Nationwide protests. Racist discrimination. Militarized police. These were the characteristics used to describe America during the long hot summer of 1967, when riots swept through more than 150 cities. They still describe America today, as the government has responded to protests against racist policing and immigration raids with militarized police forces backed by the Marines and the National Guard. 

It all sounds eerily similar to the America of more than half a century ago, when a presidential commission diagnosed the country’s problem: racism, particularly in policing, was causing widespread political unrest. 

“When a protest becomes that broad-based — cutting across gender lines and ethnic lines — then I think you have the opportunity to realize this is a true political movement,” says Rick Loessberg, an urban historian and the former planning commissioner for Dallas County, Texas, and the author of “Two Societies: The Rioting of 1967 and the Writing of the Kerner Report.”

“This is not just a group or a segment of the population letting off steam,” says Loessberg, “which was what was one of the explanations that was used in the 1960s. This is something else that’s much, much deeper and much more significant.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Loessberg about what America learned — and didn’t learn — from our history of racist policing and political unrest.

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

TRANSCRIPT 

Akela Lacy: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy. 

President Donald Trump announced last month that he would end his deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles. 

KSBY: Today the Pentagon announced that it is withdrawing 2,000 National Guard troops from Los Angeles. 

KSBW: That deployment is now over. About 4,000 National Guard troops, 700 Marines were sent to LA during protests over immigration raids last month. 

WDIV: The deployment happened despite objections from city officials and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. 

AL: The news came days after a federal judge ordered the administration to stop indiscriminate immigration raids in LA. 

From masked agents taking people off the streets into unmarked vans, to men in military fatigues on horseback stalking through an empty Los Angeles park, streets emptied as communities hid in fear of the next raid. 

The images of militarized police and federal agents descending on the public were striking — and strikingly familiar. That’s because we’ve been here before. Not just in LA, but as a country. And that’s what we’re talking about today with historian Rick Loessberg, who has written extensively about America’s great wave of unrest in the summer of 1967.

That’s when more than 150 cities across America exploded in racial uprisings. Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other communities were convulsed by what became known as the “long, hot summer.” President Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to figure out what was going on, and the resulting report — the Kerner Report — delivered a devastating conclusion: America was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”

This pattern of unrest followed by national soul-searching isn’t new. From police beating Selma civil rights marchers on “Bloody Sunday” in 1965, to attacking people protesting police brutality in 2020, to shooting striking miners in the back during the Lattimer Massacre of 1897 to this summer’s protests in LA. We’ve been here before.

Joining me this week is Rick Loessberg, an urban planning historian and former planning director for Dallas County, Texas. Loessberg is the author of the 2024 book, “Two Societies: The Rioting of 1967 and the Writing of the Kerner Report.” Welcome to the show, Rick. 

Rick Loessberg: Thank you for having me, Akela.

AL: So why are we talking about a report from 1967? What about this is relevant today? 

RL: Well, it doesn’t take anyone very long who thumbs through 600 pages to discover that it primarily addresses the same topics that monopolize our conversation today: inappropriate police conduct and equitable economic outcomes; and then just a general lack of understanding and awareness, and a recognition of past and present discrimination. 

AL: The reaction to racist policing was found to be a major cause of the unrest in 1967. You could easily say the same thing today as far as racist policing. “Border czar” Tom Homan just said on national TV that it’s perfectly fine for ICE to go after people based on their physical characteristics.

Police have also become more militarized since what we’ve seen in 1967, and we’re seeing the National Guard deployed for far less than it was deployed then. Some of the commission’s recommendations have taken shape in policy as far as diversifying the police. But can you actually fix racism in policing as it expands to all these other agencies and ensnares police and immigration enforcement or removals, or is it a feature rather than a bug?

RL: Well, any institution — any organization — is only as good as the people who are in it and who lead it. It’s obviously a monumental task. I think the progress that we’ve made since 1968, we’ve made substantial progress. You know, people ask me, is the glass half full or half empty? And I say, yes. But the reality is, if you just look at the last five to eight to 10 years, things have changed dramatically, and we’re seeing things that I know in my lifetime I never thought I would see.

