The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner Commission: Ten Years Later

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Ten years ago this week a presidential commission investigating racial unrest reported, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one white, one black -- separate and unequal."

The commission, headed by former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, called on the federal government for massive efforts in black employment, education, housing and welfare reform. Ten years later, where are we? Is the nation more integrated, or more divided than a decade ago. Senator Edward Brooke, the only black member of the U.S. Senate, and a member of the Kerner Commission, said today that the nation had failed to achieve the major goals of the commission and that the situation was potentially explosive. The New York Times, in a major survey, indicates a large measure of white indifference and black resignation to continued racial discrimination. Tonight, how great is the failure, and why? Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, first a factual scorebord of progress over the past ten years in four crucial areas. Unemployment: the percentage of blacks out of work now is twice what it was in 1968; 7.4 percent then, 13.8 percent now. In welfare: in 1968 there were 1.6 million black families living below the official poverty line on welfare; this year the number is the same, 1.6 million. Among whites the figure has dropped from 4.1 million to 3.4 million. In education: ten years ago fifty-six percent of all blacks between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four had high school diplomas, seventy-eight percent of all whites; now, sixty-eight percent of the blacks do, eighty-two percent of the whites. Then, 4.6.percent of all college students were black; now, 10.4 percent of them are. In the area of housing: then, twenty-five percent of blacks in central cities lived in substandard housing, compared to eight percent for whites; now, it`s sixteen percent for blacks, five percent for whites. Robin?

MacNEIL: One man who grappled with both the explosive despair of urban blacks and the intellectual agonies of the Kerner Commission ten years ago was John Lindsay, then Mayor of New York. Mr. Lindsay, now again a lawyer, was vice chairman of the Kerner Commission. Mr. Lindsay, taking into consideration the statistics Jim has just given in brief, and your own feelings about the situation, should we be claiming modest success, or failure?

JOHN LINDSAY: I think you can claim both, and that`s not a hedge. You claim. modest success because, as Jim`s data indicated, there have been some gains.-- particularly gains, I think, in the area of the introduction of non-whites into middle-class America in various modes and forms; through education, through jobs and related activities. I think you claim failure because beneath that level, on the street level, with thousands upon thousands of largely teenage and young men in their twenties, unemployment figures are worse. It`s best to get accurate data in this field, but it`s bad. Crime has not abated, and we`re confronted with - someone once put it -- a nation of hustlers. These are young people, largely male, who are disconnected from all established life as we know it: parents, schools, homes, jobs; and no one has yet in the country figured out an overall strategy for attacking this problem.

MacNEIL: Is that the reason for the failure? Is it that it`s beyond the wit of politicians, or rather so far to devise a strategy, or is it a lack of political will, or what is it?

LINDSAY: A little bit of both. To arrive at-a strategy which attempts to be a solution to these problems, you`ve got to understand it to begin with; and there`s very little understanding in Washington, D.C. of the root causes of the. problem and what happened. That`s true of the present administration, it`s been true of past administrations. There have been differences in the will involved. Under the Nixon administration there was a clear attempt to use the backlash and the resentment among whites -- because of the perception of aggressions on the part of non-whites -- to use it politically. And the inner city was seen as something to thump over the head rather than to try to rescue.

MacNEIL: How much do you see this as a failure of white America or just indifference on the part of white America, and how much a failure of black leadership?

LINDSAY: Well, again I think you have to say both; and again it`s not a hedge. The failure of black leadership is a hard word. I think what`s happened is that your leadership among blacks has moved strongly in the area of political and social action; and in so doing they`ve tended to leave behind the crowd on the street, which hasn`t stayed up with them. That`s the march of time and history, rather than any deliberate failure. In respect of whites, one, I think, also has to understand that there are genuine and real fears, particularly among middle-class whites. They`re frightened; they feel threatened, both by crime and by the pressure of jobs, affirmative action programs has them -- you have to understand it -- quite understandably worried. And unless you address yourself to those fears, you`re going to have trouble finding solutions to the problem.

