News Articles, 1998
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CNN - 30 Years after Kerner report, some say racial divide wider

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Segregated schools, drinking fountains and restaurants are things of the past, but has the United States avoided becoming two societies, "one black, one white -- separate and unequal?"

The famous warning was sounded 30 years ago by the presidentially appointed Kerner Commission. Now a private urban-policy group says the Kerner prediction has come true and that the economic and racial divide is growing.

"While leaders and pundits talk of full employment, inner city unemployment is at crisis levels. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and minorities are suffering disproportionately," reads the document from the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation.

The Foundation released its report, "The Millennium Breach," this weekend to coincide with the anniversary of the Kerner report.

"People need to become aware that things are getting worse again," said the new report's co-author, Fred Harris. Harris is a former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and member of the Kerner Commission.

"They need to see their own self-interest in this -- that it doesn't make sense to have these underutilized regions in the country and these underutilized people whose lives are being wasted," Harris said.

The report

The foundation cites a mountain of statistics as evidence to support its findings, including:

• The national unemployment rate is below 5 percent, but unemployment rates for young African-American men in places like south-central Los Angeles have topped 30 percent.

• Our national incarceration rate of black men is four times higher than the same rate in South Africa under apartheid.

• Our child poverty rate is four times the average of western European countries.

• Of the 43 percent of minority children attending public schools, more than half are poor and more that two-thirds fail to reach basic levels of national tests

The report recommends some $56 billion in societal changes, including expanding programs like Head Start. It also recommends reducing spending in ineffective programs, cutting corporate welfare and military spending.

The report urges continuing commitment to measures that work, including: after-school youth centers, urban school reform, school-to-work programs, job training, inner city economic development and crime and drug prevention.

Emphasis should be taken off of things that don't work, it says, including: enterprise zones, prison construction, boot camps, and supply-side economics, which gives tax breaks for the rich and corporations in the hope that the money will trickle down to poorer socioeconomic groups.

Not every minority leader agrees with the foundation's findings.

On Friday, Robert S. Woodson Sr., an African-American conservative who heads the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, accused the report's authors of being "stuck in the '60s" and offering recommendations too general to be useful.

Woodson says the number of black families earning between $35,000 and $70,000 annually doubled between 1970 and 1990, even though the number of black families earning less than $15,000 more than doubled during the same time frame.

"Racism and discrimination still exist. But they aren't the biggest problems facing blacks in America today. The real issue is the growing economic rift within the black community," he said.

Ethnic tensions in the United States had been mounting since before the turn of the century. But by the mid-1960s, the struggle for civil rights threatened to tear the nation in two.

"Pillage, looting, murder and arson have nothing to do with civil rights," President Lyndon B. Johnson told the nation, after deadly riots had nearly paralyzed parts of Los Angeles, Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan, during the first half of the 1960s.

In the summer of 1967, hoping to find a peaceful solution to the rioting, Johnson formed a commission of business, political and civil rights leaders to investigate the nation's ethnic tensions. He appointed Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner to chair the commission.

"Johnson apparently believed these riots were not some spontaneous uprising, but were planned by outside agitators and, perhaps, subversives. And he hoped that the commission would find that was the case," Stephan Thernstrom told CNN. Thernstrom co-authored "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible."

Instead, the Kerner report concluded that racism and economic inequality spurred the riots.

"White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto," the 1968 report said. "White institutions created, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

The Kerner report was the nation's first comprehensive look at race issues in the United States, and it was the federal government's first official document that said racism existed and was a problem.

"The word racism had been used only by people who were deemed radicals," Roger Wilkins, of George Mason University, told CNN.

"But all of a sudden here are corporate (chief executives), conservative civil rights leaders ... to say, 'If we don't mend our ways we are heading to two societies,'" Wilkins said.

Our changing society

The Kerner Commission only examined relations between blacks and whites, but many more colors now dot the landscape of U.S. society.

And the landscape continues to change.

Because Asian-Americans have been more successful than other ethnicities, some people call them a "model minority."

Leaders from the Asian community say that stereotype comes from opponents of affirmative action and that it only serves to drive communities further apart.

"The purpose of the 'model minority' characterization is to create wedges between people of color," Julie Su of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in California told CNN.

In Los Angeles County, the next census is expected to show people from Hispanic origins outnumbering whites.

Some blacks fear the city's growing Hispanic population is taking jobs away from their community. Hispanics find that troubling.

"In unison there's more strength and more power because we have more in common in terms of our needs and our issues than we have that divides us," Carmela Lacayo of the El Pueblo Community Development Corp. told CNN.

In 1992, riots again engulfed Los Angeles for days after a jury failed to convict police officers for the beating of motorist Rodney King.

After the violence, a California think tank named RAND decided to look into whether race relations had changed in the city, which had long been a melting pot for a multitude of ethnicities.

"Things have gotten better, not worse," said Bob Levine of RAND. "The ones who have moved out of south-central (Los Angeles) are relatively successful. They're integrating economically and otherwise into majority society. The ones left behind are a real problem."

So what can be done to close the gap and to make sure our society doesn't revert back to violence in order to deal with our differences?

The critic of the most recent report on race divisions in our society says Americans need to change their mantra.

"If we keep banging the drum of racism, we will never find a way to close this economic rift. After all, if racism were the culprit, why haven't all blacks been affected in the same way?" Woodson said.

Correspondents Jonathan Karl and Kevin Smith and The Associated Press contributed to this report.