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by Jelani Cobb (Editor), Matthew Guariglia (Editor), Jelani Cobb (Introduction by)
The Kerner Commission Report, released a month before Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination, is among a handful of government reports that reads like an illuminating history book--a dramatic, often shocking, exploration of systemic racism that transcends its time. Yet Columbia University professor and New Yorker correspondent Jelani Cobb argues that this prescient report, which examined more than a dozen urban uprisings between 1964 and 1967, has been woefully neglected.
In an enlightening new introduction, Cobb reveals how these uprisings were used as political fodder by Republicans and demonstrates that this condensed edition of the Report should be essential reading at a moment when protest movements are challenging us to uproot racial injustice. A detailed examination of economic inequality, race, and policing, the Report has never been more relevant, and demonstrates to devastating effect that it is possible for us to be entirely cognizant of history and still tragically repeat it.
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"Jelani Cobb's Essential Kerner Commission Report is more than essential. Today its relevance is existential."
--David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963
"Jelani Cobb, as one of the nation's preeminent journalists and scholars, reminds us in The Essential Kerner Commission Report that knowing history is no guarantee of not repeating it, especially when the majority of voters and politicians refuse to take heed to the facts, time and time again. Perhaps with this must-read volume in the era of Ferguson and Floyd, things will be different."
--Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America
"Much of what is in the Kerner Commission Report is as relevant today as in 1968. Jelani Cobb's powerful introduction provides the context, and his clear presentation of the report is stunning in illuminating the ongoing problems of racial injustice."
--Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
