Locked in the Poorhouse: Cities, Race, and Poverty in the United States is a 30-year update of the final report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission), co-authored by former Kerner Commissioner, Senator and Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation Chairman Fred R. Harris and Eisenhower Foundation President Alan Curtis. The book was released in 1998 with a companion volume, The Millennium Breach.Harris, Fred R. and Lynn A. Curtis. Locked in the Poorhouse: Cities, Race and Poverty in the United States. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998; Curtis Lynn A. and Fred R. Harris. The Millennium Breach: Richer, Poorer and Racially Apart. Washington DC: 1998; National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Final Report. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968.
Background The Kerner Commission was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 after the 1960s protests in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Newark and many other cities.National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Final Report. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968.
The Kerner Commission's final report was released on February 29, 1968, after seven months of investigation. The report became an instant best-seller, and over two million Americans bought copies of the 426-page document. Its finding was that the riots resulted from black frustration at lack of economic opportunity. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced the report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.”
The final report's most famous passage warned, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”
The Commission concluded that a significant cause of urban violence was white racism and suggested that white America bore much of the responsibility for African American protests. The final report recommended expanded employment and education opportunity, more diverse and sensitive police forces, and substantial investments in new housing aimed at breaking up residential segregation. New initiatives needed to be “at a scale equal to the dimensions of the problems.” The Commission cautioned that only with “new will” in the nation could its recommendations be implemented.
Continuation of the Commission The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation (the Eisenhower Foundation) was formed in 1981 to continue the work of the Kerner Commission and of the 1968 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (the National Violence Commission). Kerner Commission Executive Director Ginsburg, former Kerner Commissioner and Senator Fred Harris (D, OK) and former Kerner Commissioner and Senator Edward Brooke (R, MA) were among the Founding Trustees of the Eisenhower Foundation. The Foundation has released 25 year, 30 year and 40 year updates of the Kerner Commission's final report.
The 30 Year Update: Locked in the Poorhouse and The Millennium Breach. In Locked in the Poorhouse, one of the two companion volume 30 year updates, Harris observed, “During most of the decade that followed the Kerner Report, America made progress on the principal formats that the report dealt with: race, poverty and inner cities. Then progress stopped and, in some ways, went into reverse. What caused this halt and retreat? First a series of economic shocks and trends had a depressing impact, especially on minorities. And second, the government's action and inaction bore a good deal of the blame...Today, thirty years after the Kerner report, there is more poverty in America, it is deeper, blacker and browner than before and it is more concentrated in the cities, which have become America's poorhouses.Harris, Fred R. and Lynn A. Curtis. Locked in the Poorhouse: Cities, Race and Poverty in the United States. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998; Curtis Lynn A. and Fred R. Harris. The Millennium Breach: Richer, Poorer and Racially Apart. Washington DC: 1998;
The companion volume to Locked in the Poorhouse, The Millennium Breach, was featured in a debate on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. When reporter Elizabeth Farnsworth asked about the policy that was needed, Eisenhower Foundation President Alan Curtis replied,PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “A Nation Divided?” A Debate on the Eisenhower Foundation’s Thirty Year Update of the Kerner Riot Commission,” March 2, 1998. "What needs to be done is not talk about liberal versus conservative but what doesn't work versus what works. What doesn't work is prison building, supply-side economics, policies like that. They've failed. We need to stop doing what doesn't work and invest in what does work: safe havens after school where kids come for help with their homework, as evaluated by Columbia University; the James Comer Yale University School Development Plan, where teachers and parents take over inner city schools; the Ford Foundation's Quantum Opportunities program that mentors high schoolers; community development corporations like the New Community Corporation in Newark, which creates jobs; the South Shore Bank, which creates banking for the inner city; and community-based policing by minority officers. Those are all proven, scientifically-evaluated programs, and if we replicate what works at a scale that's equal to the dimensions of the problem, we can make an impact."
Locked in the Poorhouse and The Millennium Breach also received coverage in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and many regional newspapers – as well as on ABC, BBC, CNN and NPR.ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. “Racial Divide,” March 2, 1998; NBC Nightly News with Jack Ford. “The Kerner Commission 30 Years Later,” March 1, 1998; CNN Network World News. “Kerner Commission Update,” March 1, 1998; National Public Radio: Locked in the Poorhouse Interview by Kojo Nnamdi with Fred Harris and Lynn Curtis, March 18, 1999; BBC Radio 5 Live. Nick Bryant in Washington, March 30, April 1 and April 2, 1998; Fletcher, Michael A. “Kerner Prophecy on Race Relations Came True, Report Says,” Washington Post, March 1, 1998; Rubin, Alissa. “Racial Divide Widens, Study Says,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1998; Newsweek. “Two Societies,” February 23, 1998; and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Marchetti, Domenica. “Charities Must Work to Build on Successes in Fight Against Poverty, Report Says.”