Things that I have taken for granted that we’re America and this just does not happen here, that we’ve learned from our mistakes and maybe we have learned from our mistakes, but that knowledge is not permanent. You’re right about the militarization of police. One of the good things though, that has come out of the 1967 riots, and I believe the Kerner Report, is they made extensive recommendations about how crowd controls should be done.

When you go back and you look at some of the incidents in 1967, one of the ways they tried to disperse crowds then was they would literally use live ammunition and shoot over the heads of the demonstrators or the protesters or the rioters. Needless to say, that was not an effective way, and it ended up really just inflaming and making a bad situation far, far worse. They’ve learned from those things. 

Police — almost at any medium to large size city level — undergo some sort of crowd-control training when they’re in the police academy and they have refresher courses. The National Guard, when President Trump federalized it a few weeks ago and sent it to Los Angeles, it did not immediately go into Los Angeles.

It took like a two-day refresher course in riot and crowd control training before they were put into the streets. It’s also important to know that when the president federalized the National Guard, he did not have them go in there to quell the disorders. They were there to protect federal property and to protect ICE agents.

They were not there to break up any demonstrations. That’s not how it was conveyed in the press, and that’s certainly not how the president portrayed it. But those were the orders and those were the orders that were followed. 

AL: I’m glad you mentioned the orders because while that is what the president said in the order, I mean, I think you could also make the argument that gives cover to National Guard agents who are there to say, “Oh, well, we’re only here to protect ICE agents.” But no matter what the National Guard members are doing while they’re there, it does have a chilling effect on protest in general.

RL: And that’s an important thing that you just mentioned, Akela. I’m not sure that’s really gotten a lot of attention in the past. The National Guard has been called out to quell disorders when really it looked like things were getting outta hand. 

AL: Right. 

RL: And with the exception of a handful of times in the 1960s when they’re trying to, for instance, integrate the University of Mississippi, it was always done with the governor’s concurrence.

Clearly this was not done this time. And when you look at the level of violence that was occurring in Los Angeles, that first day that caused President Trump to take the steps that he did, it was nowhere near the level of magnitude of violence destruction that has happened or preceded the beginnings of other major riots.

And I’m concerned that if this becomes now the standard operating procedure: when a demonstration occurs that a president does not like for whatever reason he’s going to federalize the National Guard and send in the Marines. 

AL: One other piece of this that I want to ask you about is the demographic change in terms of who we’re seeing being the subject of protests, participating in protests. It’s being the subject of aggressive policing. We’re talking about Latino communities facing ICE raids versus African American communities protesting discriminatory and brutal policing. Does this change in demographics shift the dynamics around how police are responding or how the government is framing these protests?

RL: You bring out something that I think is very, very important. In 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, we saw demonstrations all over the United States. And it wasn’t just in the large urban centers like Los Angeles and New York and Boston. It was even in Alaska and Montana and places like that where they had demonstrations. And I want to make it very clear that a demonstration is not a disorder, is not a riot. 

However, the president at the time tried to conflate the two and make it sound like it was 1967 all over again. When you go back and you look at the people who participated in the demonstrations and even in the demonstrations that got out of hand in 2020 and compare them to 1967, it’s vastly different.

The only thing they really had in common was that the demonstration began in response to some sort of police incident, whether it was somebody being arrested in Newark, New Jersey, in 1967, or of course the murder of George Floyd. And the same thing that we’re seeing in Los Angeles the past month. It was in response to a perceived slight by the criminal justice law enforcement system.

When you then look at the people who were participating in 1967, they were overwhelmingly Black, overwhelmingly male. When you look at George Floyd, it’s almost 50-50 Anglo and African American, and it’s one-third female. And when you look at the video clips from Los Angeles, you see exactly what you said: Yes, it’s Hispanic. It’s also Anglo. You also see Asians there. 

