Bill Moyers Journal (2007-2010); 1151; The Kerner Commission - 40 Years Later with Fred Harris; Newark Mayor Cory Booker

This week on Bill Moyer's Journal, Forces from America's cities. We've gone from an urban crisis in the 60s to an urban catastrophe in the 21st century. And to dynamic boys for change, Mayor Tory Booker. We're going to have to get beyond blame and start accepting responsibility. Stay tuned. Funding for Bill Moyer's Journal is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Pollock Gut Charitable Fund, Park Foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Colbert Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, Maryland and Bob Clemens and the Clemens Foundation,

Bernard and Audrey Rappaport and the Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the Petzar Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Orphala Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement, plan, products and services to employers and individuals since 1945. Mutual of America, your retirement company. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyer's. Welcome to the Journal. You have to go searching deep into the websites to find out what the presidential candidates think about urban issues. Their speeches on the subject have been few and far between. During all those debates of the past year, cities were barely mentioned. Perhaps it's because to talk about cities, we have to think about the very touchy subject of race, or perhaps the culprit is amnesia.

We've simply forgotten the past that produced the urban challenges of today. Here's what I mean. The official name for it was the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, but it passed through the press and the popular law as the Kerner Commission report, and that's how it's remembered today, at least to those of us old enough to remember. If you think all the talk about race in this presidential campaign is savage, you should have been around 40 years ago in 1968 when this report was published. Talk about controversy. The Kerner Report was an unflinching portrait of America, and it was born from the flames of exploding cities. July 1967, Newark, New Jersey, goes up in flames. Reacting to a rumor that police had beaten and allegedly killed a local man, residents protested, peacefully at first, but then the scene turned violent. For six days, state troops and police clashed in the streets with riders.

Twenty-six people were killed, including a ten-year-old boy. Six days later, it happened again in Detroit, Michigan. Detroit, it looked like the wartime blitz on London, but this was no war. It was arson, looting, a race-rired blown up into something beyond control. Triggered by another police action, and another angry protest gone haywire, the destruction of downtown Detroit was worse than Newark's. The nation watched on TV, as Detroit was torn apart. As reports poured in a sniper shooting at police, President Lyndon Johnson called in the army to put an end to the violence. Thousands of African Americans were rounded up, and a curfew was thrown over the city. Five days on, 43 people were dead, hundreds wounded, and block after block of inner city Detroit was destroyed.

Locals picked through the ruins, stunned and confused. The mayor said his city looked like Berlin in 1945. It wasn't just Newark and Detroit that erupted that year. Scores of other cities were under siege. In 1967, 126 cities were hit by racial violence, with 75 incidents classified as major riots. The country was stunned and terrified. What was driving these events? President Johnson felt compelled to act. We need to know the answer, I think, to three basic questions about these riots. What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again? To answer those questions, LBJ appointed what became known as the Kerner Commission, named for its chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. New York City's mayor, John Lindsay, was vice chair.

The youngest member of that panel was a populist senator from Oklahoma, named Fred Harris, just in his 30s at the time, and coming from a mostly white state. Harris nonetheless went to the floor of the Senate and called on the president to fully and publicly reckon with these awful events. It's going to take a national commitment, a massive kind of national commitment. And anything less than that, we're not to cure the areas that we have, and that impoverty generally, and then the problems of race and the problems of our cities. The president listened. He was furious about the riots, believing that militant groups such as the Black Panthers must have somehow been behind the violence. But when the Kerner Commission's work was done, its findings would shake in the Johnson and the country. The Kerner report became a moment of clarity for America, a time when the nation was forced to focus on the harsh realities of racism, poverty, and injustice in our cities. On the 40th anniversary of this historic Kerner Commission report,

I asked that formerly young populist senator Fred Harris to talk about his experience. He's one of the last of the surviving members of the original commission. What was the urgency? I mean, here you were. You were just recently elected to the Senate from Oklahoma, basically White State, a little town of Walters. What were you thinking? Is this the end of the country? What is it? We just didn't know how far this was going to go. Johnson, the president, he said to me, have you seen the FBI reports about these riots? Johnson was like a lot of people who thought, really, there was some conspiracy behind them. And I said, you know, the conditions are such and the hostilities are such in these central cities. That almost any random spark could set them off. And that's what happened in Detroit and Newark. You and other members of the commission actually went to the streets where... We did. That's right. What did you see? What, all these years later, what are the particulars you remember most formatively?

We went... We divided up in the teams, and my team was John Lindsay and me. John was then the mayor of New York. You couldn't have had two more different people be from a little town in Oklahoma and John Lindsay. For one thing, he was tall and he was short. I remember when we went, for example, we went to Milwaukee. And I spent a good portion of that day in a black barbershop. I found Milwaukee as segregated, really, maybe more so than southern cities. For example, I kept saying to people, do you run into much discrimination here in Milwaukee? And people didn't know quite how to answer it. It turned out the reason was that they didn't see any white people. That's how segregated Milwaukee was. And we found there people, of course, and this was true all over. Black people had come up there looking for jobs.

