, in the nineteen-thirties and into
the Second World War, served in the Illinois National Guard, for
twenty years, retiring in 1954 with the rank of major general. Under
his leadership, as Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman report in their
biography, the Illinois guard had the nation’s highest percentage of
African-Americans. A former district attorney, later elected to a
county judgeship, Kerner had a reputation for strict personal
integrity, earning him the nickname Mr. Clean. He was elected governor
of Illinois in 1960, and it is possible that his coattails delivered
the state to John F. Kennedy, in one of the closest Presidential
races in American history. He had a strong record on civil rights, and
was an adamant supporter of fair housing, declaring, in 1968, “Civil
disorders will still be the order of the day unless we create a
society of equal justice.”

After Kerner got the call from Johnson, he announced, “Tomorrow, I
go to Washington to help organize this group of citizens for the
saddest mission that any of us in our careers have been asked to
pursue—why one American assaults another, why violence is inflicted
on people of our cities, why the march to an ideal America has been
interrupted by bloodshed and destruction. We are being asked, in a
broad sense, to probe into the soul of America.”

Kerner wanted open hearings. “My concern all the time about this
commission has been that at the conclusion our greatest problem is
going to be to educate the whites, rather than the Negro,” he said.
Kerner did not prevail on this point. J. Edgar Hoover testified on
the first day, to say that the F.B.I. had found no evidence of a
conspiracy behind the riots, and that he thought one good remedy for
violence would be better gun laws. “You have to license your dog,”
he said. Why not your gun? Martin Luther King, Jr., told the
commission, “People who are completely devoid of hope don’t
riot.”

Maybe the most painful testimony came from Kenneth B. Clark, the
African-American psychologist, at the City College of New York, whose
research on inequality had been pivotal to the Supreme Court’s
decision in Brown v. Board of Education. He told the commission:

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.

The historical trail is blood spilled in a deeply rutted road.

John V. Lindsay, the handsome liberal mayor of New York who served as
the vice-chair of the commission, got most of the media attention. But
Kerner did his work. When the commission travelled, Kerner went out on
the street to talk to people. He went for a walk in Newark, and
stopped to speak to a group around the corner from Prince Street. They
told him they had three concerns: police brutality, unemployment, and
the lack of a relocation program for displaced workers. One man told
the Governor that he hadn’t had a job in eight years.

After months of hearings and meetings, the commission began assembling
its report. Kerner wanted it to be moving, and beautifully written.
John Hersey was asked to write it, perhaps in the style of
“Hiroshima
[[link removed]]”; Hersey
said no. (Instead, much of the report was drafted by the
commission’s executive director, David Ginsburg, who later helped
write Hubert Humphrey’s campaign platform.) Toward the end of the
commission’s deliberations, Roy Wilkins offered emotional personal
testimony that greatly informed a draft by Lindsay, describing “two
societies, one black, one white.” Another draft contained a passage
that was later stricken: “Past efforts have not carried the
commitment, will or resources needed to eliminate the attitudes and
practices that have maintained racism as a major force in our society.
Only the dedication of every citizen can generate a single American
identity and a single American community.” Every word of the report
was read aloud, and every word was unanimously agreed on. The final
draft did include this passage: “Race prejudice has shaped our
history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future. White
racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has
been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” In
the final report, as the historian Julian Zelizer writes in an
introduction to a 2016 edition, “no institution received more
scrutiny than the police.” That’s been true of every one of these
reports since 1917.

Johnson, when he got the report, was so mad that he refused to sign
the letters thanking the commissioners for their service. “I’d be
a hypocrite,” he said. “Just file them . . . or get rid of
them.”

The Kerner Report
[[link removed]] was
published on March 1, 1968, but first it was leaked (probably by
Ginsburg) to the Washington _Post_, which ran a story with the
headline “_chief blame for riots put on white racism_.” It became
an overnight best-seller. It sold more copies than the Warren
Commission report, three-quarters of a million copies in the first two
weeks alone. Released in a paperback edition by Bantam, it was said to
be the fastest-selling book since “Valley of the Dolls.”

Civil-rights activists, expecting a whitewash, were stunned. “It’s
the first time whites have said, ‘We’re racists,’ ” the head
of _core_ declared. Republicans rejected it. “One of the major
weaknesses of the President’s commission is that it, in effect,
blames everybody for the riots except the perpetrators of the
riots,” Nixon said from the campaign trail. “I think this
talk . . . tends to divide people, to build a wall in between
people.” Conservatives deemed it absurd. “What caused the
riots,” William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote, “isn’t segregation or
poverty or frustration. What caused them is a psychological disorder
which is tearing at the ethos of our society as a result of boredom,
self-hatred, and the arrogant contention that all our shortcomings are
the result of other people’s aggressions upon us.”

