Appendix 2
Los Angeles Times
February 28, 1993New Report Echoes 'Two Societies' Warning of 1968 Kerner Commission
Poverty: Eisenhower Foundation says to counter the slide toward a divided nation, funds are needed to aid the hard-core inner-city poor.
By Ronald J. Ostrow
Washington - A presidential commission's conclusion 25 years ago that America was moving toward "two societies, one black, one white" has grown more relevant in the wake of last year's Los Angeles riots and the failure of government to respond, a national foundation warned Saturday.
As a remedy, the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation called for the nation to focus on improving the lot of the urban hard-core poor, "the roughly 10% of the population who live in urban areas of concentrated long-term poverty, and whose violence and suffering has a disproportionate effect on American life, class tension and race tension."
The report recommended that federal officials scrap or reform a number of unsuccessful high-profile programs and move away from experimental efforts in favor of programs that have demonstrated success. The foundation estimated that at least $300 billion would be needed over 10 years to carry out its recommendations.
The recommendations are being made on the 25th anniversary of a 1968 report by the Kerner Riot Commission, which was created by former President Lyndon B. Johnson after racial disorder struck Newark, NJ, Detroit and other cities in the summer of 1967, two years after the Watts riots in Los Angeles. The commission was headed by former Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner.
While there had been some gains since the 1960s in attacking the social ills that underlay the riots, many were undone by "federal disinvestments of the 1980s," said the foundation. The foundation was named for former President Dwight D. Eisenhower's youngest brother. It was created by members and staff of the Kerner Commission and two other presidential panels from the late 1960s.
"We conclude that the famous prophesy of the Kerner Commission, of two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal - is more relevant today than in 1968, and more complex, with the emergence of multiracial disparities and growing income segregation."
After April's riots in Los Angeles, Congress enacted and then-President George Bush signed a $1.3-billion aid package that included small-business loans for Los Angeles and a $500-million program for creating summer jobs for youths throughout the country, the report noted.
Congress then passed a long-term aid package, which included urban enterprise zones and "weed and seed" initiatives to weed out criminal elements and then seed areas with social renewal programs.
The report questioned the value of both approaches.
"The day after the 1992 election, the President vetoed the bill," the report stated. "So ended the federal response to the riot, at least for the 102nd Congress.
"The contents of the vetoed bill and the motivations of Congress and the White House over the spring, summer and fall of 1992 raised grave doubts about whether the gridlocked American federal political process would or could ever enact informed solutions to the problems of the inner cities and the persons who live in them," the foundation report said.
The report identified Head Start preschools as an example of the kind of program that merits sharply stepped-up support, citing evaluations that Head Start is "perhaps the most cost-effective, across-the-board inner-city prevention strategy ever developed."
While more than half of those families earning $35,000 and above send their 3-year-olds to pre-shcool, the enrollment rate is only 17% for lower-income families, according to the report.
Calling for extending Head Start to all eligible children, the report said that "it is noteworthy, if frustrating, that the Kerner Commission called for 'building on the successes of Head Start' more than 25 years ago." President Clinton has proposed full funding of Head Start.
As an example of the need to scrap programs that don't work, the report cited the current major federal job-training system - the Job Training Partnership Act, launched in the early 1980s. While the program shows "marginally positive" results for disadvantaged adults, high-risk youth, "actually did worse than comparable youth not in the program," evaluations showed.
Job training and placement should focus entirely on "the truly disadvantaged" and be handled mostly through private, nonprofit community development corporations, the report said.
Among its other proposals, the foundation called for:
- Reversing the current federal spending formula so that 70% of anti-drug funds are devoted to prevention and treatment, while law enforcement and interdiction draw only 30%. The Clinton Administration appears to be leaning in that direction.
- Encouraging already established methods of successfully rehabilitating housing through nonprofit organizations but in a way that avoids "the infamous red tape" of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
- Making public housing work better through resident management of public housing properties. "Where tenants are well organized and exercise real power, conditions improve, based on demonstration programs to date."
- Supporting so-called innovative policing and community-based policing so they are the model for the 100,000 new police officers Clinton has pledged to put on the streets of America.
- Treating handguns, like tobacco, as "a broad-based public health problem," making them the target of a campaign waged by high federal officials, including the surgeon general of the United States.
The report, while estimating that its recommendations would require $300 billion over 10 years, noted that reducing the federal budget deficit will be a high priority during the 1990s.
But some of the reform could begin as part of the economic stimulus program, the foundation said. In addition, defense spending cuts, higher taxes on the wealthy and the proposed energy tax could be used partly to expand Head Start and reform job training and placement, the report said.
Carrying out all of the proposals "may take in the neighborhood of 15 to 16 years - almost a full inner-city generation," the foundation said.
The New York Times
March 1, 1993The Two Societies
By anthony lewis
"In light of the sorry history of discrimination and its devastating impact on the lives of Negroes, bringing the Negro into the mainstream of American life should be a state interest of the highest order. To fail to do so is to ensure that America will remain forever a divided society."
- Justice Thurgood Marshall in Regents v. Bakke, 1978.
Twenty-five years ago today the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson after terrible riots in Detroit and Newark the year before, made its final report. Gov. Otto Kerner and his colleagues warned: "Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."
For the anniversary, the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation has issued a massive report on what we must do about the miseries of our urban ghettoes - the miseries that exploded last year in the Los Angeles riots. It is a valuable report because it refuses to accept what so many Americans have come to believe: that there is nothing to be done about the poverty, decay and crime of our inner cities.
The report, written by the foundation's president, Lynn A. Curtis, concludes that the Kerner Commission's vision of two unequal Americas is "more relevant today than in 1968, and more complex, with the emergence of multiracial disparities and growing income segregation." But it does not see this reality as a reason to give up.
"The fact is," the report says, "that we already know quite a bit about which investments work in the American inner city."
The focus of the report is on helping children and youth avoid the dead ends of ignorance and crime. It argues that a number of community-based programs in different cities have proved successful, and that it is time to apply their methods on a larger scale.
The methods include "sanctuary, extended family, mentoring … discipline, educational innovation that motivates a youth to obtain a high school degree, job training linked to job placement …" To spread those ideas the report proposes a national nonprofit Corporation for Youth Investment, funded by both private sources and the Federal Government.
Among many other proposals, one is for a National Community Development Bank. It would encourage a network of development banks like the South Shore Bank in Chicago, which has had much success in stemming urban decay - and has been profitable.
To finance its suggestions, the report calls for a gradual rise in Federal spending to a level of $15 billion a year in new money for investment in children and youth, and $15 billion for investment in inner cities themselves. Those levels, it says, should continue for 10 years.
I asked Roger Wilkins, a leading black analyst of urban problems who was sent by President Johnson to help deal with the Detroit riot in 1967, what he thought of the report. He welcomed its insistence that we must act and that we know a good deal about what to do.
"But I don't believe," Mr. Wilkins added, "that any social program in the world can do for a child what a healthy, economically steady family can do. So you have to strengthen families. That means focusing on job creation. You need income for families, earned income. Job training and placement should be centered on the aim of strengthening families."
If we recognize that necessity, we have to confront another contemporary reality: the decline of manufacturing industry in this country with the globalization of production. Strengthening the family in inner cities is dependent in that sense on President Clinton's aim of rebuilding American industry to create jobs.
There is one more aspect of the Eisenhower Foundation report that must be noted. After quoting the famous Kerner conclusion about two societies, the report has very little to say directly about race. That may reflect a political judgement.
Few white Americans want to think about remedial measures for the black heirs of centuries of discrimination. Reagan and Bush political strategy was to arouse racial fears, and then use them as a reason to do nothing. But a divided America, damaging to whites as to blacks, will continue until we face the issue of race.
The Washington Post
February 28, 1993Little Progress Is Seen On Urban Ills Since 1968
Group Urges $300 Billion to 'Reconstruct' Cities
By Barbara Vobejda
A quarter century ago this week, after devastating urban riots, a presidentially appointed panel known as the Kerner commission issued an aminous warning: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."
Today, another report argues that despite some gains, the Kerner commission's warning "is more relevant … than in 1968." Moreover, the problems of urban American have been further complicated since then by new multiracial disparities and growing income segregation, according to the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, which has continued the work of the Kerner commission.
"Yes, there have been some improvements," said Lynn A. Curtis, Eisenhower Foundation president and author of a massive report updating the work of the commission. "But, in spite of that, the downside is considerably worse."
