![]() It began in the wee hours of July 23, 1967. When the uprising finally ended five days after Smith’s arrest, 26 people were dead, 750 were injured, and more than 1,000 had been thrown in jail.Ī few days later, Detroit residents clashed with the city’s police during a raid of an after-hours club. ![]() Neal Boenzi/The New York Times, via Redux Picturesīy the afternoon, 3,000 National Guardsmen descended on the city, but the protests continued for several days. Paul, Minn., Baton Rouge, La., and Chicago in recent years. A closer look at both the Kerner commission's findings and the ensuing fallout uncovers the tangled roots of protests in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, St. Still others point out an important insight into the nature of police brutality - that poverty and segregation can foster police violence. Some historians see the commission as a missed opportunity to broach a national conversation on the role of police in black communities. While the black community pushed for police reform alongside socioeconomic improvement, the federal government responded by equipping police with new tools to control violent expressions of civil unrest. In the wake of the violence, two seperate and opposing movements formed. What’s more, the violence provided the support lawmakers needed to shift from the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, which funneled millions of dollars of federal resources to local police departments and undermined local efforts to address the racialized policing practices that had set entire cities on fire. ![]() Crime was rising in many cities, but the commission urged the federal government to invest heavily in programs aimed at improving the lives of the cities’ black populations. The president, still expected to run for re-election later that year, was driven by the fear that white voters would not sympathize with the commission’s findings. Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Libraryīut just as the report laid bare the inequality experienced by black Americans in urban areas and attempted to paint police brutality as a main cause of the uprisings, the Johnson administration doubled down on a law-and-order agenda. Otto Kerner of Illinois, and President Lyndon B. Today, 50 years later, the commission’s findings, that “the nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white - separate and unequal,” still ring true.įrom left, Roy Wilkins, Gov. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders - more commonly known as the Kerner commission after its chairman, Illinois Gov. Johnson responded by organizing a commission, comprised of lawmakers and law enforcement officials from around the country, to understand what caused the violence that left scores of people dead and caused millions of dollars in damages. News networks broadcast the unrest around the country, and as the cities burned, many Americans watched in shock and horror. Sign up for our newsletters to receive all of our stories and analysis.ĭuring the summer of 1967, more than 150 cities erupted into violence, fueled by pent-up resentments in the cities’ black communities over police brutality and other forms of racial injustice. The Marshall Project is a nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S. Looking Back at the stories about, and excerpts from, the history of criminal justice.
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