Hello and welcome back to the Civic Flame, a podcast where we take a deep dive into the legal side of our Constitutional democracy and ask some serious questions about how the constitution and democracy are (or arenÕt playing nice together today). This week is a special episode because itÕs the first time weÕve had a request from a listener! Someone asked me to do a deep dive into one of my favorite legal documents in the US and that is the Kerner Commission. Dr Fun Sponge Changes to Mother of Democracy Before we get to it, though, you may have noticed that some of our social media have changed from Dr. Fun Sponge to Mother of Democracy. Between looking for a new job and getting my book ready to send back to the publisher, I realized that keeping multiple projects going wasnÕt going to work. And it wasnÕt really who I am. I donÕt do things in isolation because, to quote my girl Yoga with Adriene, ÒitÕs all connected baby!Ó So, IÕm pulling my birthzillas maternal health and childbirth research stuff together with my civic flame and Dr Fun Sponge stuff to talk about my two favorite things: women and democracy. And importantly how hatred of women is incompatible with democracy. So, thatÕs how we get to the Mother of Democracy. For those of you here for more of the rule of law stuff, this week gets into one of the most important documents in US history, and one of the few times a Congressional report became a best seller. So weÕre turning it back to 1968: grab your bell bottoms and letÕs go! (transition music) 1968: One Damn Thing After Another ItÕs 1968, thereÕs chaos everywhere (as one of my students who lived it said: we went from Camelot in 1960 to Chaos in 1968). The Vietnam War is in full swing, as is the anti-war movement. The Civil Rights Movement has fractured along different lines, including radical and militant lines. Dr. King has started to acknowledge that his dream was a dream and is himself becoming more jaded with the inaction of who he calls the Òwhite moderate.Ó But itÕs not all bad news. Otis ReddingÕs Ò(SittinÕ on) the dock of the BayÓ and the Beatles ÒHey Jude!Ó are topping the charts, and The Planet of the Apes breaks on to the scene. Now I could talk all day about 1968: from Dr. KingÕs assassination to RFKÕs assassination, the Warsaw Pact invades Czechoslovakia, the Tet Offensive happens, President Johnson refuses the democratic nomination, and then during the DNC in Chicago police riot and beat unarmed protestors while the delegates in the convention hall come to fisticuffs. And that only takes us through August! YouÕll often hear historians refer to 1968 as Òone damn thing after another.Ó Because it was. What was the Kerner Commission? And in the middle of all this, at the center of some of it, sits the National Advisory Commission on Civil DisordersÑknown as the Kerner Commission Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois who was the Chair of the Committee. This Committee is established in 1967 by LBJ through Executive Order 11365 to investigate what were called the Òhot summersÓ or the riots and violence breaking out in the early 1960s. From 1965 to 1967 there were major riots or rebellions in some of the nationsÕ cities, in particular Newark and Detroit, which were a large centerpiece of the Kerner Commission report. The famous Watts riots occurred during this time as did riots in Boston, Atlanta, and so on. After seeing these riots on the news, including the deployment of National Guard, LBJ tasked the Kerner Commission with answering 3 questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again? Now, this is not unique in Congressional history, but it is rare enough to be refreshing. They started with a question and went out and found the evidence for their conclusion, as opposed to so often when they find a conclusion and go out and see which evidence supports them. And you know they were looking for information not just what they wanted to hear because boy howdy did they NOT hear what they wanted to hear. They didnÕt hear it so much that LBJ refused to take a copy of the final report. This pissed off RFK, sr (the good one, not the dead- bear carrying creeper who is somehow still the Secretary of Health and Human Services), that he decided to do what he said he wasnÕt and challenge Lyndon Johnson, the sitting president in his own party. This was not a thing in the 1960s or for decades before. It was not done (despite the fact that Gene McCarthy was successfully doing it). So, LBJÕs reaction to this report reshapes the American presidential landscape in a big way. The Great Society Loses to Vietnam What it also does is throw open for all the public to see the failure of LBJÕs Great Society program in light of the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers come out a few years later and show the American people that the US knew it could not win in Vietnam. Johnson knew it at the time, but he kept pouring money into it instead of his version of the New Deal: The Great Society. JohnsonÕs lack of funding for the social programs he wanted to eradicate poverty and destroy segregation made him just another white face coming to Black voters making promises they wouldnÕt deliver: thank goodness we donÕt do that anymore. And when the Kerner Commission Report gets reported on in the media, it becomes inescapable that police violence rather than being