MacNEIL: Finally, do we need a new surge of militancy or a threat of violence to reawaken the anxieties that prompted you on the Kerner Commission to come up with the findings you did?

LINDSAY: No. Because it will set things back even further. The threat of violence or violence is counterproductive, in my judgment.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: All right, now to a man who was also very much involved in what was happening ten years ago. He`s Roger Wilkins, who was then an Assistant U.S. Attorney General here in Washington. He is now the chief urban affairs analyst for the New York Times. Mr. Wilkins, how do you see things in terms of changes from then till now?

ROGER WILKINS: Jim, it seems to me that the principal finding of the Kerner Commission was that we needed new commitment, sustained commitment, massive effort. I doubted then that the country was capable of that kind of commitment; the ten years that have elapsed have, I think, proved me right.

LEHRER: Why was there no such commitment?

WILKINS: Well, I think the commission said it: we have a significant problem of racism in this country. The country was able to see simple moral problems; it was able to see Birmingham, it was able to see Montgomery. When the issues changed to the fundamental ones of economics, of housing, of basic social arrangements, it was going to take a massive commitment of will, of political leadership, and the whole new understanding that the Kerner Commission tried to give the country. What happened then was that President Johnson failed to give the country the leadership it needed, failed to use this report as a platform; and President Nixon kicked the whole effort in the head, the black masses became dispirited, black leadership. didn`t have anybody to talk to, and white people got tired of it.

LEHRER: You mean you think it`s solely as a result of the failure of two Presidents of the United States, that if those two men had been with it we wouldn`t be sitting here talking about the problems ten years after the Kerner report?

WILKINS: Jim, there would have been problems, there`s no doubt about that. But Johnson, after all, initiated a number of programs called Great Society programs that were essentially the first fledgling experiments to get at these root problems. They were frail, they were fragile, they were tender. Instead of nourishing them, nurturing them, President Nixon kicked them in the head, called them failures, the rest of the country agreed that there was no need to throw money at problems; and that was that.

LEHRER: Your newspaper said in a story about what`s happened these last ten years that instead of two societies, as the Kerner report predicted -- one black, one white -- that actually three have developed: one white, one poor black,`and one middle-class black. Do you agree with that?

WILKINS: Oh, I always agree with what my newspaper says.

LEHRER: Oh, absolutely. (Laughing.)

WILKINS: Yes, I agree with that.

LEHRER: Tell me why you agree with that, then.

WILKINS: I agree with that. Even in the sixties it was apparent that the civil rights movements` gains were primarily going to black people who were well-educated and who were already well positioned to earn livings. Two of the people, for instance, who profited very much from those years in the federal government were Thurgood Marshall and me. Well, Thurgood would have earned a living even had there been no civil rights movement, and so would I. But what happened was that that class of people enlarged. They, by and large -- many of them -- got involved in the mainstream of American life, and what it did was it drained black life of all kinds of leadership and strength that it otherwise would have had. I`ll give you one example: in the 1940s when I was a kid, bright, able black people had very limited job opportunities, so they went into the NAACP or the Urban League. Those people now go into Exxon, they go to the New York Times, they go to the government, they go to Channel 13; and what it means is that there is less of a pool of able, talented blacks to deal with the problems of the seventies, which are much more sophisticated and much more complex than the leadership was dealing within the forties.

LEHRER: Roger, finally, let me ask you a more subtle and personal question. As a black man, do you feel that the atmosphere in which you live now is different than it was ten years ago -- as an individual?

WILKINS: The atmosphere for me personally is clearly better. But in a sense I am much more dispirited. I have worked now in the four pillars of the eastern establishment -- the Justice Department, the Ford Foundation, the Washington Post and the New York Times -- and what I see...

LEHRER: And you`re on public television.

(General laughter.)