From the south. And the trouble was, they found very little opportunity. Jobs is what we heard everywhere. John and John Lindsay and I were walking down the streets in Cleveland, I believe it was, for example. You see, idol, young black men on the street, you know what? And if these guys get up, they said, what we need is jobs, maybe jobs. Get us a job, maybe. I remember that so. And that's what we heard all over. It was the promise of those jobs that had lured so many African Americans up from the south in the first place. From World War II on, millions of blacks migrated north, packing into the booming industrial cities of Chicago and Newark, Milwaukee and Detroit. Where they are in wages that were the first steps out of poverty for an entire generation. But 20 years old, even as this great migration kept bringing more and more people into the cities, many of the jobs began dwindling. Huge plants closed down,

moved out to the suburb and beyond. Many white residents followed suit, leaving the central cities in droves. By the mid-60s, many of the biggest inner cities in America had become chronically segregated and were drying up economically. There was low family income, high unemployment, almost criminally inferior schools. No jobs. The jobs had moved out to the suburbs. There were poor transportation. People couldn't get to take two or three buses to get to some of those jobs. And there were jobs. The new jobs that were created were either requiring a very high level of skills or education or were just service jobs that were very low pay, kind of flipping hamburgers, kind of jobs. So the people that Black people saw as sort of representing society were police officers. And they were nearly all white and most of them lived outside this central city

and came in during the day to enforce the law. So there was a great deal of hostility. I had a remarkable woman on this broadcast a few months ago. Gracially bogged. She's 91 years old. Still lives in Detroit. She said, this was not a riot. This was a rebellion. This was a rebellion against what you just described as the failanks of white faces that surrounded the ghetto and kept it segregated. She said, this was a rebellion against the loss of jobs. You think there's something to that? Well, it is, in a way, although you got to be careful to say, you know, it wasn't some organized thing. That is, there wasn't a rebellion in the sense that somebody decided to organize it with the definite ends in mind, the goals, and it goes more spontaneous than that. Now, what we finally decided on the commission was, we couldn't say what caused the violence. Or why violence would occur, for example, in Watts in 65, but not in 67.

What we couldn't do was describe, with particularity, the terrible conditions that existed in these places where riots had occurred. We found, as I said, no conspiracy. There were one or two on our commission said, well, should we actually say that? Isn't that the truth? There's no conspiracy. There's no conspiracy. There's no organization to this. And they will. Yeah, well, let's just tell the truth. So indication, no fact to indicate that any of them were planned. The elements were there. And some Jews, an unpredictable Jews, set them off. But at this point, there is still no evidence of any planning for these civil disorders within the city. In March of 1968, the report was published. It was brutal in its honesty. While saying that a growing black militancy may have added fuel to the riots, the commission rejected the idea that there had been any organization behind the outbreaks.

Instead, the commission blamed the violence on the devastating poverty and hopelessness endemic in the inner cities in the 1960s. Among their many findings, one in five African Americans lived in squalor and deprivation in ghetto neighborhoods. The unemployment rate was double for African Americans as compared to whites. The report described communities neglected by their government, racked with crime and traumatized by police brutality. Disproportionate rates of infant mortality were astonishing. African American children dying had tripled the rate of white children. The statistics weren't new, but the Kerner commission pushed further and laid the blame for many of these conditions on white racism. Quote, what white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget is that the white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it. White institutions maintained it and white society condones it.

The report's conclusion and its most memorable message was this. Our nation is moving towards two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal. We used the word racism. And on the commission, we had two three people say, what should we use that word racism? Not a word that was thrown around very largely by government panels in the 1960s. We thought that was very important, I did. And I think it was to say it because what we know is that oppressed people often come to believe about themselves the same bad stereotypes that the dominant society has. Our saying racism I think it was very important to a lot of black people who said, well, maybe it's not just me. Maybe I'm not, by myself, having fought here. Maybe there's something else going on. I remember that the headlines based on the premature leak of a summary of the report would read

a commission blames riots on whites. That's right, white racism. White racism. And that inflamed whites who didn't want to be blamed. That's right. But that we thought, and I think if we'd had time to background so people would have understood it a little better. What we were talking about with racism was not one white person, one black person, or old black people. We were talking about kind of an institutional racism which existed where people live in all white neighborhoods send their kids to all white schools, drive quickly through the black section, and they were on the train to a job where the whole their associates are white. And don't see anything odd about it. That was one natural order. That's right. That's what we were talking about. For civil rights leaders like the Reverend Martin Luther King, the Kernner Report confirmed reality. And now we see the surfacing of old prejudices and hostilities that have always been there

and they're out in open. That's very good that they're out in open because you can deal with them much better when they are there to see and when people admit them. And my analysis was no more pessimistic or gloomy than the Kernner Commission's report the other day. I do feel that we've got to say in no uncertain times that racism is alive and on the throne in American society and that we are moving toward two societies that are separate and unequal and if something isn't done to stop this in a very determined manner, things can really get worse. The Kernner Commissioner suggested a series of solutions to tackle the problems they diagnosed, everything from better early childhood education to a crackdown on police brutality. They pushed for massive job creation, more affirmative action, and an expansion of the social safety net. But critics saw the Commission as wrong-headed.