Johnson came up with his own explanation for what had happened in
America during his Presidency: “I’ve moved the Negro from D+ to
C-. He’s still nowhere. He knows it. And that’s why he’s out in
the streets. Hell, I’d be there, too.” In 1969, Harry McPherson,
Johnson’s chief speechwriter, tried to explain what had so bothered
Johnson about the Kerner Report. “It hurt his pride,” McPherson
said, because it made it clear that Johnson had not, somehow, saved
the Negro. But there was a bigger, sounder reason, he believed: “The
only thing that held any hope for the Negro was the continuation of
the coalition between labor, Negroes, intellectuals, . . . big city
bosses and political machines and some of the urban poor. . . . In
other words, it required keeping the Polacks who work on the line at
River Rouge in the ball park and supporting Walter Reuther and the
government as they try to spend money on blacks.” Middle-class
whites didn’t give a damn, he thought, but blacks needed poor and
working-class whites on their side. “Then a Presidential commission
is formed and goes out and comes back, and what does it say? Who’s
responsible for the riots? ‘The other members of the coalition. They
did it. Those racists.’ And thereupon, the coalition says . . .
‘we’ll go out and find ourselves a guy like George Wallace, or
Richard Nixon.’ ”

That spring, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, and then Robert F.
Kennedy. In July, five months after the release of the report, Kerner
wrote his own reflections, looking back at the response to the
maelstrom that had followed King’s assassination, and arguing
against the militarization of the police: “Armored vehicles,
automatic weapons and armor-piercing machine guns are for use against
an enemy, and not a lawbreaker. . . . If you come out with a show
of force, you in a sense challenge the other side to meet you. Force
begets force.”

Still, Johnson fulfilled Kerner’s wish to be appointed to the
federal bench. During Kerner’s confirmation hearings, he was
questioned by Strom Thurmond about the conclusions of the report that
bore his name:

Thurmond: Why do you say “white racism” caused these riots?

Kerner: I beg your pardon.

Thurmond: Why do you want to blame the white people . . . for this
trouble?

Kerner: Because we say this has developed over a period of time, and
the people in the Negro ghettos indicated that the rebellion was
against the white establishment. . . .

Thurmond: . . . What does that term mean? What did you think it
meant when you put it in this report or approved of it?

Kerner: I thought it meant this—that over a period of years the
Negro was kept within a certain area economically and geographically
and he was not allowed to come out of it.

In 1971, Kerner became involved in a scandal connected with his
ownership of stock in a racetrack; he was eventually charged and
convicted of mail fraud. Sentenced to three years in prison, Kerner
went to the Federal Correctional Institution, a minimum-security
prison in Fayette County, Kentucky, on July 29, 1974, two weeks before
Nixon resigned. He insisted that his conviction was one of Nixon’s
“dirty tricks.” “I have reason to believe I was one of the
victims of this overall plan,” he wrote. He suspected Nixon of
punishing him for his role in Kennedy’s victory in 1960. In his
cell, Kerner kept a journal. “So frequently I sit here alone,” he
wrote, thinking thoughts that inmates have thought since the beginning
of prisons:

I wonder of what use is our prison system—as I have often wondered
when I was seeking an alternative to this inhuman manner of
restraining those who have violated the law. The waste of man
power—both by the restrainers and the one restrained. Removing the
individual from the outside world really accomplishes nothing of a
positive nature. The restraint builds up frustrations and a smothering
of the will. It kills motivation and completely removes decision
ability.

With an ailing heart and what was soon discovered to be lung cancer,
Kerner was paroled after serving seven months. He spent what time he
had left urging prison reform. He died in 1976. Not long before his
death, asked about the Kerner Report, he said, “The basis for the
report, I think, is as valid today as the day we sent it to the
government printing office.”

On June 1st, in Washington, D.C., police in riot gear cleared
Lafayette Square of peaceful protesters, by force. (“Take off the
riot gear, I don’t see no riot here,” protesters chanted.) The
purpose was to allow President Trump to stride to St. John’s Church,
accompanied by the Attorney General and the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, and be photographed holding a Bible. The next day,
Ohio’s Republican senator, Rob Portman, called for a national
commission on race relations. “It would not be a commission to
restate the problem but to focus on solutions and send a strong moral
message that America must live up to the ideal that God created all of
us as equal,” Portman said. He suggested that it might be co-chaired
by the former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

The United States does not need one more commission, or one more
report. A strong moral message? That message is being delivered by
protesters every day, on street after street after street across the
nation. _Stop killing us_. One day, these reports will lie archived,
forgotten, irrelevant. Meanwhile, they pile up, an indictment, the
stacked evidence of inertia. In the summer of 1968, the civil-rights
leader Whitney Young published an essay titled “The Report That
Died,” writing, “The report is still there, it still reads well,
but practically nothing is being done to follow its
recommendations.” It was as it had ever been. It is time for it to
be something else.

_JILL LEPORE, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New
Yorker since 2005. Her books include “The Name of War
[[link removed]],”
which won the Bancroft Prize; “New York Burning
[[link removed]],”
which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history; “Book of
Ages [[link removed]],”
a finalist for the National Book Award; and “The Secret History of
Wonder Woman
[[link removed]];” and
the international bestseller, “These Truths: A History of the United
States
[[link removed]].”
Later this year, she will publish her fourteenth book, “If Then: How
the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
[[link removed]].”
Lepore received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1995 and is
the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard
University._

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