The Kerner Commission’s anti-segregation recommendations were shelved in favor of a law-and-order president

Evidence

Just weeks before King’s assassination, Johnson’s Kerner Commission, which he had created to study the root causes of the many Black rebellions that had swept through Detroit, Newark, and cities across the nation in the mid-1960s, had issued its report, which recommended a national effort to dismantle segregation and structural racism across American institutions. It was shelved by the president, like so many similar reports, and instead white Americans voted in a “law and order” president, Richard Nixon. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1318

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘reform responded to protest only when threat of civil war loomed’ pattern in passage 1317, and connects to the reader’s broader case study on how origin narratives shape who counts as the problem.