Those words were written almost half a century ago by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, after its chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, Jr.. President Lyndon Johnson established the eleven-member commission on July 28, 1967, in order to investigate the causes of the urban uprisings that had ravaged cities across the nation and to provide recommendations for the future.

Mounting civil unrest in the face of persistent racial discrimination had spawned riots in the black neighborhoods of major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark and Detroit. In his remarks upon signing the order establishing the Commission, Johnson asked for answers to three central questions about the riots: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?”

The Commission’s final report was released on February 29, 1968, after seven months of investigation. The report became an instant best-seller, and over two million Americans bought copies of the 426-page document. Its finding was that the riots resulted from black frustration at lack of economic opportunity. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. pronounced the report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.”

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