That in the smokescreen of building new constitutional safeguards and procedural policing reforms and new techniques to improve policing, we were quietly constructing the conditions for even more police power. Then, as now, the Black communities who stood at the brink of all of the harms of an unreconstructed democracy knew to be wary. Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charlotte five years ago.

Then, as now, cities burned from police violence (the poet Amiri Baraka had a phrase for it: “white cop Black death syndrome”). Kerry, sixty-eighth U.S.Half a century ago, the nation sat in a familiar place. This book is a must-read for anyone who is tired of the status quo and in need of both the inspiration to make a difference and proof that there’s still time to do it. In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris and Alan Curtis have curated a collection of brilliant essays authored by a diverse group of respected experts and activists, to examine where we’ve gone wrong and wrestle with what we must do to respond at last to the alarm bell of the Kerner Report and live up to the promise of our country. It's time to get real about both the challenge and the work required to bring great models to scale and break a cycle that downgrades the American Dream and diminishes our very definition of ourselves as a country of equal opportunity. Half a century later, how many more wake-up calls do we need before we face the tragic reality that in many ways-despite pledges by politicians and remarkable local accomplishments by innovative, creative leaders-in the aggregate, as a country, we've fallen backward. “It's been fifty years since the Kerner Commission offered a wake-up call long in the making, holding up a mirror to confront the reality of a society deeply divided by both race and economic status. Washburn, Valerie Wilson, Gary Younge, Julian E. Johnson, Celinda Lake, Marilyn Melkonian, Gary Orfield, Diane Ravitch, Laurie O. Elliott, Carol Emig, Jeff Faux, Ron Grzywinski, Michael P. Dionne, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Delbert S. Cisneros, Elliott Currie, Linda Darling-Hammond, Martha F. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work-and not work.Ĭontributors include Oscar Perry Abello, Elijah Anderson, Anil N. This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice.

In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report.

In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that America was heading toward “two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal.” Today, America’s communities are experiencing increasing racial tensions and inequality, working-class resentment over the unfulfilled American Dream, white supremacy violence, toxic inaction in Washington, and the decline of the nation’s example around the world.

Kerner report findings