And I think when a protest becomes that broad-based — cutting across gender lines and ethnic lines — then I think you have the opportunity to realize this is a true political movement. This is not just a group or a segment of the population letting off steam, which was what was one of the explanations that was used in the 1960s.

This is something else that’s much, much deeper and much more significant. 

AL: And even more significant that you have, still, the deployment of federal law enforcement and the National Guard. There was part of the research on the commission that made the argument that the riots were a form of political expression.

RL: Yes. They didn’t say that specifically in the end, but yes, there was an internal staff paper that came right out and said that, yes. 

AL: You also note that the report characterized events that we wouldn’t consider riots as such. We saw similar narratives about outside agitators in 2020. I want to ask, why does this matter?

What is that idea really suggesting? The notion that outside agitators or some conspiracy, or someone who isn’t really representative of the public is responsible when we see any expression of public outrage, 

RL: Well, prior to 1967 or the Kerner Report, you’re right. All prior studies or reports trying to investigate — why did a riot happen — whether it was Watts 1965 or there had been an earlier Detroit riot in 1943 or a Harlem riot in 1939, they all had the same conclusion: That it was riff raff, it was losers, it was people who didn’t have ties to the community. It was troublemakers. It was outside agitators, as you said. 

The Kerner Commission to its credit wanted to see if that was true or not. So they conducted a study of almost 14,000 people who had been arrested, and they looked at their arrest records and their backgrounds, and they discovered that they were people who had been born in the community in which they were arrested, that actually stayed in school longer than the average individual in their neighborhood. They had an arrest record that was really no different than anybody else in their neighborhood, and most of them actually had a job. 

In short, these were the people who are playing the game, who are doing what you’re supposed to do to get ahead. And when you think that these people were trying to do the right thing — work hard, stay in school, stay out of trouble — and yet they felt like they’d had enough of that because it wasn’t working. That’s very significant and that’s very troubling.

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not the communist from [the] 1960s from Russia doing this to us. It’s not Black radicals and militants either. It’s us. And so when it’s us that is being that troubled and is willing to take those steps, you feel like you have to recognize that.

[Break.]

AL: This conversation about how the report’s authors defined riots versus protests, but more broadly about how we define violence in terms of physical violence against other people versus destruction of property, let’s say. This has colored the debates over the anti-ICE protests and going back to 2020, going back decades further to the civil rights movement.

One argument being: How can you police the response to institutional violence being waged by the government? The other being, if you do something like light a cop car on fire, you’re ruining the optics for everyone else — creating this kind of false binary between nonviolent or violent protests. You talked about the suppression of one part of the report that characterized the unrest, including the act the commission considered violent as an expression of political power. Can you talk about what the controversy was there? 

RL: President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission at the end of July 1967 to investigate why there had been more than 150 riots in the U.S. that year. And what the social scientists concluded was that there was this political bent to the rioting.

People who were rioting weren’t just letting off steam. They were concerned that they had no future. They had a sense that they had no power. And they put that together in a report and delivered it in December of 1967. The report was written by some very, very capable individuals, but they will openly admit they were sort of inexperienced at that point in their career, and they had just either gotten their PhDs or they had just begun teaching at colleges and they were teaching at places like Harvard. So these were very well respected, accomplished individuals. 

Their writing tended to reflect their youthful exuberance, as one of them would say, and also the times. There was a lot of “the power of the people” kind of statement in their draft study. And when the senior staff read this, it was like: Nope, can’t do it. It’s just not working. 

As one of the senior staff members told me — first of all, he wished it had been better edited. If it had been better edited and some of the rhetoric had been toned down, it would’ve been a much easier fit. Staff members told me, though, we were already going out on a limb saying that it was racism that was causing the rioting.

No other riot report in the 20th century had made that conclusion before. It had always been the riffraff. And so now we’re blaming white society and white institutions. We felt like we couldn’t go any further and actually say this was a political protest because then it would look like the country was falling apart 

AL: Even if it was true. I mean, what do you say to people who say, “Who cares if people are being turned off?” Who don’t think that it should be a primary concern. 