They blasted Kernner for blaming everyone in society except for the writers themselves. Commission members had hoped to spend six more months explaining their report to the public and lobbying for their recommendations. But in the face of all the criticism, LBJ shelved that idea. Looking back all this time, what did the Kernner Commission get right? I think virtually everything was right. And I could add on to that this, I think one of the awful things that came out of the Reagan presidency and later was the feeling that government can't do anything right. And that everything it does is wrong. The truth is that virtually everything we tried worked. We just quit trying it, or we didn't try it hard enough. And that's what we need to get back to. We made progress on virtually every aspect of race and poverty for about a decade after the Kernner Commission report. And then, particularly with the advent of the Reagan administration and so forth,

that progress stopped. And we began to go backwards. There are consequences from our acts. And when we cut out a lot of these social programs or the money for them or cut it down, we don't emphasize jobs and training and education and so forth as we had been doing. There are bad consequences from that. The Reagan Conservatives were quite critical of the Kernner Commission as being unbalanced and simplistic. They say, for example, that you fail to take into consideration the close correlation between being born out of wedlock and growing up without a father and being poor. That your work over the years actually exempts the poor from being responsible for their own condition. Well, you know, the breakdown in families is just like sort of crime and narcotics and so forth. These are the consequences. They're the handmaidens in the sense of poverty. I said at the time,

there are a lot of people who want to punish people for being poor. You know what I said? It's your own fault. We want to punish people for being poor. I said, I used to be poor myself. And being poor is punishment enough. I think what you need to do is to help people up. Give them a hand up and recognize the kind of terrible conditions that they've grown up in of subcommittees and committees. For the last 30 years, Fred Harris has been teaching politics at the University of New Mexico. Power was diffused and one way it was diffused was to break all these committees down into subcommittees. But he's never lost his commitment to the work of the Colonel Commission. When he's not in the classroom, Harris is part of a major ongoing investigation into the issues of race and poverty today. He sets on the board of the Eisenhower Foundation based in Washington, DC. The foundation was created to continue the work of the Colonel Commission. Its mission is to research and support successful programs in the inner cities. Every few years,

Eisenhower publishes an updated set of findings, a report card of how the country is dealing with the key issues raised by Colonel. Alan Curtis is president of the Eisenhower Foundation. The Colonel Commission said, look, these problems can be solved. Let's not give up hope. And so we try to be keepers of the flame of that message that there is hope there are solutions. And we remind America every so often that we still have a long ways to go in fulfilling the prophecies of those commissions and their recommendations. Alan Curtis and Fred Harris have been holding hearings in Washington, Detroit, and Newark to prepare a report on the 40th anniversary of Colonel. We want to listen. We're taking testimony. We would encourage you to discuss today not only the solutions, but how to change political will in America so that we can embrace the priorities of the Colonel Commission

and we can begin to fulfill America's promise. In those cities, they heard a striking array of voices. We've gone from an urban crisis in the 60s to an urban catastrophe in the 21st century. That's what you're looking at when you look at Katrina. That's what you're looking at when you look at gentrification. We are in an urban catastrophe. We need to be blunt about it. And if we've used the wrong words, it doesn't wake people up first of the sleep. This is not an ordinary situation. And it is a national situation. It is not a Newark situation. Big North Eastern cities are home to some of the most concentrated poverty in the country. And that's your new split. That's your new divisions. We're seeing lives of quiet desperation that we have cordoned-off communities in which we allow crime to exist. We allow lots of bad things to exist. And as long as they don't spill over,

that's okay. I would take issue with one of the premises of the most famous quote in this that we're moving towards two societies. I would respectfully suggest that we never were one society in this country. This country has simply never confronted the issue of race. Race is, I guess to use a religious term, the original sin of this country. I believe 40 years later today, the conditions here in Southeast Michigan are just as ripe for protest and demonstration and possibly all those other negative things as they were 40 years later. You need not look too far to see Gina, Louisiana's, and all of the other challenges. On my way here, there are people on corner standing up with signs saying, we'll work for food. But we ain't here talking about what's the problem. You want to know what's going on? As somebody say, it's almost the same old same old. The continuation of white flight that started in the 50s has been compounded by the Exodus

of the middle and upper class blacks as Detroit experienced a brain drain. In 1970, the infant mortality rate, that is our baby's dying before age of one, was about 65% higher in the black community than in the white community. Currently, it's 205% higher in the black community than in the white community. The city of Detroit constitutes 85% black residents only 9% white residents. The poverty rate white, it's only 5.9% blacks, 24%. The median family income for whites over $65,000 for blacks, only $37,000. We could go on and on, but it's very clear that there are these measurable distinctions between blacks and whites in Metro Detroit. The young people of my congregation and my community are as industrious as you will find anywhere.

