"What Happened, Why It Happened and How to Prevent It from Happening Again"

"A new study that builds on the Kerner Report's work was released this week. Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years After the Kerner Report was co-edited by Fred Harris (the sole surviving member of the original Commission) and Alan Curtis, CEO of the Milton Eisenhower Foundation. It notes that poverty has increased and so has the inequality gap between white America and Americans who are black, brown and Native American. The gains children of color made when efforts continued to desegregate schools in the 60s began to reverse by 1988. Court decisions that loosened oversight of previously de facto segregated schools resulted in a huge change: In 1988, almost half of all students of color went to majority-white schools. Today that number has plummeted to 20 percent. Poverty is such a problem, the study concluded, that if it is not mitigated, America's very democracy is threatened.
"'I was 37 when I served on the (Kerner) Commission,' Harris told NPR. 'Whoever thought that 50 years later, we'd still be talking about the same things? That's kinda sad.'"

Karen Grigsby Bates at NPR finds that fifty years later America is even more "separate and unequal."

And Alice George at Smithsonian also looks at the report.