RL: Words do matter. They really, really do. And I was lucky enough to be a part of some key decision making processes with our county commissioners and got to administer a lot of the major types of programs that the Kerner Report recommended.

And it doesn’t take very long to realize words do matter. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a public or a private discussion over a contract, over a program, over a proposed statute or ordinance, and it boils down to words. We have to be so mindful of when we’re having a conversation about any difficult topic, but especially something like race right now. You cannot be afraid to say the truth, but you need to make sure that you say it in a very straightforward manner. 

“If you look at the composition of the commission, you never would’ve thought they would’ve been a group that would’ve unanimously concluded that the rioting was a result of white racism. ”

I go back to one of the things that we can learn from the Kerner Report and the commission that wrote it is: These 11 individuals had their disagreements. And if you look at the composition of the commission, you never would’ve thought they would’ve been a group that would’ve unanimously concluded that the rioting was a result of white racism. You had a white southern police chief. You had a small town Republican congressman from Ohio who never voted for any of the Great Society’s social legislation and only had about two percent of his district being Black. He was on the commission. You had a senator from Oklahoma. Can you imagine a senator from Oklahoma today taking any progressive stance? 

You had a self-made millionaire from West Texas who believed in the bootstrap mentality as much as he believed in the American flag and apple pie. Yet you had that kind of group of individuals who came together and somehow crafted, I think, the most boldly, starkly worded report on race in our nation’s history.

And one of the ways they did that is the way they communicated with each other. They had the utmost respect for each other. They had their disagreements and they would pound the table, but they didn’t say, “well, you’re a racist.” And the other one didn’t respond by saying, “you’re woke” or “you’re a socialist.”

“They chose to emphasize and focus on what they had in common and then work from there.”

And what they chose to do is they chose to emphasize and focus on what they had in common and then work from there. And when they did that, they found that, again not surprisingly words mattered. That it was maybe only a difference in tone or emphasis that they had, and I think that’s one of the things we have to do here now [when] talking about race. 

AL: The bipartisan consensus that you’re talking about, a big part of this, at least in the book, is possible because these commission members actually visited the cities.

RL: Yes. 

AL: You kind of alluded to this, but could something like that ever happen today? Like, do members of Congress supporting these ICE raids just need to visit other cities? Are we past that point and this is just purely political? 

RL: All movements — all changes in the wind — start at an individual level and it only takes one. And when you have — and we’ll use the Senate as an example — when you have such an even split between Democrats and Republicans, all it takes is a handful on either side to change the outcome and the same thing would happen in the House as well. So yeah, that’s a very good idea. 

AL: You also dig into the influence of riot theory on the writing of the report among other disciplines in the social sciences. The report went out of its way to avoid the appearance that it was condoning the unrest or any form of destruction of property, emphasized support for “law and order,” and avoided saying the riots were rational or justifiable, even though that belief was shared by some of the members.

The window for acceptable forms of protests — the scale from like riot to protest has in many ways closed significantly since 1967. Like I just think of campus protests against the genocide in Gaza, the police response to protests in 2020. What forms of civil disobedience or protest does that leave us with?

RL: That’s the hard part about protests in general. And when you go back and you look at, for instance, the movements that were done in the ’60s with the Freedom Riders in Martin Luther King’s march and the March on Washington, how meticulously planned they all were, and oftentimes they were confronted with extreme violence, yet they kept their composure.

If you’re going to have a demonstration, it needs to be very well planned and orchestrated and led like any organization, like any movement, so that it doesn’t go off in the wrong direction. But that’s— it’s easier to say than to do, I think. 

AL: I really wanted to talk about this because I think this is one of the most important links to what we’re seeing today.

You discussed the debate around the chapter in the report on Black history in America as being both a preview and a guide to the hysteria over critical race theory and attacks on DEI. How are they related? 

RL: The commission realized early on that to be able to really reach America and bring about the change that it thought it was needed, that it was going to have to explain how far reaching discrimination had been.