the work of random Òriffraff,Ó trouble makers, or bad actors, was something far more dangerous. It was the result, as the Kerner Commission reported to the American public, of a nation that was moving in two directions: one white and one Black. And that this segregation was only going to continue to have deleterious and disastrous affects on our society. A Congressional Report becomes a Bestseller! Kerner showed that around half of the riots started with an inciting incident, and that was police violence against Black community members. The American people wanted to know what was going on so badly that the Kerner Commission Report became a best seller, selling out 2 million copies right away (in a country with a population at the time of 200 million. Church groups and book clubs were getting it. Civic organizations like the Elks and the Odd Fellows were reading it. Town libraries and police departments were ordering copies. Folks were talking about it. And as they read the pages, they continued to find uncomfortable truths about the USÕs treatment of Black Americans. The Commission spoke about ghettos, and remember this is a time when that terms is still heavily related to the ghettos in Poland and elsewhere where Nazis deliberately separated and impoverish undesirables, so in the Ô60s it was much clearer that this ghettoization is a deliberate choice. Throughout the discussions of police violence, holding community members without bail, shooting into apartment buildings without cause, and so on, people began to get a view of what life might have looked like on the other side of the color line. Kerner Showed us how to avoid police violence and urban unrest The Kerner Commission Report also did something remarkable: it answer the last question. It told us how to improve policing, how to stop riots, and how to invest in Americans. You know, all the stuff it was supposed to tell us and that LBJÕs Great Society was supposed to do anyway. It included the same conclusions we see and donÕt fund today: train the police to be members of the community not military enforcers. Put good paying jobs in areas. Put grocery stores in areas. We need more affordable housing, equitable schools, and accessible public transportation. Black people and other minoritized groups deserve to be represented as people on the news and not as animals, and deserve to be represented on television by reporters who look like them. You know, all that scary diversity, equity, and inclusion stuff weÕre still fighting out? Yeah, in 1968, democrat and republican members of the Kerner Commission figured out, wrote down, and proved, how that is the only way to go forward in a politically stable way. Fred Harris, the last living member of the Kerner Commission does an short interview on NPR I suggest. And I also suggest reading his book. He talks about how frustrating it was to have to come to these conclusions and somehow still have these conclusions not implemented. Harris and other members of the CommissionÑincluding the first Black man to have been elected to the US Senate by popular vote, Edward Brooke of MassachusettsÑ have talked about how hard it was to talk to their families about this. Harris noted that his father was not a wealthy guy and explaining why so much tax money had to be going to cities and to Black folks to his working class, rural, white dad, made him realize the scope of the dialectical problem: this was going to be hard to talk about and convince people. The Longer We Wait to Address Injustice, the More Costly it will be And it still is, as it turns out. But every year we get farther into these problems and donÕt solve them, it becomes harder and more expensive. It we had started in the 1960s, it would have been so much more expensive and time consuming than if we had started in the 1860s when we should have seen a fully equal American after Reconstruction. It we had started in the 1760s and gotten rid of slavery before we became a nation, weÕd never have had to spend money on this. But what if we wait to solve it until 2060? A hundred years after the Kener Commission, two hundred years after enslavement ends, and the social, political, economic, and most of all, human toll of our failure to address these deliberate inequalities will continue be catastrophic. (transition) Well thatÕs it for this week. There are so many other really cool Congressional reports (donÕt worry, IÕll stuff myself into a locker on the way out of my office for the sheer amount of nerdi- geekness that just came out of my mouth). But honestly, if I had any artistic talent at all, IÕd love to turn them into graphic novels because I think people would take some interest. But there I obviously the Warren Report on the Kennedy Assassination, the 9/11 Report, the January 6th Report, and one of the really interesting ones from the 1970s is the Church Committee Report which detailed the ways in which the CIA was spying on Americans and infiltrating anti-Vietnam War protests. So, let me know if you want to hear about any of them. In the meantime, like follow and share this podcast. And follow us at our new home Mother of Democracy on Instagram and Blue Sky. Take care out there and keep the civic Flame Burning bright. (outro) The Civic Flame is a Mother of Democracy Production with writer Amber Vayo and sound producer Matt Munyon. Thanks for Listening.