![]() ![]() ![]() If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. At the same time, the cost of funding the report’s proposals was far more than President Lyndon Johnson could afford to spend while fighting a billion-dollar war in Vietnam.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. The report stopped short of what many activists and some liberals might have liked, though. It proposed a long list of specific recommendations, including the construction of six million new housing units, greater federal spending on education, and more generous welfare payments to those in need. The report offered dire warnings that only aggressive federal action could prevent future unrest. Their final report, released in March 1968, used stark language to conclude that the riots occurred because white society had denied opportunity to African Americans living in poor urban areas. Determined to assert their independence, commissioners hired a team of investigators, visited riot-torn areas, and held hearings with activists and public officials. The new commission, however, failed to follow the White House script. Johnson assumed that his mainstream commission would produce a mainstream report that would endorse the broad outlines of his existing domestic agenda and insulate him from attacks both from the right and from the left. There were no radicals or young people, and there was no spokesman for the black nationalist movement. There were two African Americans, two Republican and two Democratic members of Congress, representatives from both business and labor, and one woman. New York’s liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay served as vice chairman. Although Kerner would not play a major role, his name would become synonymous with the commission and its work. For chairman, he selected Illinois Democratic governor Otto Kerner. Johnson filled the eleven-member commission that he announced that evening with mainstream bipartisan figures. ![]() ![]() The popularity of presidential commissions also reflected the postwar fascination with experts and the belief that social scientists could offer objective solutions to complicated social problems. As the burdens on the presidency increased in postwar America, commissions became a convenient way for presidents to fill the gap between what they could deliver and what was expected of them. Johnson would appoint twenty such commissions during his tenure as president. Between 19, there was an average of one and a half presidential commissions appointed every year. It was a strategy many postwar American presidents used to handle vexing political issues. He planned to kick the issue of urban violence down the road in hopes that by the time his commission issued its report, the crisis would have already passed. The speech followed deadly and destructive riots in Newark and Detroit, which marked the culmination of four consecutive summers of racial unrest in American cities.Ĭreating a presidential commission seemed like the ideal option: it allowed him to demonstrate leadership without committing his administration to a specific course of action. On July 27, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson stood before a national television audience to announce the creation of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (NACCD). ![]()
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