WILKINS: And what I see is that the very limited power that the blacks who make it into organizations such as those still have, to change things in the South Bronx, in Harlem, in Hough and Watts and all those other places; and you realize that if you are committed to those issues you`re going to spend the rest of your life and have your heart broken day after day and year after year because of the intractability of the problems and because of how hard it is to get white people to understand that that misery is part of America:. and something that we`ve got to deal with.

LEHRER: All right, thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: The Kerner Commission included an advisory panel on private enterprise, and one of its members was Louis F. Polk, Jr. In 1968 Mr. Polk was a senior executive with General Mills. He`s the former president and chief executive officer of MGM, founding director of outward Bound school programs, and is now president and chairman of the board of Leisure Dynamics. Mr. Polk, how great is the failure, generally speaking, in your view?

LOUIS POLK, Jr.: I think it`s really very dramatic when you deal at the level of the unskilled minority person. Roger pointed out that if you`re black and a girl today you can get a job almost anywhere; if you have a college education, certainly in television or in any bank in the United States you have a great advantage over anyone else. The problem occurs, I think, due a lot to black leadership and to the lack of enthusiasm and optimism that we had in the sixties. I can remember Bobby Kennedy and when he started Bedford-Stuyvesant and the tremendous drive we had going in that; I can remember backing up a small black electronic company in Minneapolis, and we had such things as "Make us your soul source,` or "Use our black power transformers," and there was a certain amount of humor in it; and you could go to IBM and say, "Look, we want your business because we`re black." And they got their business because they were black, and there was a great enthusiasm about that. Some corporations went into the core parts, the decaying centers of cities and put their pension money into those, even, and put their bright young white guys in there to try to solve those problems. At Fairchild Camera I remember we started a plant in Shiprock, New Mexico hiring all unskilled Indians.. Everyone was willing to experiment and try. It was also a time of good economic well-being; corporations were incredibly successful, they felt they could do anything. Since that time, I think, we`ve drifted away and the black leadership has drifted away from those problems also, and so there`s an unskilled worker out there, most of whom are black and unemployed, that no one is in touch with, and no. one`s in touch with those environments, either.

MacNEIL: How much is the recession responsible for that? If prosperity returned, would we be singing a different tune today?

POLK: I think it has a lot to do with it, because right now a middle-class guy is struggling with an income that he`s barely making ends meet, he thinks. Corporations are struggling trying to replace their plant and equipment and not being able to do it, and wondering how much they should invest. If you can get back to those days when you thought you could do anything, and corporations could, then they spread out their effort. Right now, when they`re struggling to survive against Japan and against Germany, it`s tougher. And so you lose that altruism that you have at another time.

MacNEIL: Some blacks, and some whites, feel that the American economy has simply given up on millions of poor urban unskilled blacks. Do you think that is-to some extent true?

POLK: I`m afraid it is, if I take my own case as an example and the amount of energy that I put into trying to help those situations, and other contemporaries my age. It isn`t there as much; you tried, and you didn`t succeed. Plus the fact that I think you have a lot of black friends now who are successful, in banks and television and writers, and they`re not back there in. the ghetto area; and so you tend to forget about them because you`re not reminded of it, as we were in the past. And I`m afraid, John, I might disagree with you, that I think that if, unfortunately, Harlem raised up and started burning things, people would start to try to do something about it again

MacNEIL: You mean the climate of urgency that you all shared in 1968 might be recreated if the threat of violence came again?

POLK: Unfortunately, I think that`s true. Or you`ll get even more repressive measures, because there`s a whole trend now, whether it`s in schools or education or in corporations, to. deal much more stiffly with discipline and authority, whereas in those days there was a lot of permissiveness going on which created a lot of opportunity for violence. Today you don`t tolerate it as you did then.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Mayor Lindsay, the point that Mr. Polk made a moment ago, that everybody tried very hard back during those times, for whatever reason, and it didn`t really work so everybody just kind of backed off -do you read it the same way?