The foundation, which was created with the help of the younger brother of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, calls for expenditures of $300 billion over 10 years to invest in children and youth and to "reconstruct" American cities with funding for housing and infrastructure.
The document also recommends scrapping the Job Training Partnership Act and avoiding investment in enterprise zones, arguing that neither have been effective.
Underlying the foundation's policy recommendations is the bleak conclusion that, while some elements of the problem have changed, the basic social and economic disparities that were at the root of urban riots in the past clearly have not been erased.
The same frustration was evident 25 years ago when the Kerner commission, named after its chairman, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, issued its report. In that document, scholar Kenneth B. Clark referred to similar investigations of the 1919 riot in Chicago, the Harlem riot of 1935, and the Harlem riot of 1943 and the Watts riot of 1965.
"It is kind of Alice in Wonderland - with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction," Clark said.
In its report today, the Eisenhower Foundation pointed to the riots in south-central Los Angeles last spring. "We can reflect again on the same moving picture," the report said.
The failure to make progress, the foundation said, can be tied to the "federal disinvestments" of the 1980s, when "the rich got richer and the poor got poorer."
The report cites several statistics to make its case: one in five American children lives in poverty; over the 1980s, average hourly wages fell more than 9 percent; infant mortality rates for children living in some big cities, including Detroit and Washington, were comparable to those in China and the former Soviet Union, and by 1992, one in four African-American males was in prison, on probation or on parole at any one time.
Curtis pointed to some positive developments since the 1960s, including the emergence of a solid black middle class, improved high school graduation rates among blacks and increasing numbers of black and Latino elected officials.
But conditions have worsened among the lower socioeconomic ranks, where there is deeper and more persistent poverty among the residents of isolated, problem-ridden ghettos.
In 1968, the Kerner commission laid out an extensive list of policy recommendations, including improved police-community relations, job creation, early childhood education, improved vocational education and creation of low-income housing outside ghetto areas.
Many of the proposals set out by the Eisenhower Foundation are similar: full funding for Head Start, a goal shared by the Clinton administration; education reform; job training and placement for inner-city youth; new emphasis on drug prevention and treatment; health care coverage for the working poor and expanded Medicaid; federal funding for housing initiatives through local community development corporations; tenant management of public housing, and stricter gun control laws.
The goal, the foundation said, should be to build on programs that have been proven to work and eliminate those that do not.
Overall, the foundation said, the initiatives would require $150 billion in investment for children and youth and another $150 billion for housing, infrastructure and investment in technology to rebuild cities.
The report said that level of funding, to be spent over 10 years, could be largely financed by savings in military spending, reductions in funding for the Agency for International Development, taxes on the very rich and a gasoline tax offset by credits for low-income groups.
Curtis argued that the funding also could be phased in, with some early improvements made simply by reorganizing. He cited as an example restructuring the Job Training Partnership Act so it is more focused on training disadvantaged youth.
Margaret Weir, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that some of these recommendations, including job creation and training, also are contained in President Clinton's economic stimulus package and may find public backing.
But for some of the other recommendations, particularly those targeted specifically at poor people, "it would be tough to get support," she said.
The Washington Post
March 7, 1993A Lot Done, A Lot to Do
Twenty-five years ago this month, the Kerner Commission, which studied the causes of the '60s racial explosions in American big cities, concluded that the United States was becoming two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. The report's anniversary has occasioned much commentary on a central question: Is the country better off now?
Many come close to saying no. A commemorative report issued by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, for example, declared that Kerner's conclusions are "more relevant today than in 1968, and more complex, with the emergence of multi-racial disparities and growing income segregation." The new report is surely right about complexity, and it contains some useful policy suggestions. But it's a large mistake to let the negative obscure the achievements made possible by the civil rights movement and by the individual struggles of millions of African Americans.
There is no denying that the legacy of racism, slavery and segregation still haunts America - often in unexpected ways. While the last quarter-century has seen growth in the black middle class and the expansion of black entrepreneurship, many studies show that blacks hold far less wealth than whites do. This is clearly the product of past discrimination - wealth is accumulated over generations - and it makes black progress precarious.
And on some matters, the country has clearly moved in the wrong direction since 1968. The inner-city poor are, if anything, more isolated, more trapped by poverty, more threatened by violence. The misery faced by a large percentage of the nation's black children is a cause for national alarm and shame.
Their fate, however, often calls forth little more than sloganeering. Conservatives blame social breakdown in the cities on "the failure of liberal Democratic programs," liberals berate "12 years of conservative Republican indifference." There were liberal failures, and there surely was conservative indifference. But one would like to think that in 25 years, we had learned more than that. Racism plays a role here; so, too, do changes in the urban labor market that often work against the inner-city poor, and so does the much-discussed rise of the single-parent family. If we want to overcome, we have to understand that economic and social forces are now larger obstacles to progress than personal bigotry.
And failure is by no means the whole story of the last quarter-century. Anyone who was forced to live under the oppression of segregation and the exclusion of discrimination knows that in most ways, ours is a more racially open society today than it has been at any point in our history. The end of Jim Crow was no trifling matter. For friends of civil rights, there is a grave danger in saying that nothing good has happened since the '60s. To say this is to say that the huge accomplishments represented by the civil rights and voting rights laws had no effect on our society. It is to deny the power of the achievement ethic among African Americans. It is to play into the hands of the enemies of civil rights.
It is also a mistake to see all our social problems in racial terms. It is true that blacks as a group are substantially less well off than whites. But the fact remains that most blacks are not poor, and most poor people are not black.
The point here is that many of the most promising solutions to the problems of poverty have nothing to do with race. President Clinton, while rightly calling for full and vigorous enforcement of civil right laws, has also proposed large spending increases for programs for pregnant mothers, infants and child immunizations. He has also called for a big increase in the earned income tax credit, which lifts the incomes of the working poor.
Because a disproportionate number of African Americans find themselves trapped in poverty, these programs will be of particular benefit to them. But they will be helped alongside whites, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and all others who are poor. This is more than smart politics; it is a real step toward justice.
The Wall Street Journal
March 1, 1993Racial, Economic Disparities Require Higher U.S. Outlays, Study Group Says
BY laurie mcginley
WASHINGTON - The Kerner Commission's famous 25-year-old warning that American society was moving toward "two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal" has become a reality, a private foundation says.
The organization, the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, calls for a 10-year program to increase spending for children and families and associated needs such as housing by $30 billion annually.
A nonprofit group founded in 1981 by several members and aids to the Kerner Commission and two other 1960s-era presidential panels, the foundation said the earlier prophecy is "more relevant today than in 1968, and more complex, with the emergence of multiracial disparities and growing income segregation."
The Foundation's president, Lynn Curtis, acknowledged there have been improvements in recent decades for minorities and disadvantaged Americans - including the emergence of a large, black middle class and the increased proportion of minority teenagers graduating from high school. "But the downside clearly outweighs the upside," he said, pointing to the substantial rise in children in poverty and sharp cutbacks in government housing aid.
The Kerner Commission, officially known as the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, issued its warning in a report presented to President Lyndon Johnson on March 1, 1968. Its head, former Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, was appointed by President Johnson in July 1967 in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles and severe rioting in the summer of 1967, especially in Detroit and Newark.
The increased spending advocated by the Eisenhower Foundation would dwarf the Clinton administration's planned effort. The administration has proposed increasing all domestic discretionary spending by $68 billion over the next four years. Mr. Curtis said he nevertheless welcomes the administration proposals.
In its report, the Eisenhower Foundation touted a raft of government and private programs - including the Head Start preschool education program for disadvantaged children, and Job Corps, a federal job training and placement system focused on the highest-risk youth. The Clinton administration plans spending increases for both.
The Foundation also proposes creation of a nonprofit Corporation for Youth Investment, to be backed with federal and private funds, to replicate across the country successful programs by community nonprofit organizations.
Robert Rector, senior policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, sharply disagree with the call for more spending. He argued that government social-welfare spending has only exacerbated urban problems, not eased them. He questioned the usefulness of Head Start and the Job Corps, adding "We shouldn't be pouring more money into programs long ago shown to be ineffective," he said.
Instead, he said, the government should focus on increasing work effort and marriage rates in the inner city; taking tougher steps to keep repeat criminals off the streets; changing the public school system by offering vouchers for children to go to private and parochial schools and enlisting help from black churches to rebuild moral character.
While he doubtless would disagree with most of Mr. Rector's points, the Rev. Jesse Jackson also is stressing the importance of improved behavior by people - especially young people - who are living in poverty. "There must be more focus on the behavior of people," he told reporters recently.