The Forty Year Update What Together We Can Do, the Foundation's follow up 40 year update summary of the Kerner Commission, drew on Eisenhower Foundation hearings in Detroit and Newark, a Foundation forum on the media, and recommendations from a national advisory panel. The 40 year update viewed the 2008 election of the first African-American President as one of a number of indicators of post-Kerner program progress. But the update also reported that the child poverty rate and income inequality had increased since the 1968 Kerner report. With the failure of the No Child Left Behind Act, large disparities remained between the educational achievement of white high school students and Latino and African-American high school students. African-American unemployment continued to be roughly twice that of whites over the 40 years since the original Kerner report. The collaboration of the prison-industrial complex and racially-biased drug sentencing had dramatically increased incarceration rates, with African-American men aged 25 to 29 being almost 7 times as likely to be incarcerated as their white counterparts.Curtis, Alan and Fred R. Harris. What Together We Can Do: A Forty Year Update of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Washington DC: 2008.
Accordingly, the 40th anniversary Eisenhower Foundation Kerner update recommended that:Curtis, Alan and Fred R. Harris. What Together We Can Do: A Forty Year Update of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Washington DC: 2008.
• The nation's top strategic domestic priority should embrace win-win employment, economic, and education reforms that simultaneously benefit the anxious middle class, the neglected working class and the truly disadvantaged.
• Demand side, Keynesian economic policy should lower unemployment; communicate to the poor, working class, and middle class that they need to band together; strengthen union organizing and link job training to job creation.
• A new Employment Training and Job Creation Act should replace the outmoded and ineffective Workforce Investment Act and the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program. Trained and retrained American workers should be linked, as first priority, to jobs in sectors that need to be developed in the national interest –like health care, housing, school repair and construction, mass transit, energy and green technologies.
• The failed No Child Left Behind Act should be replaced by an Education Equity Act. The federal government should begin to finance a system that creates equity in dollar investment per pupil across all school districts, as is done in most advanced industrialized countries. The Act should build on successful state equity models, like those in Connecticut and North Carolina.
• Safe Haven Investment Neighborhoods should be funded across the nation. The Investment Neighborhoods should include people in deepest poverty, other impoverished citizens and working-class families. Drawing in part on the models like the Harlem Children's Zone, Safe Haven Investment Neighborhoods should replicate best practices – programs already proven to work. In each Safe Haven Investment Neighborhood, multiple and interdependent solutions should target multiple problems.
• A new Safe Haven Investment Corporation should co-target federal with local public and private funding – channeling that funding in no small part to grassroots community-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations with demonstrated institutional capacity located in each Safe Haven Investment Neighborhood.
• The tax breaks given to the wealthiest Americans in 2001 and 2003 should be reversed. This could save about $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years. Tax loopholes that give American one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the industrialized world should be eliminated. At the same time, we need to reduce taxes on the great majority of Americans.
• To create national will, a new Fair Economic Deal movement should articulate a narrative that unites the middle class, the working class and the poor as partners in the American story. The movement should be based on the values of two Republican Presidents and two Democratic Presidents – Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Abraham Lincoln invested in public infrastructure and crusaded against racial injustice. Theodore Roosevelt called for regulation of corporate greed. Franklin Roosevelt created an American social contract. John Kennedy focused on “what together we can do” to serve our country.
The PBS Bill Moyers Journal covered the 40 year Kerner Commission update. Moyers sent crews to cover the pre-report Foundation hearings in Detroit and Newark. After an in-depth interview with Harris and coverage of the Detroit and Newark hearings, Moyers observed:PBS Bill Moyers Journal. “Forty Years After the Kerner Commission,” March 28, 2008
We remember the Kerner Report for its searing conclusion that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal." African-Americans at the time were fast becoming concentrated and isolated in metropolitan ghettos, and the Kerner Commission said that by 1985, without new policies, our cities would have black majorities ringed with largely all-white suburbs.