They are as innovative and as intelligent as any that you will find anywhere. But unfortunately, they have a number of challenges that have been unaddressed because the recommendations of the current commission were ignored or dismissed. The one industry which has flourished is the prison industry. And yes, it has become an industry. During the last 15 years, this state has been averaging one brand new prison a year. We have got to get serious about what's going on and what our government is allowing us and how we're losing our rights every single day. And all this money that's been spent for the war, we need to pray about that because it should not be going to a rat. It should be right here in our cities in our neighborhood.

When we had 9.11, we were arguing about Social Security reform. Where were we going to find the money for it? And within 48 hours after 9.11, we found $40 billion for New York City, $1 billion an hour. When we want to do something as a country, we do it. This is not about can we do? This is about a will. This is about do we want to do? When you start saying, I'm going to have cuts in Medicare and Medicaid cuts to housing and urban development. No subsidies to mass transit. Eliminate funding for job training. Cut school lunch programs and inner city for inner city children. Eliminate school loan programs for minority students. Repeal after school programs, etc. What I'm saying is this is about public policy. This is about resource implementation. The 1968 corner commission conclusion that racism is deeply embedded in the American society is still true. Racism is still as American

as apple pie in this area. The existing huge disparities by race could not exist without racism. The Eisenhower Foundation has now issued its preliminary report, echoing the testimony heard across the country. While noting that certain things have improved, such as the growth of the black middle class, the foundation nonetheless concludes that America has for the most part failed to meet the corner commission's goals of less poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and crime. Among the troubling facts, 37 million Americans live in poverty today. But African Americans are three times as likely to be at the very bottom of the scale, living in what's known as deep poverty. Media and non-white families have just one-fifth the wealth of white families. And over the last 20 years, three times as many African American men go to prison as go to college. Many people today, Americans are short memories, of course.

Don't realize, for example, that the sentence for a minority person is longer than a sentence for a white person going to prison. Minorities are more likely to get the death sentence than white. The sentences for crack cocaine used disproportionately by minorities are longer than the sentences for powder cocaine used disproportionately by whites. And so there is still this endemic institutional racism in America that people forget about. And I think they need to be reminded about that. The Eisenhower Foundation's full report will be released later this year. Fred, you've been teaching democracy down there at the University of New Mexico for 30 years. I mean, your textbook on democracy is used in universities all over the country. Why can't democracy deal with these persistent, chronic realities that the Kernner Commission described and you hear four years later are restating? Well, I think, first of all,

people don't really realize that conditions are so bad for so many people, poverty and for African Americans and for Hispanics. I think a lot of people think, well, then we do all that. And I think if people knew these conditions and that's what we ought to do on the 40th anniversary of the Kernner Report is to get people to see that these problems of race and poverty are still with us. Also, I think we need to approach this on the basis that we're all in this together. As somebody said, we may not have all come over on the same boat, but we're all in the same boat now. And here's the interesting thing. Every poll that Tekken shows that two-thirds of Americans think Americans own the wrong footing. They're headed in the wrong direction. And there's overwhelming support for, for example, this. Do you think we ought to spend more on prevention by putting money

in education and training and jobs instead of police and prisons? Overwhelmingly, people say yes. Do you think that we ought to have social nets as to catch people who are falling out and to give them another chance? Oh, yes, strongly believe in that. What about health care? We've got 46 million people without health insurance. And yet, overwhelmingly, Americans say yes. I think we ought to have health care, even if for everybody, universal health care, even if it costs us more money. So the public is way ahead of the politicians, I think. And as I said, it's in our own interests, and everybody's interests to try to do something about it. We can do it. Thank you very much for spending the time with me. Thank you. I've never had been successful in the New York Times. Now we go to a man,

half for at Harris's age, who all these years later is trying to pick up where the Courier Commission left off. Courier Booker was only 32 years old in 2002, when he first ran as a reform candidate for mayor of Newark, New Jersey. I can't see you. I'm talking to a screen, but I'll just let you know I'm running for mayor. His campaign was documented by the Oscar-nominated film Street Fight. Newarkface is real challenges. We have a murder rate that's twice the Bronx. We have almost a third of our people living below the poverty line. And we graduate only about 40% of our kids from high school. There's no excuse for this. The city can be doing so much better for the people who live here. Booker ran against a powerful and popular, though corrupt, incumbent. Opponents said this road scholar Stanford football star and Yale Law School graduate wasn't black enough, called him a pawn of white society trying to take over Newark. Booker lost. But four years later, he came back again to win. The city he took over was one of the most dysfunctional