The Miami Herald
March 3, 1993Escape for the cities
The ills facing America's inner cities have an intricate history of racial discrimination and social imbalance. Remedying them therefore requires long-term vision and leadership.
So concludes the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation after closely examining the federal aid that actually made it to postriot South Central Los Angeles. Washington was prodigal in good intentions, the foundation says, but lacking in political will and foresight to apply durable solutions.
Twenty-five years ago the country suffered the worst riots in its history when racial disorders in Newark and Detroit spread to other communities. The Kerner Commission, investigating those events, concluded that their root was that our nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal." That conclusion, the foundation's report says, is even more relevant today.
The destitution of inner cities lingers on, the report suggests, largely because government typically reacts to crises instead of preventing them. That's what happened in South Central LA. While national attention remained focused on violence there, the White House and Congress hastily approved a short-term, $1.8 billion aid package. But once national interest shifted, they failed to agree on a more ambitious program. Giving priority to their constituents' particual interests, some congressmen snarled the aid package with tax hikes that collided with President Bush's "no new taxes" pledge. The plan died in a presidential veto the day after the election.
The report offers some commonsense solutions to inner city problems. Thus it recommends reorganizing ineffective programs such as the federal anti-drug campaign. Currently, 70 percent of its $12 billion budget goes to interdiction, while only 30 percent goes to prevention and treatment. How about changing priorities? The Foundation further recommends strengthening successful job-training and placement, welfare, and health care programs.
The report's overall lesson couldn't be more evident: Seek inner city solutions based on existing needs, not fleeting political demands after a crisis. More important, don't let workable solutions remain hostage to Washington's gridlock.
Star Tribune
March 15, 1993Déjà vu on urban riots and reports
On the 25th anniversary of the Kerner Commission's famous prophecy that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal," a new, massive report concludes that the vision of two unequal Americas is more relevant today than in 1968."
Yet the future is not without hope. The 300-page missive, by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, is a road map to a better America that should be required reading for every public-policy thinker and elected official in the state. Better yet, "Investing in Children and Youth, Reconstructing Our Cities" should be shared in churches and schools - as well as by the nearly two dozen men and women seeking the office of mayor in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The report rejects urban enterprise zones; economics that make the rich richer and the poor and middle-class poorer; the federal Job Training Partnership Act; and the "War on Drugs" with its attendant prison-building, which the foundation terms "our national housing policy for minorities and the poor." It persuasively argues for community-based strategies that are already working in urban America.
The Washington-based Foundation proposes a nonprofit Corporation for Youth Investment, to be funded by both private sources and the federal government, and a National Community Development Bank, to be modeled after Chicago's South Shore Bank, which has had much success in stemming urban decay. It wisely suggests shifting the $12 billion anti-drug budget's emphasis from interdiction to prevention and education.
Financing means a gradual rise in federal spending to $30 billion a year for 10 years. The report challenges Americans to fund programs on a "scale equal to the dimension of the problems," which the Kerner Commission long ago emphasized.
If America can find hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the savings and loan industry, it should be able to find the money for a long-term strategy of youth investment and community reconstruction. First, Americans must come to believe in the investment's potential for return.
What has been missing a commitment to change. If the nation's inequities are to be corrected before the Kerner Commission's golden anniversary, Americans must collectively open the way to renewal through a deeper sense of personal and national responsibility.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
March 4, 1993Inner-city challenge
Twenty five years ago this week the Kerner Commission first warned, after urban riots, that this nation was becoming two societies, "one black, one white - separate and unequal."
On the 25th anniversary of the commissioner's disturbing report, the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation has concluded that little has been learned in the last quarter century about how to prevent the festering social conditions that lead to hopelessness and angry riots.
The Foundation's report says the reaction by Congress and the White House to last year's Los Angeles riots was the wrong one because the remedies proposed won't work.
The foundation instead proposes some approaches that seem more promising: o Focus on drug treatment and prevention rather than interdiction.
o Reorganize the Job Training Partnership Act to focus more on unemployed inner-city youths.
o Turn responsibility for building low-income housing over to nonprofit organizations rather than profit-seeking developers.
o For the next decade, spend $15 billion more a year on programs for inner-city youths and another $15 billion on inner-city infrastructure.
The sickness in America's inner cities continues. It calls for radical intervention and a sustained, imaginative effort at healing.
The Palm Beach Post
March 6, 1993An action plan for everybody
By stebbins jefferson
America cities explode with predictable regularity. A 1919 riot in Chicago, 1935 and 1943 riots in Harlem, 1965 rioting in Watts, 1967 racial explosions in Newark, NJ, Detroit and other cities. America's traditional response has been to confront the problem of race riots and ethnic unrest with a study, generate a report - and file it. With each incidence of convulsive mass violence, more and more of the permanently employed, the affluent and the powerful seek sanctuary in the suburbs. Yet the problems of the inner cities, where 10 percent of the population lives in concentrated long-range poverty, stretch like tentacles to touch all Americans wherever they live, undermining social order, depleting resources and creating a counterculture alienated from core American values.
After nationwide rioting in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders chaired by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner. The Kerner Report was published March 1, 1968. Its foremost conclusion: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal." The commission's recommendation was to "mount programs on a scale equal to the dimensions of the problems." That advice has been ignored.
Last week, on the 25th anniversary of the Kerner Report, the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation released a plan: "Investing in Children and Youth, Reconstructing Our Cities." This report not only confirms the prophecy of the Kerner Commission but also indicates that the underlying causes and circumstances are even more complex with the emergence of multiracial disparities.
The value of the Eisenhower Foundation report is that it identifies programs and policies that should be adopted for the rest of the 20th century. The commission invites the involvement of all who care and understand that America can self-destruct if the problems of our cities are not solved.
The foremost advice is that to save disadvantaged youths we adopt a "multiple-solutions" approach. That formula includes varied combinations of mentoring, discipline, educational innovation, job training, social, community and economic development. The commission's report addresses all facets of inner-city problems. During the past 12 years, housing for the poor was cut by 80 percent while the number of jail cells doubled, making jails and prisons the public housing programs of the day. The war on drugs has been a $12 billion-plus annual program in which 70 percent was spent on law enforcement and 30 percent on prevention and treatment. Such formulas must be altered to bring solution, not merely containment, of problems.
Education, job training, welfare, health care and even government itself must be reinvented to eliminate bureaucracies that consume money but which prevent timely, innovative response to the needs of people. This report tells why and how, proposing specific, practical solutions and citing models that can be adapted to local needs. Dr. Lynn Curtis, president of the foundation, correctly calls the report "old-fashioned American common sense."
Perhaps the greatest value of the report is its insistence that leadership come from the bottom and the top of the social order, for there is work for all to do. Quick-fix solutions of the past have brought us to the brink of total chaos. Only long-term commitment to reconstruct our cities can restore order.
The cities that were once our greatest strength are becoming our greatest weakness. We can reverse that trend by investing in people who live there. If that advice sounds familiar, it is because we have always known what to do. We have not chosen to do it.
The Atlanta Journal
February 28, 1993U.S. still refuses to spend enough to heal inner cities, report says
Despite a history of urban riots, the United States has never learned how to invest in inner cities and stop the violent cycle, a new study says.
Last spring's riots in Los Angeles underscored the lack of a serious federal effort to erase the same type of racial and economic discrimination blamed for riots as far back as 1919, said the report. It was released Saturday by the private Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation to coincide with the 25 anniversary of the Kerner Commission report.
In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that the United States was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."
"We can reflect, again, on the same moving picture - now the April 1992 riots in south-central Los Angeles," the new report said. "Congress and the White House misunderstood the problem. They then constructed a solution that flew in the face of what really did work."
After the Los Angeles riots, Congress passed a $1.3 billion package including small business loans and $500 million for summer jobs. A longer-term plan, focusing on urban enterprise zones and drug enforcement efforts, was vetoed by President George Bush. Lynn Curtis, author of the new report, said the government should focus on high-tech job training, affordable housing and community development banks that can finance inner-city projects.
Federal efforts have been insufficient and too rigid, and didn't allow for "local, neighborhood-based, one-stop shopping for coordinated services," the report said. The study also argued:
Focusing on drug treatment and prevention, rather than interdiction.
o Revising the Job Training Partnership Act, aiming it more toward the needs of unemployed inner-city youth.
o Turning responsibility for building low-income housing over to non-profit organizations, rather than for-profit developers.
o Investing $15 billion more a year in programs for inner-city youth, and an extra $15 billion in inner-city infrastructure for 10 years.
