"Watts Rebellion" 60th anniversary renews call for Kerner Report plan
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Policemen force a suspect into a police car during the rioting in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, August 1965. Photo: Bettmann/ Contributor via Getty Images.
The 60th anniversary of a shocking uprising in Los Angeles, which foretold similar unrest in cities throughout the 1960s and 1970s, is being marked with calls to revisit solutions to poverty outlined in a famous report.
The big picture: Activists and scholars have unveiled an updated edition of the 1968 Kerner Report that recommends a slew of initiatives to combat inequality, racial injustice and child poverty — issues stubbornly still here.
- Many of the original recommendations were never adopted, but activists say they are hopeful now amid the rise of progressive candidates from New York to Albuquerque, N.M., running for office.
Catch up quick: Just days after President Johnson signed the landmark Voting Rights Act, 21-year-old Marquette Frye was arrested for alleged drunk driving on the edge of Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood on Aug. 11, 1965.
- Onlookers witnessed police roughing and arresting him, his brother and his mother — all Black — generating anger that turned into rioting and arson throughout the area.
- Six days of unrest resulted in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, nearly 4,000 arrests and the destruction of property valued at $40 million. Nearly 14,000 National Guard troops were sent to patrol a 46-mile area.
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cut short a visit to Puerto Rico and visited the ravaged scenes, convincing him that the civil rights struggle should go North and West and focus on economic inequality.
Over the next few years, similar uprisings would spark in Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Newark, N.J., and hundreds of other cities amid racial tension, lack of jobs and frustration over ongoing discrimination and police excessive force.
Zoom in: The issues that generated the unrest haven't gone away and have possibly gotten worse, Alan Curtis, president of the Eisenhower Foundation, told Axios.
- "Today, we have so much information on how market fundamentalism hasn't worked," said Curtis, who edited the new "Creating Justice in a Multiracial Democracy: The Kerner Commission Updated."
- Curtis said more fact-based policies that tackle child poverty and police abuse are needed, and the nation needs to have an honest discussion outside of ideological camps.
- The update recommends that the nation fund public education based on student needs instead of property status, Congress pass federal police reform, expand media diversity and talk about poverty during elections.
The intrigue: Former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris, the last living member of the Kerner Commission, told Axios last year that more people are in poverty than in 1968.
- "And it's tougher to get out of poverty today than it was then," said Harris, who died last November at 94.
State of play: The U.S. Census said there were 36.8 million people in poverty in 2023 — 11.1% of the population.
- Around 20% of Latinos and 17% of Black Americans live in poverty today.
What they're saying: "The past 60 years have been a combination of success and retrenchment. Most of the retrenchment has happened in the last decade," National Urban League president Marc Morial told Axios.
- "We're in a fight because our population has changed. You have more Black people, Hispanics (and) Asian Americans" living in the U.S. now," Jamarr Brown, a national director at Color Of Change PAC, told Axios.
- The Urban League's latest "State of Black America" report warns of an "organized effort" to dismantle civil rights enforcement, DEI protections, and Black political power.
The other side: Paul Gessing of the Rio Grande Foundation, a libertarian think tank in Albuquerque, N.M.,
Flashback: Johnson created the 11-member commission as Detroit was engulfed in a raging riot. Five days of violence would leave 33 Black people and 10 white people dead, and more than 1,400 buildings burned.
- During the summer of 1967, more than 150 cases of civil unrest erupted across the United States.
- Bipartisan Kerner Commission's members included former Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, New York Mayor John Lindsay, U.S. Sens. Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts and Fred Harris of Oklahoma.
Commission members toured cities and found that many Black residents complained about the lack of jobs and poor relations with local police.
- Black residents also told the commission that they had moved North to escape the poverty and racism of the South and found few jobs and old racism.
- The country, the report famously warned, was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal."
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