THE WORK THAT REMAINS
A Forty-Year Update of the Kerner Commission Report
Forty years ago, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, famously concluded that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Its recommendations to promote racial integration and remedy the economic failures that fostered a wave of inner city violence were ultimately rejected by President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission. Today, minorities still face many of the troubling conditions outlined in the commission report, including under-representation in the labor market, high rates of poverty, disparities in education funding and disproportionate involvement in the criminal justice system. In collaboration with the Eisenhower Foundation, EPI will present a forum to assess our nation's progress over the last forty years and, more important, to discuss what is still left to do to move us closer to an equal and high-performing society.
When and where
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Registration: 9:15 am
Program: 9:30 - 11:30 am
Economic Policy Institute
1333 H Street, NW, East Tower, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20005
[ RSVP below ]
Introduction
CHRISTIAN DORSEY
Outreach Coordinator, Economic Policy Institute
Opening remarks
DR. VALERIE RAWLSTON WILSON
Senior Resident Scholar, National Urban League Policy Institute
DR. ALAN CURTIS
President and CEO, Eisenhower Foundation
DR. JOHN IRONS
Research and Policy Director, Economic Policy Institute
DR. ALGERNON AUSTIN
Director of Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, Economic Policy Institute
Discussant
HILARY O. SHELTON
Director, NAACP-Washington Bureau
RSVP: Click here to reserve your seat now
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Among America’s major racial and ethnic groups, blacks suffer most severely from a lack of jobs. As indicated in Figure A, from 1997 to 2007, blacks consistently had significantly lower employment rates when compared with whites. In 1997, the white-black differential in employment rates was 6.5 percentage points. By 2000, as a result of job growth in the second half of the 1990s, the gap had fallen to 4.1 percentage points. The 2001 recession and subsequent “jobless recovery” reversed these gains, and by 2004, the white-black employment rate gap had increased to 5.9 percentage points. Since 2004, the gap had been declining again, but the current economic downturn will likely reverse these gains.
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