and dangerous in America. Poverty rates, unemployment and crime all higher than the national average. While education and quality of life standards remain dismally low. But Cory Booker had long been driven to save Newark. His commitment began over a decade ago when he left the comfortable suburbs to move into the city's notorious brick towers housing project. He stayed there eight years battling an entrace bureaucracy and challenging thousands of tenants to fight for better living conditions. As mayor, Booker has defied liberals and conservatives alike with innovations in every department of city government. After the brutal murders of three young people last year, his changes in the police department have resulted in Newark's longest stretch without a murder since before the 1967 riots. I talked with Mayor Booker in his office earlier this week. Do people in Newark even talk about the current commission even talk about

the riots of 1967? Do they remember them? You know, it's interesting. I mean, there is a generational divide. I mean, I was born after the civil rights movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive. But there's still a scar here in the city of Newark. And it's never been talked about, I think, to the point where we can really start healing if there's any Newark riots. A lot of people understand that the pain was the initial explosion of anger and alienation. But after that, the response, sending in the National Guard troops, a lot of violence was carried out and perpetuated by those who were allegedly coming here to protect residents. There were thousands of rounds of bullets that the National Guard couldn't account for, as they were sweeping through firing into indiscriminately into housing projects. People here will still tell stories, tell me, especially around the University of the riots, about having to sleep on the floor, talking about people that were murdered or killed by bullets coming through their window that were being shot by friendly fire. So it was this time that there is a lot of pain.

And I still think, we as a city, we as a culture, have to heal. Most people don't know that up until the riots, Newark was run by the mob. Along with a corrupt democratic administration, absolutely. And people don't realize that the overt racism that was being exacted on population here, the good intentions of the federal government sending large block grants to the city that were then doled out and corrupt the ways. Really started to aggravate the frustrations of residents of this city that really felt that the judicial system was not a place they could go for justice. The government was not a place that they could go for justice. They were being locked out of job opportunities. It began a sense, which is the most toxic element in American society then, and now, there began to be a sense of hopelessness about that the system was not making a space for their cries for justice. To what extent is race still casting a poll over what you're trying to do here? It concerns me, especially now, that a new generation of African-Americans

are coming to the fore. And I hear reporters ask me all the time that you are a part of a generation of blacks who's creating a race transcending society. And that bothers me. Why? Well, I don't want us to be an America that has sanitized, homogenized, deodorized, as a friend of mine says, and forgets about race. The richness of America is that we are diverse. We're not Sweden. We're not Norway. We are a great American experiment. And as soon as we start trying to forget race, or turn our back on race, number one, we don't confront the real racial realities that still persist. But number two, is we miss the great delicious opportunities that exist in America and nowhere else. So I don't want to be a race transcending leader. I want to be deeply understood as a man, as African-American as a Christian, all that I am. But ultimately, it's a portal to punch through to a deeper, more textured, more nuanced understanding of the beauty and the brilliance of America. So that involves a difficult conversation, not a sound bite.

I hear what you're saying, but what do these brought some statistics from this week's Washington Post. And I'd like to know what you think about these. The average black person in America is 447 percent more likely to be imprisoned than the average white person. And 521 percent more likely to be murdered. Blacks are in 60 percent to the dollar, compared with whites who have the same education levels and marital status. And because of long standing patterns of inheritance, blacks and whites begin life with substantial disparities in family wealth. That's this week's Washington Post. What do these findings say to you? Well, I think that anybody who believes in America, who believes in justice, who believes in what we stand for, has to find those statistics nauseating and realize that we as a country are not complete yet. That this is not in many ways a nation that's seeking a black justice or seeking a white justice. We profess certain values. Our children pledge it every single day that we will be one nation under God,

indivisible with liberty and justice for all. That these realities defy the exactly. So what's the challenge And that's really where I come back to is, you know, we can have the courage to deplore the situation, but that's not going to heal it. I do not believe. I'm not going to have the same conversation. My father has now, and I watched him. He sat with me. He's how, he's now in his early 70s. What was that conversation? You know, my dad was the most optimistic guy came up to Newark one day, and he said, my father was born to a single parent. He said, I couldn't afford to be poor. I was just poked, PEO, couldn't afford to be the two letters. A poor boy from North Carolina, born to a single mother, in a viciously segregated town. And to have my dad and say, here we are, decades later. And I still see kids in a viciously segregated world, still see kids growing up in poverty. But what I worry about is that their life chances are even worse than mine were, growing up in the 1930s and 40s. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that. I mean, right here, 20 years ago, the birth rate among the single women, fatherless families was very big out here.