The Kerner panel, officially the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson to find out what caused riots in the late 1960s.
National Journal
March 6, 1993Building Two-Way Streets In The Cities
There's a slim chance that déjà vu - to stand Yogi Berra's line on its head - won't happen all over again in the nation's inner cities. If the Clinton Administration and its allies get their way, the cycle of urban violence, public remorse and private recrimination over federal inaction that has been repeated again and again for most of this century may finally be broken.
To mark the 25th anniversary of the March 1, 1968, report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation has issued a study that excoriates the federal government for its lack of response to last April's riots in Los Angeles. The foundation, which was set up to carry on the work of the Kerner Commission, calls for a "pragmatic" $30 billion federal investment "that begins by reinventing government for the truly disadvantaged," in the words of Lynn A. Curtis, its president, who also wrote the 1968 report.
Such a demand for a huge infusion of federal aid to help the inner-city poor certainly isn't new; in fact, it's a predictable part of the old cycle. But some things are different, and they hold out a small promise for change.
The Eisenhower Foundation report lists dozens of programs that have made a big difference to children, youth and poor neighborhoods in the most distressed cities around the nation. These programs are, for the most part, local initiatives that have been designed to meet a community's distinctive needs. Most of them are operated by private, nonprofit organizations. They get their money from a variety of sources, including the federal government. But they are not federal programs.
Herein lies an irony. The biggest critics of the Reagan-Bush era do not suggest a return to either the New Deal or the Great Society approach of massive federal programs. Indeed, they advocate the kind of grass-roots, public-private ventures that were pioneered during the Reagan and Bush Administrations. They seek from the Clinton Administration what they didn't get from either Reagan or Bush: cooperation, friendliness ("partnership" is a key word these days) and an end to hostilities, along with a little money.
Which brings up the mayors and country officials and the dramatic reversal in the attitude of the local government groups toward the White House. The U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties are all enthusiastically - jubilantly, even - supporting President Clinton's economic plan even though cities and counties would have to sustain some cuts in federal aid.
The mayors and other local officials are responding, in part, to the recognition that the federal budget deficit needs to be reduced. But that doesn't account for the new spring in their steps or ring in their soundbites as they troop into Washington for their annual winter meetings to lobby Congress and the President. For the first time in at least 12 years, these local officials feel that they are in friendly territory, that their needs are understood and their situations appreciated by those in control. Indeed, the few grumbles that can be heard are about federal mandates, not money.
Clinton's economic plan and support for such direct federal programs as Head Start, of course, enter into the calculations of both the local officials and nonprofit activist organizations.
The Eisenhower Foundation report describes how, in the wake of the riots in the 1960s, the federal government ignored the plight of inner-city neighborhoods and forced communities to set up their own programs. During that period, neighborhood youth programs sprang up around the country - the Argus Community in the Bronx, the House of Umoja in Philadelphia and the Dorchester Youth Collaborative in Boston, for example - to offer young people in the nation's ghettos safe havens in which to play sports, avoid drugs and most important, talk to adults who cared about them.
Similarly, the local government groups complain about federal disinvestment in the cities during the Reagan and Bush Administrations, which forced community development corporations and other local nonprofits to take up the slack.
But perhaps these critics of Reagan and Bush should, instead, thank them for providing an environment in which real innovation could take place. The innovations have worked, if only on a small scale. That's why the Eisenhower Foundation and officials of local governments want federal aid to enlarge and spread these kinds of programs to other neighborhoods and other cities. They don't want the federal government to run the programs - or even pick up the entire tab.
The difference between the Reagan-Bush approach to cities and what local officials say they believe will be the Clinton tack is profound.
Consider two federal housing programs: HOPE and HOME. HOPE, the pride and joy of Jack F. Kemp, the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary in the Bush Administration, was the plan to sell off public housing to tenants. It was an example of Kemp's total faith in free markets and complete hostility to government projects. It didn't work.
HOME, which Congress adopted over Kemp's opposition, is a block grant program that's designed to foster public-private cooperation in the rehabilitation of housing and of neighborhoods. Deals put together by cities, community development corporations and local banks and businesses are central to its operation. Nearly everyone who's worked with local housing programs says that HOME is just what the doctor ordered. But the program has been hobbled by some onerous regulations, and HUD Secretary Henry G. Cisneros says that he is working on streamlining the rulesThe mayors have given Clinton a real honeymoon. The Eisenhower Foundation is a lot more skeptical, although Curtis allowed that "the Clinton Administration has the vision needed to implement what works."
The mayors have given Clinton a real honeymoon. The Eisenhower Foundation is a lot more skeptical, although Curtis allowed that "the Clinton Administration has the vision needed to implement what works."
Now comes the hard part for both sides. Clinton has to get his economic plan through Congress more or less intact. Then, the mayors and the nonprofit groups have to live up to their side of the bargain and actually get the programs out on the street.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy
March 9, 1993Report Urges Foundations, Government to Finance Proven Anti-Poverty Models
by elizabeth greene and jennifer moore
Foundations and government agencies should stop supporting piecemeal projects to ameliorate urban poverty, a new report says.
The report also says grant makers need to step up their efforts to finance proven anti-poverty efforts.
The report, which focused on improving the lives of young people and revitalizing poor neighborhoods, urged the federal government to increase spending to expand effective programs, many of them developed by non-profits. It called for the creation of a new non-profit organization, the Corporation for Youth Investment, that would coordinate the distribution of over $500-million in government and private money over five years to community-based organizations and put an end to spending on ineffective programs.
The 350-page report was published by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation to mark the 25th anniversary of the report issued by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission for its chairman, Otto Kerner, then governor of Illinois. The commission was appointed by President Lydon B. Johnson in 1967 to recommend ways to improve urban conditions following riots in Newark, Detroit, and other cities. The Kerner report warned that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."
'Growing Income Segregation'
The Eisenhower Foundation report found the Kerner conclusions to be "more relevant today than in 1968, and more complex, with the emergence of multiracial disparities and growing income segregation." The foundation was created in 1981 to further the work of three bipartisan Presidential commissions on crime and violence, including the Kerner group, that were created in the late 1960's. It gets its name from President Dwight D. Eisenhower's youngest brother, who chaired one of those commissions.
"The tack the report takes is to say, Look, let's simply identify what works and do more of it, expand it on a national scale to everyone who is eligible to receive it, and toss out what doesn't," said Lynn A. Curtis, president of the foundation.
The report recommended increasing federal spending by $30 billion a year for 10 years to pay for new or expanded programs that help young people and provide low-cost housing and community-development aid to poor neighborhoods. It suggested taking money from programs it found ineffective, such as the Job Training Partnership Act, to help cover some of the costs.
"If we acknowledge that it will take a long time to get to those levels in the current economic climate, then we are talking about at least one generation of inner-city children and youth," said Mr. Curtis. "But if we could turn things around in just one generation, we'd really be cooking."
Among the report's recommendations:
o Calling of a national summit, potentially titled "Children, Youth and the Inner City: Replicating What Works," that would bring together key figures from charities, foundations, and government. The conference could precede the convening of a federal commission, to be overseen by the White House, that would develop a plan within six months to restructure government efforts involving young people and inner cities.
o Creation of a new federal program that would channel more money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to local community-development corporations. The report recommended that national non-profit organizations should act as intermediaries, deciding how the money should be distributed.
o Development of more sophisticated evaluations of charity and government programs of charity and government programs to determine what impact they are having on poor children and on the community at large. More comparisons need to be made between people served by the programs and people who are not, the foundation said. However, it cautioned that programs need to be given time to work: It said most efforts take at least five years to show results.
o Greater reliance on public-service advertisements, particularly televised appeals, to educate the public about effective programs. Those messages should be narrated by popular figures and should explain what makes the organizations work. "Successful programs must become household images," the report said. In particular, foundations should encourage more spots by producers who are members of minority groups and who may have more streetwise approaches than "more establishment and powerful agents of influence."
o Increased foundation support for advocacy groups, like the Children's Defense Fund and Common Cause, that serve as watchdogs to the federal government, educate policy makers, and push for reform.
For information on how to order copies of the report, "Investing in Children and Youth, Reconstructing Our Cities: Doing What Works to Reverse the Betrayal of American Democracy," contact the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, 1660 L Street, NW, Suite 200, Washington 20036; (202) 429-0440.
