4221 - Healing Our Divided Society: A Fifty Year Update of The Kerner Commission

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

The session will review the conclusion of the 1968 Kerner Commission that there had been little progress in reducing poverty, inequality and racial injustice in America. In 2018, in its Fifty Year Update of the Kerner Commission published by Temple University Press, the Eisenhower Foundation concluded that we still have made little progress. This conclusion was arrived at by the Foundation’s National Advisory Panel, which included contributors like Marian Wright Edelman, Joseph Stiglitz and E. J. Dionne. However, the Foundation and the National Advisory Panel also stressed that we have learned a great deal about what works, and what doesn’t work, over the last fifty years. Accordingly, the nation needs to scale up what works and finance by scaling down what doesn’t work. But we cannot scale up until we create the “new will” among the American people that the original Kernrer Commission concluded was essential for progress.

Sub Unit

• Special Session

Session Organizer

• Alan Curtis, The Eisenhower Foundation

Presider

• Alan Curtis, The Eisenhower Foundation

Panelists

• Elijah Anderson, Yale University

• Michael Jeffries, Wellesley College

• Gregory D. Squires, George Washington Univ.