And now, according to statistics today, nearly 70% of children in Newark are born out of wedlock. Can you ever deal with these issues unless you start with breaking that cycle? Well, if you look at single mothers, and I love this analysis, because there's been a lot of studies on the increase in on-wed mothers, which I think is not a good thing for our nation. But as much as this increase in the black community, the proportion of on-wed mothers are state the same. So it may have increased, it's actually increased in both. So a lot of these issues, and I often say that if you want to take the temperature of America, and where we are, is that involving as a country, it's good to dip into a Latino community, the black community, because you get a clarity of the urgency that our nation still faces. But that does not mean that these aren't real issues within the white community in America as general. What's the most stubborn reality that you face here in Newark? It is a spiritual crisis of people not believing in the greatness of who we are. And I know in my experience,

and I've dealt with some of the most difficult situations our country has ever seen. If you take away options for people, or where they don't believe, rightfully or wrongfully, that there was hope for their lives in the pathways in which we as Americans view as the righteous path, they're going to stray, people are going to stray from that path, where they feel they have limited choices. I mean, take, for example, a 15-year-old kid, and I see this, who's growing up in a household with perhaps their, parents are not present, and they are not getting the kind of education available in their schools. And we have some very challenged educational institutions in our nation. And they make a mistake, and instead of smoking marijuana or caught with a significant amount, and they don't have pre-trial interventions available to them. They don't have lawyers to come and help them out. And they get thrown in jail. They come out maybe weeks later, and now they have a criminal conviction. They have a criminal conviction. They have no education, formal education. They have nobody there to mentor them. All these things begin

to mount up to them. And they realize I have no other option or believe that they have no other option. Then they continue in the country, which is so easy and right there. It's an economic engine for them that gives them respect. They are making what one might say in the rawest form. And I don't believe it. It's a spiritual deficit. But in the rawest form, they might say that this is a rational, economic decision that they're making. But here is America. And what is our response to that? We can slide up and deplore it. We can say that we need to build more prisons and hold these criminals. Or we can say, let's end this madness and look at practical policy decisions that we can make, such as we can make a great investment in an alternative to detention program that statistically is proven through longitudinal studies to reduce recidivism by 60-70%. But we don't invest in those programs one front end. Because of blackness, race? You know, I don't think it's as simplistic as that. You have to understand, race now is ground into a complicated crucible with poverty and so many other issues, geographic dislocation,

you name it. What we have to realize is we can get caught up as pundits sitting there, talking about sound bites and race, which is so not helpful. Or we can say, hey, black, white, or whatever. Let's change policy to react to the concerns that we have. My passion, my life, is not about trying to create justice for one group over another group. It's to understand that we are one nation. We're in this together. We're either going to race together to the bottom, or we're either going to race together to the top. But you're dealing with the reality right here in Newark, right? Yeah. And that is the statistics. The facts, the figures are all devastating. Right. But that's the attitude on competing against. Or people say that we face this Leviathan of a problem that's so implacable that we can't deal with a quarry. And I've heard this so much. We're 40 years where we've been dealing with these problems. I have people the most sincere individuals come to me and tell me, oh, mayor, murder, it's going up all

over the country. There's nothing you can do about it this year. It's even going up in New York City. What can you do about it? Well, here we are a year to date. We're down 70% on murders because me and a group of very committed grassroots activists and police decided we were going to choose a different way. We have a choice as Americans. We can continue to talk about problems and I will not have this same conversation when I'm 70 something years old with my child. We are going to shut up in this city and fight. So what's the strategy? I think this is what the, I've got a nation of white audience all over the country. Listen to the mayor of Newark. What is the new strategy? legislation. We did that in the 60s. Billions of dollars have been pointed to the cities. Beans right here in Newark. What is the strategy that you think people living in urban areas all over this country should follow the deal with these intractable, real, grim facts on the ground? I say simply this. Don't look at government to do it. Don't look at somebody else. Look in the mirror and ask yourself, I benefit from this nation. I benefit from incredible sacrifices. What am I willing to do

different this year to make a difference in the problems in America? You're saying that to these black kids who are going to be arrested? Absolutely. And I've sat with those kids that you're talking about at this point. I've sat with young people as a mentor and looked them in the eye. It's your life. It's your destiny. You choose. But I'll tell you this right now, you know, King again said, it's so much more eloquently. It's the most shocking words and the violent actions of the evil people that threaten us as a nation. It's the appalling silence and inaction of the good people. And we as Americans have to understand that change will never roll in on the wheels of inevitability. It necessitates sacrifice and struggle by true warriors. Is that money? Do you need more money? You know, there's no simple answer. And that's the need. That's a need your reaction to spend more money. Well, you know what? I can show you places in the city of Newark where we're doing more with less. Simply because we have good people stepping forward and saying, I'm not going to tolerate this anymore in my nation. What are they doing? In my block. They're doing mentoring programs. You have grassroots leaders, young black men,

starting up, starting organizations like prodigal sons and daughters here in the city of Newark, welcoming people back to the community. Because if you are Christian, that's one of the seminal stories. If somebody's coming back from doing wrong, you don't just point a finger at them and say, bad, bad, bad for the rest of your life. You get up and you embrace them and you help them. And you put them back and I see people in our grassroots doing that. You have to stop shooting young black men who just said they're tired of seeing what's going on in their communities and they reach out and they mentor and they work with people. The power of our country always has never been the leadership. Please. The civil rights movement was done by young kids, young people that we will never know their names that made this country change. I'm struck that you've been emphasizing so-called quality of life issues. You're picking up the litter on the street. I've heard red that you'll get angry at somebody in the car ahead of you who throws rappers out on the street. Yeah, I'll start my hometown. I want to pull them over and give them a crash back. Because it's all about the spirit. It all comes down to a spiritual transformation and if your city looks messy, we have a lot of challenges with that. And Newark with litter and legal dumping.