The Independent
March 1, 1993America's black-white divide 'has got worse'
By david usborne
A quarter of a century after a report commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson detailed the extent of lingering racial segregation in American society, a follow-up study released yesterday argues that for the most part the divisions identified then either apply today or have actually worsened.
Known as the Kerner Commission, the panel appointed to investigate black-white disparities after the Watts riot of 1965 concluded in 1968 that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal." According to the new report, that warning has become not less but "more relevant."
The new study, compiled specifically as a sequel to the Kerner work, has been published by the Eisenhower Foundation, a body set up by the former president's younger brother. Its findings, which coincide with the start of a second trial of four the white policemen in the Rodney King case, will come as a fresh jolt to America's troubled conscience.
It will also provide added impetus for the Clinton administration to detail its own plans to address the problems. President Bill Clinton's plans are not so much aimed at blacks themselves but at the decaying urban centers, where a large proportion of blacks live.
Though the report's conclusions - advocating a sharp increase in expenditure on urban renewal and youth education - coincide fairly substantially with President Clinton's own plans for city centers, in some respects they depart from the White House view. In particular, it argues against the creation of special "enterprise zones" in urban centres, where investment is encouraged by tax incentives, arguing they have been ineffective, Mr Clinton has just promised to spend heavily on extending enterprise zones.
Not everyone will necessarily accept the overwhelmingly bleak tone of the new report's conclusions. Those with a more optimistic view, point to the progress made, for instance, in integrating police forces and schools since 1968 and to the emergence of a strong black middle class.
"Yes, there have been some improvements," concedes Lynn Curtis, the president of the Eisenhower Foundation. "But, in spite of that, the downside is considerably worse." Altogether, the foundation calls for an enormous spending programme of $300bn (£2.2bn) over 10 years to address the problems.
The report candidly places some of the blame for the continuing racial tensions and disparities on the two former Republican presidents and their policies during the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. It was a period, the study says, of "federal disinvestments" in inner cities, when "the rich got richer and the poor got poorer."
While accepting that a body of fairly well-off blacks has emerged in all American cities, the report's authors emphasize that the situation among the majority who remain disadvantaged has, by contrast, worsened. The social tensions fed by this are further exacerbated by new factors not present 25 years ago, such as the arrival of new racial groups, notably the Hispanics, suffering similar disparities and frustrations.
Many of the bald statistics in the report are certain to prompt renewed alarm. Since 1968, the report says, life expectancy among blacks has declined, while broad measures of infant mortality, unemployment and poverty have all risen. Child death rates in cities such as Detroit and Washington DC in the 1980s were equivalent to those in China and the Soviet Union, it suggests.
Scrutiny of the economic conditions of the black community, as compared to whites, reveals that unemployment is twice as high and the poverty rates three times as great. Black male earnings are less than three quarters those of their white equivalents and the median income of black families is 57 percent of white families.
Jet
May 31, 199325 Year Later: Is White Racism Still Dividing America Into Black and White Races - Separate And Unequal?
Twenty-five years after President Lyndon B. Johnson's Kerner Commission issued a report saying that America was being ripped apart by White racism, only little has changed, says the recent Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation report that commemorates the Kerner Report.
In riot-torn cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, homeless people peddle newspapers, huddle in overcrowded shelters or beg for money or meals on busy streets. Tired, old Black women wearily wait for buses in Chicago that take them to the suburbs where they are being rapidly replaced by illegal immigrants or ethnic minorities who work for less money. Some Black youths who dare to dream of "having a good day" are robbed of expensive designer basketball shoes and jackets by bullies brandishing guns. Some Black youths who dare not dream of designer clothes and fancy ears still stand in long lines seeking employment.
In many respects, life in the inner cities is virtually the same as painted in 1968 when Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, chairman of the 11-member interracial National Advisory Commission in Civil Disorders, released the long-awaited riot report to President Johnson. The commission revealed that America is divided into two societies - one Black, one White - both separate and unequal.
The report's conclusion was grim: "…certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of White Americans toward Black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II."
Two weeks after publication of the report which cost $1 million to find out why riots and rebellions exploded in 40 cities in the late '60s, President Johnson commented on the report in an exclusive taped interview (Jet, March 23, 1968). Johnson said of the Kerner Report:
"I think it's the most important report that has been made to me since I've been President. I think that the most important thing in the report is the conclusion that it reaches about the cause of our problems in the country evolving primarily from White racism."
In its current 350-page report to observe the 25th anniversary of the Kerner Report, The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation concludes: "Overall, in spite of some gains since the 1980's, but especially because of federal disinvestment of the 1980's, the famous prophesy of the Kerner Commission, of two societies, one Black, one White - separate and unequal - is more relevant today than in 1968, and more complex, with the emergence of multiracial disparities and growing income segregation."
The national Foundation asks that the nation invest in its children, youth and urban infrastructure at a level that catches up with countries like France, Germany and Japan.
"We just propose old-fashioned American common sense," suggests Dr. Lynn A. Curtis, president of the Foundation and principal author of the report. "Based on scientific evaluations since the Kerner Commission, we need to replicate what works and toss out what doesn't.""We just propose old-fashioned American common sense," suggests Dr. Lynn A. Curtis, president of the Foundation and principal author of the report. "Based on scientific evaluations since the Kerner Commission, we need to replicate what works and toss out what doesn't."
The Eisenhower Foundation, created by members and staff of the Kerner Commission and two other presidential commissions from the late 1960s, includes Yale Professor James Comer, creator of the successful inner-city Comer School Development Plan.
The Comer plan and many community-based strategies that are already working in inner cities across the nation are highlighted in the Foundation's report.
The urgency for leadership is stressed in the Foundation Report. "America found the money to fight the persian Gulf War, and it found the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to bail out the failed, deregulated savings and loan industry." the Report notes. "America can find the money for a true strategy of child investment, youth investment and community reconstruction if there is the right leadership at the very top. We now have that leadership," the Report added, referring to President Clinton.
Foundation President Curtis is especially concerned about reorganizing the failed federal job training program to function more like Job Corps. "And it means housing built by non-profit inner-city groups, not for-profit developers," he added.
"The truly disadvantaged also should have a real stake in the President's economic strategy, with employment opportunities in public works projects and in emerging high-tech industries," Curtis suggested, pointing out a program in France that trains jobless North African youth in computer repair.v
As the economy begins to recover and the debt reduction proceeds, the report asks that "the federal government build to a level of $15 billion more per year to invest in children and youth who are disadvantaged and $15 billion more per year to invest in reconstruction of the inner city. This level is the 'scale equal to the dimension of the problem,' to recall the Kerner Commission's recommendation, and should be sustained for at least 10 years, according to the plan."
The Eisenhower Foundation is also aware of the gridlock in passing legislation to support Clinton's economic plan. "A national summit on Replicating What Works for Children, Youth and the Inner City is needed," Curtis said, "just as the Clinton administration successfully set the tone for its economic policy with the economic summit last December."
With the Kerner Report's grim conclusion that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one White - separate and unequal - The Eisenhower Foundation devotes considerable attention to the current status of Blacks. It notes qualifications and contercurrents abound.
"For example," the Report says, "It is true that, in households headed by a married couple, median income for African Americans has gone from 68 percent of Whites in 1968 to 84 percent in 1990. But, reflecting the breakdown of the family in the inner city, for all African-American households, the median family income was 59 percent of Whites in 1966 and 56 percent in 1989.
In 1960, twenty percent of all African-American children were living in fatherless families. Today, the figure is an astounding 60 percent. In 1960, the ratio of African-American to White unemployment rates for young adults aged 20-24 was 1.6; in 1989 the ratio was 2.3"
Elaborating further upon the status of Blacks, Prof. Andrew Hacker puts another coat of paint on the grim and complicated picture of racial interaction. In his recent book, Two Nations, Black and White Separate, Hostile And Unequal, Professor Hacker says White superiority still haunts America. He concludes:
"There remains an unarticulated suspicion might there be something about the Black race that suited them for slavery? This is not to say anyone argues that human bondage was justified. Still, the facts that slavery existed for so long and was so taken for granted cannot be erased from American minds."
The Foundation Reports notes that New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, one of the few White members of Congress who has talked honestly and openly about race relations, adds: "I don't think politics has dealt honestly with race in 25 years … Republicans have used race in a divisive way to get votes, speaking in code words to targeted audiences. Democrats have essentially ignored self-destructive behavior of parts of the minority population and covered self-destruction behavior in a cloak of silence and self denial."
