# Kerner Report > [!abstract] 🏛️ Official report > **Issuer:** National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the "Kerner Commission") > **Legal basis:** Executive Order 11365, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 28, 1967 > **Released:** February 29, 1968 The **Kerner Report** is the final report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the panel [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] appointed in July 1967 while Detroit was still burning, after a summer of uprisings in American cities (see [[Long Hot Summer]]). Johnson gave it three questions: "What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?" Its answer, released at the end of February 1968, became one of the most quoted government documents of the century: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." ## Why it matters Johnson expected a report about agitators and lawlessness. He got an indictment of white America. The commission found no evidence that the riots had been organized by conspirators, a conclusion the FBI shared. It placed the causes in segregated housing, joblessness, police practices and the decades of policy that had concentrated Black families in poor neighborhoods: "White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it." The report became a bestseller. Johnson largely refused to embrace it, partly because of the huge spending it called for. About a month later, Congress passed the [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]], which the commission's diagnosis had helped make urgent. ## Who was on it The commission had eleven members and was deliberately bipartisan. It was chaired by Illinois Governor [[Otto Kerner]], with New York City Mayor John Lindsay as vice chair. The other members were Senators Fred Harris (D-Okla.) and [[Edward Brooke]] (R-Mass.), then the Senate's only Black member; Representatives James Corman (D-Calif.) and William McCulloch (R-Ohio); NAACP leader Roy Wilkins; Steelworkers president I. W. Abel; Atlanta police chief Herbert Jenkins; Kentucky commerce commissioner Katherine Graham Peden; and businessman Charles Thornton. ## What it recommended The report called for large federal investments in jobs, education, welfare and housing. On housing, it called for an end to segregated neighborhoods, a major expansion of housing construction for low- and moderate-income families, and a shift away from high-rise public housing projects toward smaller buildings spread across more neighborhoods. ## Legacy The Kerner Report is the benchmark against which later measures of racial progress are taken. Its central warning, that separate and unequal neighborhoods produce separate and unequal lives, is the same argument now being made about the rollback of fair housing enforcement (see [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]] and [[Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing]]). ## Connections - [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]] - [[Race Riots]] - [[Long Hot Summer]] - [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]] - [[Edward Brooke]]