If you're unkempt, it's all about self respect. It's all about the spirit. And it all starts with how you feel about yourself and what you know about your self. Look look, I'm not saying. I ran for it to become mayor of the city of Newark because I wanted to make policy change. And we're doing it. We're getting ex-offenders hired. going out and talking to companies and saying, hey, if we train them, if we give them soft skills, if we help these men to understand who they really are, will you hire them? And companies are stepping up and doing it. We're creating incentives to help them, free legal services to help our brothers and sisters coming home. So we're making clear policy changes. But at the end of the day, I need that law firm, like the one in the city of Newark who's willing to give those free legal services. I need those companies who understand that you can do good and do well at the same time. I need the churches who are willing to run some of the programs. But today, jobs, too, don't you? Yeah, but the thing is, if you reimagine your economy, how? If you have so. Oh, there's so many ways. Look, we have to save inner city buildings. Like the city of Newark, we're hemorrhaging energy.

Nobody's weatherized the city of Newark. Nobody's looked at insulation. So all of a sudden, you realize, wait a minute, you could save money, millions of dollars for government, for schools, for businesses, if you weatherize, if you insulate. And all of a sudden, you realize, wait, you've created a business model right there. Then you can create businesses and therefore jobs right here in the city of Newark, running around and doing these things. If you reimagine your economy and realize, you can go to people and say, wait a minute, you've got a law here that makes no sense whatsoever, preventing young black men who have criminal convictions from getting jobs in the port area. Why are you denying them? In the port area? In the port area. Or let me give you a worse. I had a guy that came to my open office hours who couldn't get a taxi license because of 20 years earlier, he had a criminal conviction. He wanted to be an entrepreneur. But yet, government was restricting his ability to get a license because of 20 years old. Every state in America has these nonsensical laws that undermine the potential of individuals. There's so many things that we can do that are sound rational policy that are not right and not left, not Democrat, not Republican, that are American, in my opinion, that we all can agree on.

But we're just not doing it. And any elected leader like me is betraying their office if they run for office and they sit in office and say, government's going to do for you. But I'm looking for a leadership, whether it's my president, whether it's my governor, whether it's my mayor. I want leaders that are going to ask more from America. We've seen the specter of race intrude into the presidential race. And I know you're experiencing when you were writing because some people said, some black said, you weren't black enough to be mayor of a basically black city. How is race playing out in your life here now? I think that's the frustrating thing for me often is the dialogue I hear on the news in the media is very different than the dialogue for real Americans on their everyday lives. You know, I spent a lot of years of my life, you know, my undergraduate studying urban issues. I did my master's degree studying at law school, my focus was all these issues. And I could sit here and give you a treatise on the causal factors of racial disparities. But at some point, I think we need to start having a conversation about what are we going to do to solve it.

And what I'm trying to say is that you can get so caught up in looking for blame, who's to blame, is it societies to blame, is it white folks to blame, is it the prisoner herself to blame. But at some point in America, we're going to have to get beyond blame and start accepting responsibility. So again, I have to say, I'm not that old, but from 38 years old, but I'm already getting fatigued with the conversation and feeling that there's a dearth of action, that it may be invoked right now because of this presidential election to talk about race and to study and to flip it over. But at the end of the day, is it going to motivate action? We've had the courage to explore the reality in which we live. But we show the equal courage to do something about it. Not wait, not point of finger, not sit and have debates about a divided America, but to get into the trenches, to roll up your sleeves, to do the hard difficult work it takes to manifest the greatness of this nation. America was born out of collective sacrifice, out of a lot of fights and a lot of struggles. And here are generation of living Americans has to decide what they're going to do.

