On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, a twenty-one-year-old African-American, was pulled over in Los Angeles while driving his mother’s Buick, then arrested after failing a sobriety test. In the argument that followed, Frye was struck by the officers as residents began hurling objects at them. Six days of civil unrest that became known as the Watts riots ensued, leaving thirty-four people dead and miles of the city pockmarked by charred ruins. When Frye died in 1986, his New York Times obituary called the riots “the biggest insurrection by blacks in the United States since the slave revolts.”
Between 1964 and 1967, black anger over policing practices, voter suppression, poverty, and economic inequality boiled over in cities throughout America. In the summer of 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Kerner Commission to examine the nearly two dozen uprisings that had occurred. (Formally called the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, it was referred to by the name of its chair, the second-term Democratic Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr.) The eleven-member commission released its conclusions in March 1968, but it soon found that they were a forecast, not a review. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the following month, and more than one hundred American cities exploded in just the type of violence that the commission had sought to understand, if not prevent.
The proximity of the two events—the report’s release and King’s death—allowed them to be conflated. It’s not uncommon for people to believe that the Kerner Commission examined the unrest of the entire 1960s rather than just its earlier episodes. But the timing is important. George Santayana’s dictum that “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is quoted with eye-rolling frequency, yet the Kerner Report shows that it is possible to be entirely cognizant of history and repeat it anyway.
Never was this more apparent than in the spring of 2020, when the half-century-old report reemerged as part of the stilted national dialogue on race, policing, and inequality. On the evening of May 25, four Minneapolis police officers arrested George Perry Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man, for allegedly passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a convenience store. He ended up handcuffed on the pavement next to the patrol car while a white officer, Derek Chauvin, cavalierly knelt on his neck for at least eight minutes and forty-six seconds, despite the pleas of nearby people that Floyd needed medical attention, and despite Floyd’s repeated assertions that “I can’t breathe” and “They’ll kill me,” while crying out to his deceased mother for help. When Chauvin at last relented, Floyd was unconscious. He was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.