So they went back and they commissioned several of the country’s leading American historians. One of which was John Hope Franklin, who’s regarded as perhaps the most preeminent African American historian of our time. And they asked them to put together this chapter on African American history and really what that was in this case was to what extent discrimination had existed and what had been done to perpetuate it and continue it, and what efforts had been made to try to combat it during the time. And that became a key chapter. 

Now when the commission staff presented the first draft of that chapter to the commission, you got a lot of the reactions that you get today when talking about critical race theory. You had comments about, “How can you say this about Abraham Lincoln? He’s one of the greatest presidents we ever had” and “I don’t think we’re giving whites enough credit in the abolitionist movement” and “This part of the chapter reads like some sort of political manifesto.” And again, it looked like you were listening in on some school board meeting in some city somewhere.

The fact though, that they were able to work through those comments and concerns, just like the ones we hear right now, gives me hope that if people have the opportunity to sit down and have a mature conversation about what the facts are and how you can present it. That you can present the part of our history that makes us uncomfortable. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we hate our country, and it doesn’t mean that we’re embarrassed to be Americans, but it’s something that we can acknowledge that’s who we were once, but that’s not who we are now. 

AL: I think one of the differences, at least, I mean I wasn’t alive in 1967, but we’re saying critical race theory, but really we’re using the language of the people who are claiming that anything that talks about racism or Black history is critical race theory — using it as a stand-in to set the levels that this is something that we should be worried about. It’s concerning that 58 years later we’re still having the conversations, but there’s maybe less good faith in the room.

RL: Exactly.

AL: I mean, I don’t know how to square that. 

RL: In many respects, what we’re hearing today has always been there, or was there even in the ’60s. Now there’s more of a national effort to point out these incidents and turn it into more of a protest movement against, as you said, the teaching of anything having to do with African American history.

AL: The report made a number of recommendations, several of which it followed through on. Can you tell us what it would look like today in America if we’d followed through on more of those recommendations? 

RL: Well, if you look at a lot of the accounts written about the report since 1968, everyone laments that it never really was implemented and it perhaps wasn’t implemented at a pace and at a scale that the commission desired.

But when you go down through the checklist and you made a reference that there’s almost hundreds of recommendations that it made from the national level to the local level, to the private sector, a great many of them were implemented and they were substantial recommendations. They weren’t minor details. They were major reforms.

Now, one of the things that I think a lot of us forget, myself included, until I had one of the commission staff members point this out to me is that the world’s not static. And that it’s always changing, and that even in 1968 when the report was released, this individual told me he believed the report had already been overcome by events that were occurring.

A month after the report was released, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Two months after that, Robert Kennedy was killed. So after that the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. [At] the end of that month, you had the riot at the Chicago National Democratic Convention. And that was just for one year.

And when you think about what the next decade was, where you still had the Vietnam War, then you had Watergate, then you had the energy crisis and AIDS and homelessness, so many other things began competing for our national focus. It’s hard to say, “What would the world be like if Kerner had been more vigorously enacted the first year or two?”

AL: All of those issues that sort of, I mean, not every single one, but like homelessness, the housing crisis, everything — all of these things are also tied. 

RL: Yes. And, and again, that’s what makes this so difficult sometimes, is that one problem it’s not just isolated — it’s in conjunction with so many other things.

AL: Right. 

RL: You know, it’s not just lack of education, it’s lack of health care, it’s lack of adequate housing. 

AL: Right. 

RL: Just go on down the list. 

AL: Thank you for joining us on the Intercept Briefing, Rick. 

RL: Thank you for having me. As we mentioned at the very beginning, the report is still so relevant and the last few months have pointed that out. And I appreciate the opportunity to talk about what’s happening now and why. 

AL: That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

We want to hear from you. 

Share your story with us at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278. You can also email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

This episode was produced by Truc Nguyen. Laura Flynn is our Supervising Producer. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. And transcript by Anya Mehta. 

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy. 

Thanks for listening.