The general reaction of Blacks to the Eisenhower Foundation Report 25 years after the Kerner Commission Report is, perhaps, best summarized by Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, renowned psychologist who was invited to appear before the 1968 Kerner Commission.
Referring to reports of earlier riot commissions, Dr. Clark said: "I read the report … of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of '35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlemriot of '43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot. I must again in candor say to any members of this Commission - it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland - with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction."
Sunday Tribune - Democrat
March 22, 1998Philadelphia officials fight losing battle
City improves but still has many long-term problems
by blaine harden
The mayor who resusitated this city fears his patient may yet be dying. So does his former chief of staff, who assisted the mayor in countless episodes of city-saving surgery. And so does a writer who shadowed them both for four years, taking notes as Philadelphia edged back from a near-death swoon.
"No matter what we did to cure the bullet wound, this doctor didn't have anywhere near the resources to cure the cancer," says Mayor Edward G. Rendell.
"It is almost criminally misleading to look at the success of center city Philadelphia and say cites are back," says David Cohen, Rendells former chief of staff. "Nothing could be farther from the truth."
Buzz Bissinger, author of "A Prayer for the City," a fly-on-the-wall narrative of Rendell's attempts to heal a sick city, has a similar verdict: "For all that the mayor has done, he has done so little."Buzz Bissinger, author of "A Prayer for the City," a fly-on-the-wall narrative of Rendell's attempts to heal a sick city, has a similar verdict: "For all that the mayor has done, he has done so little."
This chorus of gloom comes from three extraordinarily well-placed urban insiders at a time when long-troubled American cities like Philadelphia are suddenly seeming to flower, sprouting budget surpluses and seducing the middle class back downtown with safer streets, fancier restaurants and more dazzling centers for sports, conventions and the arts.
It is precisely the good news that has the unlikely trio of Rendell, Cohen and Bissinger so riled up. Their frustration is rooted in a shared conviction that the recovery of American cities is more wishful than real, more skin-deep than systemic.
The much-publicized renaissance of New York City is especially misleading, they say, because Philadelphia and second-tier cities like it can never hope to plug into a money machine like Wall Street. The signs of recovery in Washington also teach the wrong lessons, they say, because of the federal government's power to change the city's fortunes.
The trio argues that federal and state leaders are rushing to assume the best about the future of depopulated cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit, Baltimore and Newark because starry-eyed assumptions are cheap, easy and go down nicely with tax-averse suburbanites.
"This is not a happy thing for a mayor to say, but I think the fundamental problems of the city are being papered over and that we look a whole lot better than we really are," says Rendell, a Democrat halfway through his second and final term. "The new breed of mayors is being patted on the back by the media, the Republicans and the Clinton administration. What's dangerous is the belief out there that we have got it licked."
Rendell's view was strongly supported this month in a report on America's cities from the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, a group founded to continue the work of the Kerner Commission that examined the causes of the urban riots of the 1960s.
The report said that even as the economy booms in 1990s, "for the first time in the Twentieth Century most adults in many inner-city neighborhoods are not working in a typical week." It said that more than two-thirds of students in poor urban schools fail to reach "basic" achievement levels. Child poverty, racial segregation and incarceration have all risen in inner cities, the report said.
The irony is that Philadelphia, like a number of big cities in the late 1990s, has rarely looked better.
In large measure because of Rendell and Cohen, much of the hemorrhaging that had brought America's fifth-largest city to the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1990s has been stanched. The budget is no longer a farce because Rendell took on the municipal unions and backed them down. The disappearance of 10,000-plus jobs a year to the suburbs, a seemingly unstoppable drain in the early 1990s, has halted, as a modest 3,000 new jobs came into the city last year.
The downtown has become a showcase, with a new convention and sports arena and with rental occupancy soaring to 98 percent. Public housing has been overhauled and is actually helping to raise property values in pockets of the city.
Richmond Free Press
March 19, 1998Kerner revisited
In 1967, the U.S. Commission on Civil disorders issued an important report.
Responding to human rebellions that exploded across the nation, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the commission to determine the causes of the racial violence and to recommend solutions. The commission was informally called the Kerner Commission for its chairman, Gov. Otto Kerner of Illinois.
After hard work and much research and study, the Kerner Commission's fundamental conclusion was: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal." The Kerner report blamed white racism for this dangerous situation.
Now, 30 years later, the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation has revisited the report and what its research found is anything but encouraging.
"The Kerner Commission's prophecy has come to pass," the Eisenhower Foundation reports. "The private market has failed the inner city. The prison system is a symbol of discrimination. A class and racial breach is widening again as we begin the new millennium."
"The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and minorities are suffering disproportionately," warns the report in giving its dismaying but undeniable conclusion.
Specifically, according to the Eisenhower report, the top one percent of Americans have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Among the world's industrialized nations, that make the U.S. No. 1 in wealth inequality - a truly devastating condition and a most damaging indictment of capitalism. Similarly, with 1.5 million people in prison, the U.S. imprisons more than any nation in the world, with one in every three African-American men in prison, on parole or on probation.
It is further indicting that the suggested solutions now are so similar to those recommended - but ignored or not sufficiently implemented - three decades ago.
Like the Kerner report, the Eisenhower report recommends full funding of Head Start, after-school youth centers, urban school reform, school-to-work programs, job-training, inner-city economic development and crime and drug prevention.
Racism and economic exploitation set off the violence in the 70s. Too little has changed.
Tampa Tribune
March 7, 1998Race report is stuck in the past
Following the race riots of the 1960s, President Johnson authorized the Kerner Commission report, which was released 30 years ago. The most famous line from the 600-page document was this: "Our nation in moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."
On the anniversary of that report, a private urban policy group, the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, has released a new study on the same subject. "The Millennium Breach" concludes that the racial divide has not only materialized, it is actually getting wider.
"The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poor, the minorities are suffering disproportionately," says the report. It also cities numerous statistics on entrenched poverty in the inner cities, lack of employment and education opportunity, and the-catch-all word, hopelessness.
An American who awoke from a 30-year coma would think, after reading this thing, that time had stood still.
Wrong.
Even worse than its incomprehensible conclusion, the report recommends a government investment of $56 billion to replicate failed poverty programs of the past. The Kerner Report devoted 70 pages to education, housing, job training and welfare programs that the author thought would bring everyone into the national mainstream. The only real obstacle the commissioners foresaw was some resistance in raising the necessary taxes. They felt that if the money could be raised, the problem could be solved.
We now know that throwing money at poverty doesn't work. There is little evidence that today's lawmakers and bureaucrats are invested with greater genius than their counterparts in the 1960s.
A more accurate chronicle of contemporary race relations can be found in "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible," a book by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom. The couple are veterans of the civil rights movement, and in 700 pages that include more than 70 tables and charts, they report on black progress and an equally impressive story of improving race relations, such as:
o Although the Eisenhower report would leave us with the impression that most blacks continue to live in segregated neighborhoods, a majority of blacks say they have some white neighbors.
o While blacks continue to suffer disproportionately high poverty rates, black, married, double--income couples make almost as much as their white counterparts. Only 8 percent of black two parent families live below the poverty level, and the black middle class has more than doubled in size since the Kerner Report was released.
o And while there are still too many Americans who harbor racial prejudices, blacks and whites are working together, playing together and marrying each other as never before. But with or without the data, can anyone honestly say that the racial divide is getting wider? Look at downtown Tampa at lunchtime, a Pinellas County beach and, much more visibly, our schools, Interracial interaction is at an all-time high. The changes from 30 years ago are all but immeasurable.
It is true that inner-city poverty is an entrenched problem, and a 1997 Gallup poll showed there still exists a gap in racial attitudes about the advances made. Still we are closer to achieving Martin Luther King's vision and remain the most progressive nation in the world when it comes to people of diverse races and religions living together.
There remains a racial divide, but the distance between the races is closing, not widening. There is more reason for optimism than anguish or despair. The authors of the Eisenhower report seem to have missed what is obvious to most of us, which is that in spite of our differences, as a people we Americans have much more in common than not.
St. Louis American
March 12, 1998St. Louis American
The economy is strong. Stocks are at record-high prices. But amid the champagne and caviar celebrations, it is worth remembering what remains to be done. Thirty years after the Kerner Commission warned that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal," the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation reports the warning has become reality.
