Morgan Professor K. Nyerere Ture’ On Lessons from Ferguson

Almost 50 years ago, an 11-member panel convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson investigated the causes of the 1960s urban riots and proposed intervention strategies for the federal government to transform American society into a real cosmopolitan canopy that included and protected all minorities as full citizens. This panel issued their findings in the “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Rights” otherwise known as the Kerner Commission Report, which ominously declared that America was heading toward a form of domestic unrest far more incendiary and costly than the scorched urban terrains that Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood, Chicago’s Division Street, Newark’s Springfield Avenue and Detroit’s Rosa Park Boulevard were in the late 1960s. Specifically, the panel concluded that three principal factors caused increasing frustrations in African American communities: white racism, police brutality and segregated settlement patterns.