Racial Tensions Have Grown Worse, Kerner Commission’s Former Director Tells Ncrac

“It’s one year later and one year worse,” David Ginsburg, former executive director of the Kerner Commission, today told the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council in an assessment of developments in the urban crisis since the Commission issued its historic warning last year that America was heading toward racial polarization.

Mr. Ginsburg, a Washington attorney, who coordinated the exhaustive study conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders–the Presidential body headed by former Gov. Otto Kerner of Illinois–cited the increase in civil disorders, student turbulence that continued on college campuses and has since struck high schools, and a rise in the number of crimes of violence. He also cited “police incidents” which, he said, threaten civil peace in slums and ghettos and the lack of needed reforms in systems of criminal justice as clear indications that “one year later we find that the nation has not reversed the movement apart.”

Mr. Ginsburg told the NCRAC assembly of 250 Jewish organizational leaders and community relations specialists that the Kerner Commission’s recommendations for resolving racial imbalances in employment, housing, welfare and education “have neither been ignored nor implemented–they await the reordering of our national priorities.” This, he added, “is bound to come.”

But he also stressed that “no effective nationwide attack is possible” until white political support for corrective legislation is “created and forcefully expressed to Congress.” He urged the Jewish community to participate fully in this effort.

While “great progress’ has been made in striking down both legal support for, and the actual effects of “overt racism,” the problem persists in many forms, Mr. Ginsburg said. He listed as examples the “deliberate exclusion” of non-whites from labor unions, law firms, certain industries, school districts, private schools, social clubs, and all-white residential neighborhoods.

But a more serious and “subtle” problem, Mr. Ginsburg said, was what he termed “institutional subordination” of non-whites created by self-perpetuating patterns of discrimination in American life. One such example, he said, was suburban zoning laws which, while incorporating non-discriminatory clauses, were designed to discourage low income housing in order to maintain high living standards and open space, and consequently created discriminatory situations. “It is this invisibility of ‘institutional’ subordination which is so difficult to cope with,” he said.