Response to the Kerner report funded policing over the reforms it prescribed

Evidence

Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the 426-page document, and it was purchased by more than 2 million Americans. Richard Nixon blasted the report for exonerating the rioters, as did the racists whom Nixon was attracting to his presidential campaign. Martin Luther King Jr., in the midst of organizing his Poor People’s Campaign, christened the report “a physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” President Johnson felt that his own physicians had overblown White racism. And he was probably worried about the report’s damaging effects on the half-truth of racial progress and the costs of its prescription for life. The report recommended the allocation of billions of dollars to diversify American policing, to provide new jobs, better schools, and more welfare to poor Black communities, and to eradicate housing discrimination and construct affordable, fresh, and spaced-out housing units for the millions of Black residents who had been forced to live in rat-infested and deteriorating houses and high-rise projects. Johnson and his bipartisan peers deployed the cost excuse, in the midst of more costly deployments for the hated war in Vietnam. Then again, Johnson did push through one recommendation: the creation of more police intelligence units to spy on Black Power organizations. The president created a second presidential commission on civil disorders later in the year, but this time, he selected the members more carefully. This commission recommended sharp increases in federal spending on police weapons, training, and riot preparation. Washington had no problem following through. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1020

Categorization

• SEED: An article angle: how policy responses to civil disorders consistently financed repression while rejecting redistributive reform — the cost excuse as camouflage for punitive expansion.
• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose — Johnson’s rejection of the Kerner prescription while funding police intelligence exemplifies how self-interested policy precedes stated ideas.