PRESCRIPTION FOR RACIAL PEACE

OUR nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." With that deliberately provocative observation, the President's Commission on Civil Disorders warned last week that there is not a moment to lose if the deepening division between white and black U.S. citizens is ever to be closed. So critical did the commission find the problem--and so hopeful was it of shocking the U.S. into badly needed reforms--that with a burst of publicity, it rushed its 250,000-word report before the public four months ahead of schedule.

"There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation's conscience," reported the commission. "To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values. The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society."

Shotgun Recommendation. Appointed last summer while the riot-caused ruins of Newark and Detroit still smoldered, the eleven-member* commission had a threefold mission: 1) to record what had actually happened, 2) to find out why it happened, and 3) to suggest a scheme for heading off further troubles. The first two tasks were performed with the help of 90 staff workers in a minimum of time and with a maximum of thoughtfulness and sensitivity. But for the third assignment, the commission, stunned by the gravity and magnitude of the problem, produced shotgun recommendations without regard for cost or national priority. Though many of the recommendations were urgently needed, the commission's apparent unconcern for political practicability was surprisingly unrealistic.

Not so its probing analysis of the riots. The commission stated that press and public officials exaggerated the extent of violence and wildly inflated estimates of damage. Of 164 disorders last year, eight turned out to be "major," 33 were "serious," and the rest were not normally worthy of attention "had the nation not been sensitized by the more serious outbreaks." Early damage estimates in Detroit ran as high as $500 million; the actual total has since dropped to $45 million.

No Conspiracy. There was no "typical" riot last year, observed the commission. Each was a unique and complex drama that, "like most human events, did not unfold in an orderly sequence." Thus it is not surprising that the commission found no single tactic successful in combatting riots. The rioters themselves, however, were typical. The majority were male Negroes between 15 and 24, who were lifelong residents of the ghetto and high school dropouts. They were usually better educated than their non-rioting neighbors, proud of their race, hostile to whites and middle-class Negroes, and distrustful of the U.S. political system. More than 20% of them were unemployed; many of those who were employed had unskilled jobs that they felt were beneath them.

The commission found no evidence that the riots were planned or directed by any subversive group. During the heat of the 1967 disorders, some officials claimed that the trouble was part of a "conspiracy," and President Johnson had specifically instructed the commission to find the truth. Though its report noted that agitators and militant organizations "helped to create an atmosphere that contributed to the outbreak of disorder," it concluded that the riots erupted spontaneously.

"White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II," declared the commission. "Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future."

Rat Bite. While many white Americans have prospered as never before in the past two decades, and have increasingly abandoned the cities for the suburbs, 14.8 million of the nation's 21.5 million Negroes are now crowded in metropolitan areas. Crime rates in the ghettos run as much as 35 times higher than in some white neighborhoods. Infant mortality is 58% higher. Garbage collection and sanitation is often appallingly inadequate; of 14,000 estimated cases of rat bite in 1965, most of them were in ghettos. Over 40% of America's non-whites (mainly Negroes) are below the poverty level, meaning that they subsist on an annual income of less than $3,335 for an urban family of four.

Unemployment and underemployment in the ghettos are as high as 33%--8.8 times worse than the national unemployment average. The ghetto dweller generally feels, and in fact often is, exploited by local merchants--including, to be sure, fellow Negroes.

From riot area to riot area, commission investigators found the same complaints voiced by residents. Always the top of the list included police practices, lack of jobs and bad housing. Next came poor education, inadequate recreation facilities, unresponsive political machinery, disrespect, biased administration of justice, inadequate federal programs and municipal services, discriminatory credit and consumer practices and weak welfare programs. Most distressing of all, perhaps, the commission found that most programs inaugurated after the riots have failed to alleviate those problems.