If they're going to sit back and just let this be a spectator sport, then we will devolve in the same way the great Roman Empire did. But if you're willing to get up and continue the fight, to continue the struggle, to understand that we are not a nation who has manifested their ideals, that when our children pledge allegiance to that flag, whether they're in Newark, New Jersey, or Beverly Hills, those kids are saying words, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all that are aspirational. We haven't achieved that. And therefore, this generation has to manifest the same struggle that my parents generation did, and my parents' parents' generation did. But the founding fathers who proclaimed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as our ultimate values, also nurtured slavery in the cradle of liberty. Absolutely. And I love that civil rights leader that said constitute, I can't say the full word. I can only say two-fifths or three-fifths of the word, because Americans were judged in black Americans, or Americans were judged in that fraction, that in a very declaration of independence, Native Americans are referred to as savages. Obviously, there is racial divisiveness, degradation that's seeped into the very founding of our

nation. But the beauty of America is that the people of this country, black and white and Jewish and quaker, saw within this nascent nation, saw within it the very manifestation of the divine, and helped this country overcome itself its limitations and its divisions, and created a nation in which I'm proud of, but ultimately, which I know is not complete yet. If you realize that, what are you doing about it? And that's the final question people should ask. What am I doing to deserve this country? I'm an American. That comes with it obligations. We have the Statue of Liberty on one side. I think we should build another statue in this country called the Statue of Obligation, the Statue of Responsibility, and people should understand it by the very nature. People are fighting to become citizens of the United States of America, wasn't to do whatever it takes, but we're taking for granted what that legacy means. I've watched you since your first race, which you lost.

I've watched you on the City Council. I know that you're trying to move us into a new direction. How do you adjust to not being able to do all the important things you want to do? I'm stubborn, and I made a decision in my life what I'm willing to die for, what I'm willing to live for, and I may be calling an arrogance to believe that I live in a time where me and my team members and my community can do anything. And I've often been criticized for it. I've often been told I'm unrealistic, but I think this country was formed on realistic ideals. It's also been the subject of death threats. I've been subject of death threats. I've seen my chair violence in my days. A young man died in your arms, David. I had a tragic situation where a kid was shot and fell backwards into my arms, and I held them as he and vainly trying to stop the blood. You have a choice to make every day.

Will you do everything you can despite the circumstances to generate love and light, or will you give in to the darkness around you? And I believe that in this city that I love, I've been able to connect to so many people that you will never read about or see on TV. Not people who are involved in debates about race on TV. Not people who are pointing fingers. But you see these neighborhood leaders on their block who step up, who take time to sweep in front of their house, and even a little bit further down the street, even though they don't own the property, who watch the kid walking home from school and ask them how their day is, ask them what kind of grades they're getting. The tenant leader in my building, when I lived in some projects, who on Valentine's Day or St. Patrick's Day, she ain't Irish. But yet she's collecting money from all the residents in the basement of the building to have a St. Patrick's Day party for a bunch of black children. This is the spirit of America. This same tenant leader I'll never forget, her son was murdered in the building in which we live.

And I remember saying to her, why would you stay here after your son who served in the American military, no less, and was kept in the home and was savagely murdered? And she folds her arms and looks at me with a toughness and she says, why am I still here in brick towers? These high rise projects and I said, yeah, why are you still here? And she says firmly, because I'm in charge of Homeland Security. Now here's a woman that gets it. It's not about the president, it's not about the Congress person, it's about me. This is my country, I'm going to fight for it, I'm going to remake it in the image of our ancestors. I'm going to show that love will prevail over ignorance, over bigotry, over division, that I will unify our country through my spirit, through my blood. And if everybody stopped talking and started focusing on doing something more than I did yesterday in order to change tomorrow, then we're going to have the America bar dreams. We remember the corner report for its searing conclusion that our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate, and unequal. African Americans at the time were fast becoming concentrated and isolated in metropolitan

ghettos. And the Kerner Commission said that by 1985, without new policies, our cities would have black majorities ringed with largely all white suburbs. The commissioners acknowledged that government policies like urban gentrification and the construction of huge, high-rise projects had helped the blight stable black communities. So they offered some specific and practical remedies, new jobs, affordable housing, and new steps to confront the destructive ghetto environment. But following the civil rights movement of the mid-60s, the peaceful marches and demonstrations, the civil rights act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the riots triggered a mounting white backlash. LBJ's escalation of the war in Vietnam added fuel to the fires. The Kerner report was published on March 1, 1968, hardly five weeks later, on the 4th of April, 40 years ago next week, Martin Luther King was assassinated, flames again engulfed

dozens of cities, and the possibility of large-scale change perished in the blood, ashes, and racist toxins. The president had told the Kerner Commission, let your search be free, as best you can, find the truth and express it in your report. They did, but the truth was not enough. The country lost the will for it. Before a booker wasn't even born when this report appeared, my generation read and shelved it. His was now right the next chapter. That's it for the journal. See you next week. I know more years. Forty years after Kerner, get today's facts on race, class, and education, and 10 things

you didn't know about America's cities. Log on at pbs.org. This episode of Bill Moyer's journal is available on DVD or VHS for $29.95. To order, call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. Major funding is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Pollock Guff Charitable Fund, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Colberg Foundation, The Herb Alpert Foundation, Maryland and Bob Climates, and The Climates Foundation, Bernard and Audrey Rappaport, and The Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, The Fetzer Institute, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Orphala Family Foundation, The Public Welfare Foundation, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement products and services to employers and individuals

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