Said the Commission, "White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II .

There had been mounting civil unrest in a few predominantly Black and some Puerto Rican neighborhoods since 1965, but what happened in 1967 shocked and terrified much of America as the evening news seemed to regularly show National Guardsmen and police crouching behind parked cars, tanks rumbling down dark streets, towering fires, and blocks and blocks of rubble and broken windows.

In his remarks upon signing the order to establish the Commission, Johnson asked for answers to three basic questions about the riots: "What happened?

This methodology featured examining the characteristics of 13,000 people who had been arrested for rioting, sending six-member field teams to over twenty cities, interviewing state and local law enforcement personnel, using FBI reports, studying census bureau data, and talking to and conducting public opinion polling of riot area residents.

The Commission's private enterprise panel was created to identify what incentives might encourage businesses to hire low-income workers or expand or relocate to low-income/minority areas.

Its primary finding was that the riots resulted from Black frustration at the lack of economic opportunity and the manner in which they were treated by white society, especially by the police.

Bantam published it in an inexpensive, mass-market paperback book format with an introduction written by Tom Wicker of The New York Times.

"[10] The report combined a detailed description of how eight riots unfolded and ended with governmental statistics that demonstrated the differences in living conditions between America's Black and white populations.

In fact, these individuals were usually lifelong residents of the city where they rioted, they had actually stayed in school a little longer and had previously been arrested no more than the average person from their neighborhood, and they had a job (albeit one that did not pay particularly well).

The Report called for an end to de facto segregation, the creation of new jobs, the construction of new housing, major changes to the welfare program, and the diversification of local police and the media.

[13] It is thought that he disliked it because of a number of reasons: that the report did not adequately acknowledge the accomplishments of his Administration,[14] that its call for "unprecedented levels of funding" was unrealistic and only exacerbated the budget problems that he was already having with Congress,[15] and that he felt that a conspiracy had to be involved given the magnitude of the rioting.

[16] A Harris poll taken about a month after the report was released found that only 37% of surveyed whites believed that the riots were mainly caused by racism.

[18] In April 1968, one month after the Kerner Report was published, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and rioting of protest and grief broke out in more than 100 cities.

[20] A number of its "National Action" recommendations have been addressed to questionable effectiveness, as per the criticism of each policy: Congress passed the Fair Housing Act about one month after the report's completion, and within a few years, funding for the nation's two largest urban aid programs (Model Cities and urban renewal), as well as federal aid for education, had been doubled.

Police brutality is a massive social issue as evidenced by the many protests against them, such as those for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Freddie Gray.

[22] Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump espoused a law and order platform that favored strong policing and suppression of riots.

The Millennium Breach, co-authored by commissioner Harris, found the racial divide had grown in the subsequent years with inner city unemployment at crisis levels.

'"[25] At a 1998 lecture commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Report, Stephan Thernstrom, a conservative voice and a professor of history at Harvard University, argued: "Because the commission took for granted that the riots were the fault of white racism, it would have been awkward to have had to confront the question of why liberal Detroit blew up while Birmingham and other Southern cities — where conditions for blacks were infinitely worse — did not.