The Kerner Commission blamed white institutions for creating and maintaining Black ghettos

Evidence

Some experts and politicians during that period did acknowledge that the desperate and unjust conditions in which millions of Black people lived were at least partly to blame for the uprisings, most notably the members of the Kerner Commission, which had been created by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the causes of highly destructive and deadly rioting that had occurred in Detroit and Newark in 1967. The commission’s initial report, released just weeks before King was killed, concluded that severe segregation, poverty, joblessness, lack of access to housing, lack of access to economic opportunities, and discrimination in the job market, combined with pervasive police violence and harassment, had created a tinderbox of rage and despair that would certainly result in more uprisings if drastic action was not taken. The report found that many white people were in denial about the true causes of Black uprisings, but Black people were not: “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 397

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• SHARE: A specific person tracking the historiography of US race policy would appreciate this precise Kerner Commission finding and its exact quote.
• XREF: connects to: Municipal neglect caused the decay whites blamed on black residents — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 180