Litany of Laments. To many a middle-class white American, the litany of Negro laments sounds vaguely familiar to the challenges that were faced--and successfully overcome--by European immigrants. If they were able to fight their way out of poverty and ignorance and the ghetto, why does the Negro not do the same? The answer, said the commission, involves the cultural background that gave many whites a vision, an incentive. Also, of course, the color of their skin allowed them to assimilate more easily even when there was open discrimination, as there was, for example, against the Irish. Besides, a developing economy decades ago offered far more opportunity for unskilled labor than can be found today. For all that, the commission noted, "whites tend to exaggerate how well and quickly they escaped from poverty. The fact is that immigrants who came from rural backgrounds, as many Negroes do, are only now, after three generations, finally beginning to move into the middle class."

What the country urgently needs, concluded the commission, is a program "equal to the dimension of the problems." That program must be organized "for high impact in the immediate future to close the gap between promise and performance; it must undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that dominates the ghetto and weakens our society."

Among the commission's specific recommendations are these:

> POLICE. More Negroes should be recruited and promoted in urban police departments. Increased police protection should be given to the ghettos; policy guidelines should be established to help patrolmen make decisions in tense situations. Police should be given special training in the prevention and control of riots. Strict rules should be written covering the use of riot-control weapons, and alternative, nonlethal equipment should be developed. The commission condemned police departments that are preparing for a long, hot summer simply by buying such destructive weapons as tanks and machine guns. "Weapons which are designed to destroy, not to control," it said, "have no place in densely populated urban communities."

> EMPLOYMENT. Two million jobs should be created over the next three years, half by the government and half by private enterprise. Business is already opening jobs to the "hardcore jobless" (see BUSINESS), but more must be done. The Federal Government should give tax credits or payments to private employers to reimburse them for the extra costs of training. Tax and other incentives also should be used to spark investments in poverty areas.

> EDUCATION. Racial discrimination and de facto segregation should be fought vigorously by invoking civil rights laws and by rewarding cooperative schools with substantial federal aid. Federal support also should be increased for adult-education programs to eliminate illiteracy, to "dramatically" improve schools in the ghetto and poverty areas, and to provide higher education for poor students.

> WELFARE. There should be uniform national standards of assistance to en sure that each American family has an annual income at least as high as the poverty level of $3,335. The Federal Government should bear a minimum of 90% of all welfare costs. Families should receive assistance as soon as they move into a new area, without waiting to meet residence requirements. As a long-range goal, the Federal Government should "develop a national system of income supplementation."

> HOUSING. The President only last month asked Congress in his urban message for 6,000,000 units for low-and moderate-income families within ten years, a program that Congress is not likely to pass without major surgery. But the commission nonetheless recommended that the building time be speeded up. Six million units should be built in five years, 600,000 of them in the next year.

Though the commission offered no estimates of the cost of its recommendations, the price tag for its ambitious program could run into hundreds of billions of dollars. And Congress is obviously in no mood for such a costly program, as it has demonstrated by its dogged resistance to the Johnson Administration's civil rights bill and a 10% income tax surcharge. Presumably, the politically savvy commissioners, aware of the congressional mood, and seeking to escape the apathy that has greeted similar reports since 1922, hoped that the crisis-toned report would shock the nation into action.

In one respect, they may have succeeded far better than they hoped. By breathing barely a word of criticism against Negroes, the commissioners exposed their report to charges of prejudice from white extremists, while black extremists have already cited it as "proof" that America is dominated by "white racism." The fact remains, however, that never before has the U.S. been so imperiled by the threat of open racial warfare. Thus, while adoption of the whole of the commission's list of recommendations is too much to expect, for the nation to ignore the report would seem all but impossible.

* Chairman: Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. Vice Chairman: New York City Mayor John Lindsay. Members: Civil Rights Leader Roy Wilkins, Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, Labor Leader I. W. Abel, Industrialist Charles B. Thornton, Oklahoma Senator Fred R. Harris, Kentucky Commissioner of Commerce Katherine Graham Peden, Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins, and Representatives James C. Gorman of California and William M. McCulloch of Ohio.

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