Yes, dramatic progress has been made since the 1968 Kerner Commission report. The black middle class has grown to unprecedented levels. Black businesses have grown. The percentage of children graduating from high school is catching up with that of white children. This year's black poverty is the lowest in 30 years, with black family median income at a record high.
Yet despite those gains, inequality remains deeply rooted. While the U.S. economy booms, most adults in many inner cities do not work during a typical week. Forty percent of minority children attend urban schools where more than half the students are poor. One in three young African American men are in prison, on parole or on probation. The median income of black and brown families remains about two-thirds that of whites. The poverty rate is three times as bad. Four of every 10 black and Hispanic children are raised in poverty.
This year's Economic Report of the President traces the history. For a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, income disparities between minorities and whites declined dramatically. Then the economic recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s hit minorities the hardest: last hired, first fired.
When the economy grew in the 1980s, the rewards didn't trickle down to poor and working people, so minorities did worse. In the 1989 recession, blacks and Hispanics were hit particularly hard, with black poverty reaching a 30-year high. It is only in the last two years that minorities have finally begun to make some progress.
Part of the problem is continued and widespread racial discrimination. All people tend to be more comfortable with people like themselves, so white employers tend to have more positive reads on white employees and more suspicions about young African American or Hispanics.
That's why the president's race commission urged him to request increases in funding for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Opening locked doors is still essential.
But what the Economic Report shows is that a good portion of the gulf is between top and bottom, not simply white and minority. Since African Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately low-wage workers, when the gap between CEO and worker rises, the gulf between the races also grows.
Over the last decades, America has grown much more unequal. The top has done remarkably well, while most workers make on average less than they did 25 years ago. In the eighth year of the current economic recovery, the wages of most workers have not yet reached the levels of 1989 before the last recession. This damages blacks and Hispanics disproportionately.
The reasons for the growing gulf between affluent and worker are many. The global economy places severe pressure on wages for less-skilled workers. The growth of the service sector has seen jobs move from high-wage, unionized manufacturing sectors to lower-wage, non-union service sectors. Benefits have been cut back; more workers are forced into temporary, or part-time work.
The result is that the economy can be growing, the stock market booming, CEO salaries soaring, but most working people - and the vast majority of African American and Hispanic workers - have to work harder for less.
This isn't inevitable. In the last two years, wages have finally begun to rise for both low- and medium-wage workers. The Federal Reserve has allowed the economy to run at lower levels of unemployment. Right labor markets do help lift wages up. Unions have expanded their organizing. Democrats forced through the increase in the minimum wage, which had a dramatic effect on wages on the bottom.
The lessons are clear. Poor children need to be given a fair start - in nutrition, health care, education. Discrimination in employment must be fought relentlessly. And blacks and Hispanics have a clear stake in a full-employment economy with stronger unions, mandated health care and a rising minimum wage.
In this light, the attempt to cripple unions in the political arena through the so-called paycheck protection laws - concerns far more than union members. Strong unions are essential if the gap between top and bottom is to be reduced. Unions mobilized to force Congress to pass the minimum wage increase. And when the Teamsters won the UPS strike, the non-union workers at Federal Express got a raise too.
When unions are weaker, workers fare worse. And when worker incomes stagnate, blacks and Hispanics take the biggest hit. The conservative attack on unions also is a direct attack on racial justice.
"Separate and unequal" is a harsh and avoidable reality. We can do better. To reduce the gulf between black and white, we must challenge the growing inequality between top and bottom, between CEO and worker. With the tide rising, we should ensure that the small boats, row boats and outboards are rising - and not just the yachts.
Sandusky Register
March 19, 1998Why we can't just get along
"I'm an artist so I'm sensitive about my stuff."
I'm paraphrasing the words of nuevo blue's Grammy Award-winning artist Badu. I'm very serious about my thoughts and words. Therefore criticism, sometimes at least initially, is met with a disturbing angst, especially when it comes from an uninformed and seemingly disinterested source who, because of their lack of objective education and their subjective cultural orientation, is unwilling to be an open and intelligent participant in the art of intellectual dialogue.
Intelligent disagreement I respect. It stimulates me into further research, reasoning, compromise, toleration and even acceptance.
But is disagreement based in xenophobia and the fear of self-discovery and exposure that is always a deterrent to peaceful resolution among people of divergent ideologies. It is the fire that fuels continued separation of people who are different culturally.
When I first read responses to some of my commentary about black males I experienced about angst.
But after reading the criticisms over a couple of times I found myself siding with the views of my critics. Maybe my views are much too ethnocentric, I said to myself. I admit sometimes my comments are strong and usually quite pointedly accusatory.
In my own defense, I rationalized by explaining facts and then juxtapose them against accepted orthodoxy to make my point, my purpose being to inform and educate.
I further rationalize by saying if a critic is unfamiliar with the language of ethnicity, philosophical sociology, and institutional racism as they intersect with social psychology then my articles would not be appreciated, understood or accepted.
Bit I still felt like my critics had a valid point; so that when i decided to change the thematic focus of my writings. I would no longer write about issues of black social pathology.
After all, America, at least since the 1954 Supreme Court case ending segregation, has made tremendous progress. Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a solid black bourgeoisie has been established: petite as it might be. And after all, am I not a part of that black middle class?
I will from now on write about our common ground as Americans, black and whites trying to work together, I told myself. I will write about black progress, advancement and more issues of black affirmation like the columnist Leonard Pitts does.
After all, I thought: this is what the people in small Sandusky want to hear.
They do not need to hear about racial disparities, economic injustices and democratic hardships of minority people in some far away place like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Cleveland.
They do not need some local guy bringing up issues about past atrocities that only fuel the fires of unresolved race and class differences.
So, I thought, why should I stir up the melting pot? The great American cauldron is still melting so why can't I just let it simmer? Why should I talk about the "new racism" when we are just coming to grips with the "old racism"?
Forget, I thought, about the backlashes manifested through reactionary, racist and violent laws designed to subvert the lasting effects of the Civil Rights Era, as it has tried to extend democracy to groups of Americans who have been historically discriminated against.
Forget about the issues like "three strikes and you're out" laws, which tend to criminalize low-income minority communities and justify building more jails and prisons.
Forget about the conservative-laden welfare-reform movement for low-income minorities that will eliminate the remaining social safety nets, while leaving in place subsidies for the rich in the form of corporate welfare. Forget about issues like California's Proposition 209, which removes one of the last remaining remedies used to provide opportunities in education and employment, and which helped to produce the black middle-class of which I'm a proud member.
I will not talk about the social causes that will land one out of every three black males between the ages of 18 and 30 in jail or prison or in some way to ensnare them in the criminal justice system.
No more will I talk about the spoils of social wars and the debris of racial destruction.
After all, we here in America share a unique bond. A bond that can't be broken. We have more in common than our differences. We rely on each other.
To quote the now famous words of Rodney King, after the white Log Angeles police beat the crap out of him, "Can't we all just get along?"
But I was shaken back into reality when I read the new report by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation on the progress of the 30-year-old Kerner report.
The Kerner report concluded that at the height of the civil rights movement, America was being divided into two societies, one black and one white. The new report states emphatically that this is exactly what has happened. The warning has become a reality.
Only a small black middle class ] the two nations. But it is the widening gaps of inequalities that are troubling as we go into the millennium.
As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, minorities are suffering even more disproportionately. The statistics are startling.
The new report says that the private market has failed the inner city and the prison system is a symbol of discrimination. Hate groups and minority-related hate crimes are on the upswing.
While we can applaud progress in the area of interracial dating, interracial marriages and bi-racial grandchildren, we must not forget incidents like the Eagles Club affair right here in our own city. We must not allow our collective memory to slip off into some kind of institutional amnesia. We must acknowledge that the reason for progress has been that people have not been afraid to speak out.
Until every vestige of racism is eradicated in this country, someone must stand up and speak truth no matter how stark it is.
The progress that we have tought so hard to achieve over the last 30 years is in serious danger of being reversed with the dismantling of the very infrastructure which gave us this progress. Someone must continue to be vigilant, observant, introspective, and critically circumspective - even here in small Sandusky.
So after a reality check I have decided to allow my critics to continue to talk about the progress and the good that has been accomplished for blacks over the last 30 years.
But as for me, I will continue to remind my critics by raising questions and making points.
I will remind them that there is still a lot of work to be done and we cannot rest until it is done. Not only does the country has a ways to go, but there is still much to be done right here in small Sandusky.
