Detroit Fifty Years After the Kerner Report: What Has Changed, What Has Not, and Why?

Abstract

Immediately after the Detroit violence of July 1967, President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission and ordered it to determine what had happened, why, and what could be done to prevent urban riots. This analysis focuses on racial change in metropolitan Detroit. Progress has been made in racially integrating the suburban ring closed to African Americans at the time of the violence. Evidence indicates social integration in that interracial marriage is more common and blacks are more represented in prestigious occupations. However, on key economic measures, African Americans are now further behind whites than they were in 1967. This can be attributed to fundamental changes in employment and the failure of the educational system to provide the training needed for jobs in the new economy.