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7. The Survivor
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177 7 The Survivor Wilkins was tiring of the fight. The continued unrest in the ghettoes, the foiled RAM plan to assassinate him, and the aggressive rhetoric left him feeling “violence well[ing] up around all of us.”1 He was now in his late sixties and had suffered with ill health intermittently for the past thirty years. Nevertheless, he still refused to consider retirement; he had resisted several internal attempts to remove him and had survived most of his detractors in other groups. But with no succession plan in place, questions were beginning to be raised about who should succeed Wilkins and what the NAACP’s direction should be in the coming decade, a decade in which the next steps were far from clear. His position as the establishment’s favorite civil rights leader was cemented when Johnson asked him to sit on a presidential commission. Disturbed by yet more violence in the summer of 1967, Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to answer three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? And, what can be done to prevent it happening again and again?”2 Illinois governor Otto Kerner chaired the commission, and the president asked Wilkins to join the panel, which was made up of four congressmen; the police chief of Atlanta, Georgia; the mayor of New York; a businessman; a union leader; and the commissioner of commerce for Kentucky. All were considered moderates on civil rights; they were also all white. Wilkins was, in addition to being the only black person on the panel, the only one who had been actively involved in the civil rights struggle. As such, according to Nathaniel Jones, who was assistant general counsel for the Commission and later the NAACP’s general counsel, Wilkins supplied a neces- 178 ROY WILKINS sary firsthand perspective on the history and the realities of the black experience.3 The moderate composition of the group initially attracted criticism, particularly from the more militant wing of the civil rights movement, which doubted that a committee made up of these establishment figures could emerge with any recommendations of substance. But the panelists were appalled at what they discovered, and when the commission presented its report at the beginning of March 1968 it delivered a damning indictment of American society.4 “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” a state of affairs for which the Kerner Commission blamed white society. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it.”5 The commission’s many recommendations included a stronger welfare system to help support black families in the poorest areas, the creation of two million new jobs, vocational training for the long-term unemployed, and the construction of six million affordable homes within five years.6 Civil rights leaders across the spectrum praised the commission’s findings. Even CORE’s Floyd McKissick was delighted. “We’re on our way to reaching the moment of truth. It’s the first time whites have said: ‘We’re racists.’ Now’s the time to seek some common truths.” He also said that CORE considered the report to be such “an important moment in the history of this country, whites finally admitting racism, that we will have a full written response whereby there can commence a type of dialogue that never existed here before.” Martin Luther King called the report’s recommendations “timely” and congratulated Wilkins personally by saying that the pronouncement on white racism was “an important confession of a harsh truth.”7 Unfortunately, there was silence from the White House. Johnson saw the Kerner report as a direct repudiation of his attempts to address the problems facing black Americans and was furious at the commission’s findings.8 He initially refused to receive a copy, and said publicly that he agreed with only some of its proposals, claiming that it needed more financial detail. For example, although no costs were listed in the report, [3.17.6.75] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 23:07 GMT) The Survivor 179 White House aides estimated that the proposal to create two million jobs would alone require an increase in the federal budget of approximately $6 billion, while enhancing Social Security along the lines recommended by the Kerner panel would require an extra $7–9 billion.9 When...