When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

by Donovan X. Ramsey

Interest in the Kerner Report was so high that it was published as a paperback and sold almost one million copies in the first two weeks of its release. But despite having created the commission and given it its mission, President Johnson was deeply unhappy with its work. Johnson, after all, had signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act into law, and the report pointed to the failures of that legislation. Simultaneously, it called out the whole of white America for its complicity in the country’s system of oppression. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the report read. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Martin Luther King, Jr., called the report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.”