Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (shown here with her sister Dr. Darlene Ifill-Taylor at a Baltimore event) is one of the many voices joining the conversation at #Kerner50.
The “Race & Inequality in America: The Kerner Commission at 50” conference aims to serve as a comprehensive investigation of race in American society.The conference will be co-hosted at UC Berkeley campus and Johns Hopkins University at the Reginald F Lewis Museum in Baltimore.
Organized by the Economic Policy Institute, the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley and the 21st Century Cities Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, the Kerner Commission at 50 Conference will be held February 27-March 1, 2018 to commemorate and investigate the Kerner Commission and its contemporary significance.
Speakers will participate from both Berkeley and Baltimore and will be simulcast to live audiences. Recordings of the events will be posted online at a later date for those who are not able to attend the conference. Findings from the conference will be compiled into reports and multimedia materials to be made publicly available following the conference.
When: Feb. 28 – March 1, 2018
Attendees at both the Baltimore and Berkeley locations will see all speakers simulcast live. Below is a list of the locations where the speakers will be in person.
From the Baltimore Location
Lisa A. Cooper, Bloomberg distinguished professor, a social epidemiologist, and health services researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels
Ronald J. Daniels, President of Johns Hopkins University.
Robert Hahn, General Health Scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia
Fred Harris, former US Senator from Oklahoma (1964-1973), & the only surviving member of the nine-member Kerner Commission.
Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
Jay Kriegel, Senior Adviser at Related Companies who previously served as assistant to the Vice-Chairman of the Kerner Commission, John Lindsay.
Leana S. Wen, Commissioner of Health for the City of Baltimore.
Julian Zelizer, a frequent commentator in international and national media on political history and contemporary politics, and author of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (2015).
From the Berkeley Location
John Charles “Jack” Boger, former Dean of the University of North Carolina’s law school (2006-2015), & former staff counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Jitu Brown, National Director of Journey for Justice Alliance.
Shantel Buggs, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, and Assistant Faculty in the Program for African American Studies, Florida State University.
Camille Z. Charles, Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies & Education, and Director of the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ronald Davis, former Director of the Department of Justice COPS Office, Executive Director of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, & retired police chief.
Shaun Donovan, US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (2009-2014), & former Director of the Office of Management and Budget (2014-2017).
Chris Edley, former Dean of the UC Berkeley law school (2004-2013), & former professor at Harvard Law.
Erica Frankenberg, Associate Professor of education and demography in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University.
Linda Darling-Hammond, President of the Learning Policy Institute, & Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University.
Rucker Johnson, Associate Professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.
Betsy Julian, Founder and Senior Counsel at the Inclusive Communities Project (ICP) in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas.
Bill Keller, Editor-in-Chief of The Marshall Project, & former Correspondent for The New York Times (1984-2014). He served as the Times’ Executive Editor from 2003 to 2014.
Elizabeth Kneebone, Research Director at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, & Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow.
John Koskinen, former Commissioner of the IRS (2013-2017), & former Non-Executive Chairman of Freddie Mac (2008-2011).
Mitch Landrieu, Mayor of New Orleans, & author of upcoming book on race, titled In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History.
Thea M. Lee, incoming President of the Economic Policy Institute.
Ian Haney López, Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley, & Director of the Haas Institute’s Racial Politics Project.
Guillermo Mayer, President & CEO of Public Advocates Inc.
Myron Orfield, Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law at the University of Minnesota, & Director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity.
Victor Palmieri, Deputy Executive Director of the Kerner Commission Staff.
Steven C. Pitts, Associate Chair of the Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley.
john a. powell, Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley, the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion, & Professor of Law and Professor of African American and Ethnic Studies.
Richard Rothstein, Senior Fellow at the Haas Institute, Research Associate at the Economic Policy Institute, & a former Senior Fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at UC Berkeley’s law school.
Robert Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, & former Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
Sandra Susan Smith, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, & author of Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor.
Eric Tang, Assistant Professor in African and African Diaspora Studies and the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Phil Tegeler, Executive Director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Coalition.
Chris Magnus, Tucson, Arizona Police Chief, & former Police Chief of Richmond, California.
William Julius Wilson, Lewis P., and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University.
Please address any questions you have about the conference to 21CC@jhu.edu or call 410-516-4913.
Background
In the mid-1960s, a series of violent police encounters with Black Americans sparked uprisings in more than 100 American cities. Shaken by the civil unrest across the nation in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the immediate causes of the rebellions, as well as the underlying conditions of racial segregation and discrimination that gave rise to them.
Headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, with Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York as vice chairman, the Commission issued its landmark report, which became commonly known as the “Kerner Report,” on February 29, 1968.
The Kerner Report, unanimously signed by the bipartisan and politically mainstream commission, was wide-ranging and dramatic and concluded that white society had denied opportunity to Black Americans living in poor urban neighborhoods.
The report offered both dire warnings along with a bold plan of federal action. Its most famous line, cited again by the US Supreme Court as recently as 2015, was: “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” In its other most memorable passage, the commission said: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
The killings of unarmed Black teenagers that sparked #BlackLivesMatter, and the ensuing movement that grew out of it, have re-awakened American consciousness to the pervasiveness of segregation, inequality, and police brutality and violence. The rise of white nationalist movements in Charlottesville and beyond, protests on college campuses, state capitols, and elsewhere over monuments and buildings that honor figures responsible for slavery and segregation, race remains at the forefront of the currents of American life.
The themes, findings, and recommendations of the Kerner Report have never seemed more relevant since its release. For that reason, the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley, along with Johns Hopkins University and the Economic Policy Institute, is organizing a national conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Report. The conference will not only examine the legacy, successes, and failures of the commission, but will envision what a contemporary Kerner Report might look like in every major area of American life, including housing, education, healthcare, policing, and more.