LINDSAY: Jim, I think there have been gains. I think in the last ten years that there have been gains of the type that Roger Wilkins was referring to just a moment ago, and those are largely gains in the introduction of black leadership into established institutional life in the United States, which might not have happened but for various efforts and initiatives -- including, maybe, the Kerner Commission report, I don`t know -- but the large body of efforts that was made back in the late sixties. And I think that`s progress in the United States; I think that is the United States at its best -- always absorbing a new group, as the United States has always done with new groups, particularly through the Statue of Liberty city of New York, and introducing them to middle-class status; an exhausting process, I might add. But where the failure is, and where Louis was absolutely right., is that I do think that in your inner city areas, where you--have your concentrations of nonwhites, there`s an abandonment of hope to some extent, there`s a what`s the-use attitude because nobody seems to be paying any attention at all. And that includes your political leadership most of all. And that, I think, is something to be concerned about.

LEHRER: Roger Wilkins, does that also include upper-middle-class blacks who have moved away? Do they also have a kind of hopeless attitude about the poor blacks they left behind?

WILKINS: Well, Jim, when I was in Detroit in 1967 with Cy Vance`s team at the time that President Johnson was appointing the Kerner Commission, after we had worked in the poor ghetto neighborhoods I went and saw some of my middle-class black friends, who said to me, "What`s wrong with those people? What do they want?" They only lived two blocks from where the riots occurred.

LEHRER: And they were asking you.

WILKINS: They were asking me. Sure, there are middle-class blacks who are anxious to disassociate themselves from these problems. But let me also say that there are many, many, many middle-class blacks -- the black leadership of which John was talking a minute ago -- who really are engaged emotionally and intellectually in this problem and who`ve made a lifetime commitment; and their problem over the last eight or nine years has been that there`s nobody to talk. to. This black leadership that exists now is far more sophisticated than any black leadership that has existed in the history of this nation. But whether they`re trying to talk to Richard Nixon, or to Gerald Ford, or to Jimmy Carter, it`s unlike the days when you had Lyndon Johnson to talk to, who had some gut feeling about the problems. These people really don`t understand.

LEHRER: Mr. Polk, would you agree? The basic premise always is that the political leaders reflect at least the going feeling of the populace as a whole at any given time.- Do you think that`s the case now, that the reason that the black leadership doesn`t have anybody to talk to is that the white citizens have not put the push on their own political leaders to listen?

POLK: That the white citizens haven`t?

LEHRER: That`s right, the white attitudes.

POLK: Well, as I tried to say earlier, I think that one of the problems is, as John says, you absorbed a lot of middle-class blacks into your institutional structure; and they tend to put less pressure -- I mean, they have power now in those institutions...

LEHRER: I`m talking about white attitudes. For instance, this CBS-New York Times poll showed that whites have reduced their hostile attitudes toward lacks, and yet they have taken an attitude of, they just don`t care any more. Would you not agree, Roger, that that was one of the major findings of that poll?

WILKINS: Yes.

POLK: Yeah. I think that`s true, but I think the point I`m trying to make is that in the thing we tried to do even in the Kerner report was that we were mostly concerned with unskilled minority groups, and that`s the group where it`s the toughest, because people forget about them the easiest--you don`t live with them, you don`t see them -- and also they`re up against a guy who`s struggling to have a job. And so there`s a lot of tension at that level, and that`s where I think we`ve really failed, and I don`t know quite what the answer was. I mean, you set up special incentive programs where you train unskilled people, you set up whole schools -- I remember Litton did, General Motors did -- just to train minority groups, to bring them up to skill levels that you could hire. And yet for some reason that program lost its momentum, and I don`t quite know why; and the result is you have too many unemployed in the United States today, and too many minority unemployed. And it is a part, though, of the ability to get the economic system going, and I think that one of the problems was. that Johnson tried to do it all at the government level and killed a lot of the corporate enthusiasm to do that. Bobby Kennedy wanted to do it with corporations, which is one great strength I think he had, and the other presidents haven`t cared enough to try to do it.