Chicago Crusader
March 28, 1998Unfinished Business
BY HUGH B. PRICE
Early this month the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation released a report updating the famous Kerner Commission study of 1968, which had surveyed America's racial landscape and in a dire tone concluded that "Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white - separate and unequal."
The Eisenhower Foundation report, "The Millennium Breach: Richer, Poor and Racially Apart," acknowledges that progress has occurred since the late 1960s. But its conclusion is equally ominous.
"The Kerner Commission's prophecy has come to pass," it states. "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. The private market has failed the inner city. The prison system is a symbol of discrimination. A class and racial breach is widening again as we begin the new millennium."
Is the reports finding true?
Before I answer, it's crucial to recognize the longstanding tradition of racial prophecy the "Millennium Breach" document pays homage to.
In fact, that tradition of scholarly and literary warnings to white America to do right on race goes back three centuries. In the twentieth century it includes W.E.B. Du Dois' classic, "The Souls of Black Folk," of 1904, and "An American Dilemma," the massive tome published in 1943 by the task force of scholars headed by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal.
But the most powerful antecedent of both the Kerner and the Eisenhower studies may be "The Fire Next Time," James Baldwin's searing booklength essay, published in 1962 amid the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.
The apocalyptic vision of the Biblical verse Baldwin used to end the book- "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time" - took on a more ominous tone in the late 1960s, when the pent-up anger of many of the nation's Black ghettos exploded.
The sense of pessimism those explosions produced in some quarters were the backdrop to the Kerner Commission's warning as well as its explicit recommendations for change.
Actually, the Kerner Report got it backwards (perhaps deliberately, the better to provoke action).
American had been two societies, separate and extremely enequal, until the Civil Rights Movements began to compel white America to - fitfully, to be sure - live up to it democratic rhetoric.
The racial turmoil of the late 1960s was a consequence of white America not moving fast enough. It confirmed Martin Luther King Jr.'s powerful insight of his "I Have A Dream" speech that revolutionary changes in the status of African Americans were required.
"1963 is not an end, but a beginning," he declared at the March of Washington. "Those who hope the Negro needed to blow of steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. . . . The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of Justice emerges."
In that regard, the Kerner Report formally ratified King's insight. Ten years ago, another massive study of America's racial landscape, "A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society," noting Kerner's conclusion, declared that despite important changes, "there are striking resemblances between the description of 1968 and the position of Black Americans reflected in our findings."
The Eisenhower Foundation study, as I said, is even more pessimistic.
So, I come back to my question: Is the study right?
On the bright side, college campuses are vastly more integrated today. So is the corporate workplace. The Black middle class has grown dramatically as millions of African Americans have risen above poverty and working-class status. The steady economic recovery has slashed unemployment and poverty, and neighborhoods and down-towns that were devastated by the riots are showing renewed signs of life.
No, America isn't the racial cauldron that some feared it would become.
But for all that progress, gaps persist, and we shouldn't pretend that the American landscape has been cleared of the systemic and individual racism that materially affects the opportunities available to Black people.
Our children lag behind academically. The assault on affirmative action threatens to close the gates of opportunity again, and many inner-city neighborhoods are crippled by the combination of high unemployment and poverty, forcing too many of our young men to pursue lives of crime. And, as the Southern Poverty Law Center reported this month, despite the country's economic boom, the number of white-supremacist hate groups has increased, not decreased, in the mid-1990s.
So, America isn't yet the inclusive society we dreamt - and dream - it could be.
Thus, if the Eisenhower Foundation Report downplays the racial progress that has occurred, it still serves as extremely useful purpose in reminding us of the significant amount of unfinished business still to do.
JACK FORD: In FOCUS this evening, updating the 30-year-old Kerner Commission Report on race and economics in America. The new version lists many of the same problems. Details now from NBC's Joe Johns.
JOE JOHNS: From 1964 through 1968, more than 250 American cities erupted in violence. They were the worst riots in US history, nearly 300 people died, 8,000 were injured, property damages went into the hundreds of millions of dollars. New civil rights laws were banned discrimination, but had not put an end to racism.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We want freedom and justice and equality, we want to be treated equal.
JOE JOHNS: Many of the big cities that burned in the 60s still bear scars today. President Lyndon Johnson, concerned that extremist groups and perhaps even Communists were organizing the disturbances, appointed a commission to investigate.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON (From File Footage): Let your search be free. Let us be untrammeled by what has been called the conventional wisdom. As best you can, find the truth.
JOE JOHNS: The Kerner Commission delivered its truth after eight months of study. The violence, it stated, wan not the product of a conspiracy, but the product of frustration. The report described high unemployment, low family income, poor schools and bad housing, mistreatment by police, and it issued a stern warning that an underclass was being created along racial lines. The report concluded, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."
FORMER SENATOR FRED HARRIS (Kerner Commission Member): That is more or less becoming true again today.
JOE JOHNS: Former Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris was a member of the Kerner Commission. He helped write a 30 year update for the privately funded Eisenhower Foundation, which was started to continue the work of the commission.
FRED HARRIS: And things got better in regards to race and poverty and the problems of the inner cities for a good while after the Kerner report, up until the end of the 70s. And then that progress stopped and in many ways began to reverse.
JOE JOHNS: The report found that there is more poverty in the US than there was 30 years ago, and that unemployment among blacks is more than twice the national average.
UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE JOHN CONYERS (Democrat, Michigan): The saddest thing of all about it is that there's been so little done.
JOE JOHNS: To change the trends, the new report recommends establishing national programs modeled on local ones with proven track records.
LYNN CURTIS (Eisenhower Foundation): If we just take all those programs that have already demonstrated success, and combine them, we have a coherent policy.
JOE JOHNS: Programs like the New Community Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, which offers a broad collection of services to thousands in the inner city every day. It operates day care centers, which serve about 900 children daily. It provides security patrols in housing for about 7,000 residents. It provides job training for inner city teens and even creates jobs in its own shopping center, complete with a Pathmark Supermarket and a restaurant. Monsignor Williams Linder, founded the program 30 years ago in the months after the Kerner Commission Report was released.
MONSIGNOR WILLIAM LINDER (New Community Corporation): We need to take the lead and create the solutions.
JOE JOHNS: The update to the Kerner Commission Report cites the significant expansion of the black middle class and it recommends new laws and federally funded programs that help end the cycle of poverty for those left behind.
UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE CHARLES CANADY (Republican, Florida): I think that this is a report that thinks more government action is going to be the solution to all our problems.
JOE JOHNS: Copies of the report will now be delivered to the members of Congress and the White House. The authors say they do not believe the changes they recommend will be made. Joe Johns, NBC News, Washington.
Publications List
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation
Individual copies of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation publications and videos on the list are available free of charge, while stock lasts, by writing or faxing:
Publications Director
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation
Suite 200 1660 L Street,
NW Washington,
DC 20036 (202) 452-0169 (F)
Multiple copies are available at cost, as long as stock lasts - by making a request in writing. Please do not request publications by phone.
Identifying and Replicating What Works
Curtis, Lynn A., Investing in Children and Youth. Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Update of the Kerner Commission, 1993.
Curtis, Lynn A., Family, Employment and Reconstruction, 1995.
Curtis, Lynn A., Youth Investment and Police Mentoring: Principal Findings, 1997.
Curtis, Lynn A., Youth Investment amd Police Mentoring: Final Report, 1998.
Curtis, Lynn A., Replicating Argus: Demand Side Employment Training and Welfare-to-Work Reform, 1998.
Curtis, Lynn A., What Works, 1998.
Curtis, Lynn A., On Replication, 1998.
Curtis, Lynn A. and Elliott Currie, Youth Investment and Community Reconstruction, 1990.
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, Argus Learning for Living: A Manual for Program Replication, 1995.
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation Video, Lessons for Youth Development and Police Mentoring, 1996.
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation Video, Argus: A Youth Development Program That Works, 1996.
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, Thirty Year Update of the Kerner Commission, 1998. Building the Capacity of What Works
Curtis, Lynn A., with John Hayes, Rodney Jackson, Patricia Kelly, and Mick Weltman. Capacity Building and Management Training, 1998.
Kelly, Patricia, Capacity Building and Staff Development, 1998.
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, Help! A Volunteer Recruitment Handbook, 1996.
Evaluating What Works
Baker, Keith, The Evaluation of Small Scale Community Programs, 1993.
Communicating What Works
Curtis, Lynn A., What Works, 1998.
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, Proceedings of the National Media Forum on Communicating What Works, 1995.
Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation Video, Television School Training Excerpts, 1996.