When Domestic Disorders Blazed Across the Major Cities of America

On March 1, 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders produced a report attempting to explain the period of greatest turmoil in the United States since the Civil War--and recommending remedies. On Tuesday the 20-year-sequestration placed on the commission records will be lifted and the documents will become available to the public for the first time.

Yet it is dangerous to look at events of one era in the context of another. Thomas J. Bray, Detroit News editorial page editor, writes in the current issue of Policy Review: “Far from offering fresh or interesting ideas for the future, the Kerner report stitched together most of the fashionable bromides of the time into an expensive wish list of social programs.” The commission, he goes on to say, thought “white racism was sufficient to explain the urban problems of the day . . . . Only now is frank discussion of crime, poverty, family and welfare becoming possible.”

To those of us involved in the 1960s and concerned above all with forestalling a firestorm, it is like reading about the wheel being rediscovered. In the summer of 1967, as author of “Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness,” an analysis of the 1965 Watts riot, I was considered an authority on civil disturbances. On July 27, while meeting with officials in Detroit during the riot there, I watched President Lyndon B. Johnson tell a national television audience about “a time of violence and tragedy” as he announced the appointment of a commission to determine “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again? What we are really asking for is a profile of the riots.” A little more than a month later the commission’s executive director, David Ginsburg, asked me to come to Washington and address myself to compiling the “Profiles of Disorder” for the report.

Johnson promised the commission full support and a free hand; but he believed, and expected we would find, a link to communist efforts aimed at discrediting the Great Society and subverting America’s efforts in Vietnam. This belief was largely based on the activities of such organizations as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led by Stokely Carmichael and H. (Rap) Brown, and the Students for a Democratic Society, led by Tom Hayden (now a California assemblyman from Santa Monica), which found common cause in their anti-war positions. The savage beatings administered to nonviolent, “passive resistance” civil-rights demonstrators in the South by segregationists and by the police, plus incidents such as the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Ala., where four girls were killed, were radicalizing the civil-rights movement and, more important, providing justification for black retaliation.

“Uncle Sam Wants You, Nigger!” Carmichael was telling black audiences, and providing the response: “Hell no! America is the black man’s battleground. The money that should be spent to fight for a decent life for black people in America is being spent to destroy the lives of Vietnamese.” Naturally, Carmichael became the darling of Hanoi and Havana, and a celebrity on American television, which provided a forum for Carmichael’s and Brown’s pontificating on black urban guerrilla warfare, against a providential background of violence and fire.

But as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told the commission in secret testimony, Carmichael and Brown were merely exploiting, not instigating. Through its moles the FBI was intimately cognizant of all SNCC operations; later, our director of investigations, Milan C. Miskovsky, a former CIA agent, produced a pile of internal SNCC documents which, he said, had been “found in an Atlanta restroom.” The papers revealed a minute, bureaucratic organization bickering over petty cash and petty jealousies.

Commissions are peculiar elements in the American government, since they have no official standing but are ad hoc bodies serving at the pleasure of the President or Congress. They are usually formed to investigate a past event, such as the Kennedy assassination, or a chronic condition requiring redress. But there has never been another like ours, which was expected to come up with solutions to complex social problems in the midst of ferment threatening civil order.

Johnson had been careful to compose a middle-of-the-road body. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, was the most liberal; Oklahoma Democratic Sen. Fred R. Harris represented the populist viewpoint. Charles B. Thornton, chairman of the board of Litton Industries, and Katherine G. Peden, Kentucky commissioner of commerce, were conservatives. To chair the body, Johnson picked Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, an amiable man of little depth who was subsequently convicted in a financial scandal.

The commission’s driving force was Ginsburg, a Washington lawyer and New Deal liberal with close White House ties. What Ginsburg hoped to produce was a document that would be incorporated into the 1968 Democratic platform and commit the nation to a program of equal rights and social welfare for black and white alike.

The commission was supposed to conclude its work in 12 months, first producing an interim report dealing with prevention of civil disorders, then a final report making program recommendations. The inquiry was conducted along several parallel lines. We held closed hearings because Ginsburg felt witnesses would speak more freely. Cabinet members, mayors and experts testified. We were offered and commissioned dozens of studies from academics and urbanologists. We became a depository for documents, such as police and FBI reports. And we sent investigative teams to 26 cities--later focusing on half that number--that had experienced urban disorder, to determine what had happened and the climate in which it had happened.

As reports came in, we soon realized that there had been no “conspiracy”: Conflict had occurred largely at random, with emphasis on local conditions; conflict had been exacerbated because of an inadequacy of understanding among officials and the police; the inaccessibility of traditional democratic channels to people in lower-income areas had built up frustrations, and we learned that much social-science theory had no more relation to reality than the fulminations of a Carmichael or the belief in a communist plot.

We were looking at American institutions that were primarily structured by and for the middle class. For the black underclass, access to the middle class was made more difficult by prejudices and stereotypes--in one word, racism.

Time pressures were intense. The deadline for an interim draft was Dec. 10, but we were still embroiled in our investigations. Hearings were continuing and even though many staff members were working 80-hour weeks, it proved impossible to make more than a preliminary reference to the key Detroit riot in the initial presentation to the commissioners.

Then, as soon as President Johnson learned about the lack of a conspiracy, the ax fell. Since no formal appropriation for the commission existed, the President had ordered several departments to pitch in with funds. They had complied with considerable reluctance. Now, seeing no political advantage accruing to him, the President let it be known that the commission no longer had his priority. Less than five months earlier he had said “This matter is far, far too important for politics . . . you will have all the support and cooperation you need.” But suddenly, funds dried up. The Saturday before Christmas the staff was called together and most people were told their services were no longer needed. What was intended to be an interim report would be transformed into one final report.

The commissioners had a separate shock the second week in January. Since we had not intended to address ourselves to long-range recommendations until after issuance of the interim report, there had been little discussion of remedies in commission meetings. But faced with a single report, Ginsburg had the various social science recommendations compiled over the holidays into a 95-page presentation covering jobs, welfare, housing and education. Although these were carefully labeled “preliminary suggestions” for commission consideration, they were omnibus in nature. Some--such as those dealing with welfare recipients--were radical for the times; they would have required major funding, and they contained the caveat that, even if implemented, there were no guarantees that riots would not continue. Several commissioners felt they should have been consulted beforehand and that, given the constraints of time, they were being placed in a largely take-it-or-leave it situation.

A day later I was asked to meet with two commission members, Democratic Rep. James C. Corman of the San Fernando Valley and Republican Rep. William M. McCulloch of Ohio. At McCulloch’s office, I found two other commissioners, Thornton and Peden. They felt the recommendations were unbalanced and that they could not live with them politically. Consequently, they were prepared to issue a minority report.

Ginsburg, informed of the dissent, worked with great skill in the remaining month on a document to which all could subscribe--although Thornton, who was closest to Johnson among the commissioners, did not agree to sign until the very last moment.

Despite L.B.J.’s silence and lack of support, the commission report marked a watershed in American race relations. Two million copies were printed. It became the basic text for national dialogue, a declaration of the necessity to look at ourselves more critically and alter prior perceptions.

One month after the report was issued, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Although there were some riots, the commission’s work with police departments--and the greater understanding that resulted--helped, I think, to prevent a widespread conflagration that could have killed hundreds, even thousands, and set back race relations for decades to come.