LEHRER: All right. Robin?

MacNEIL: Can I just pick up on something you said? Are you including Jimmy Carter in that "nobody to listen to them"?

WILKINS: Yes. I think that President Carter was naive about what he thought he was going to do about the race problem in this country.

He told an interviewer when he was running that he wanted to do more for blacks than any president in their lifetime. The interviewer said to him, "How are you going to do that?" He said, "Well, I`m going to appoint as many articulate blacks in my administration as I can." Well, if a fellow thinks that a few appointments are going to change a problem like this, he is awfully naive. The whole struggle over forming an urban policy that`s been going on now for nine months in the Carter. administration demonstrates more than anything else a fundamental lack of sophistication about how hard this problem is.

MacNEIL: Okay. Let`s pick up on solutions. You said that Mr. Johnson stressed -- and to some degree the Kerner Commission also stressed -massive government, programs: Those programs, or very similar ones, are still part, albeit piecemeal, of the political agenda today. Are they still valid, those programs? For instance, the welfare reform proposal Mr. Carter`s come up with is not dissimilar from the one that you all recommended in the Kerner Commission, ending the man-in-the-house rule and giving support incomes, and so on, as was the one that Pat Moynihan suggested to President Nixon so many years ago. Are these kinds of approaches still valid?

LINDSAY: Well, in my opinion they are still valid. The present welfare system ought to be junked. It doesn`t work. It`s a bureaucratic and administrative nightmare, to begin with. Obviously something has to be substituted for it, and the only thing that can be substituted for it is a program that takes off the backs of localities and local taxpayers the horrendous burden of supporting those who, for reasons beyond their own control, cannot support themselves, they`re below the poverty line. But when you have a problem this deep in the nation, only a national effort can resolve it. And you cannot expect a hodgepodge of federal-created and then locally funded and managed programs to work that well. The country is too small now, and the matter is totally interstate and it`s spread countrywide.

MacNEIL: If the Kerner Commission report were coming out today, forgetting the climate for a moment, would the recommendations, still stand as a valid course of action?

POLK: I think they would, at least from the corporation standpoint. There were real incentives for corporations to train and hire unskilled people.

MacNEIL: What about the government programs?

POLK: I think the government programs were a mistake, because you can`t interject a whole bureaucracy into a problem and expect a solution from it, I don`t think. Not when you`re trying to train people to work.

If you`re trying to train people to work, you`d better train them in the arena where they`re going to have to work, which is in the corporations.

MacNEIL: Are you all saying that ten years later we really don`t know quite what to do?

WILKINS: Well, sure. But I disagree with Bo on one thing: I don`t think that those federal programs all needed to be junked. Some of those programs were designed -- the community action program, for instance, the model cities program -- were designed to and did elicit hidden leadership in poor black, poor Hispanic, poor native American communities that nobody knew was there. It was an unleashing of a lot of creativity, talent and hope. Now, there are also, as John knows, a few crooks -- quite a few crooks -- in it. But the fact was that you began to see a whole class of Americans beginning to do for themselves things that needed to be done.

MacNEIL: I`d just like to close -- we have less than a minute - with Mayor Lindsay. Senator Brooke said today that fears that the nation has acquired a permanent underclass-are likely to give vent to unrest, and it is potentially explosive. You of the people here perhaps have the most knowledge of the situation in a city like New York. Is that the case? Were the lootings after the blackout last summer an indication of that explosiveness?

LINDSAY: Yes, they were an indication of an attitude and a state of mind that is dangerous. But I do think, however, at the same time that people in the minority communities who are the underclass in this country learned a very, very hard lesson, which is that violence is counterproductive and that the people who are victimized by it the most are themselves.

MacNEIL: We have to stop it there. Thank you all for coming. Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: We`ll be back tomorrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.