Only in America

Reference 1 is an article built around the Kerner Report, a weighty report commissioned by President Johnson in response to the many racial troubles and disorders of the 1960's. From which the US - and other countries like the UK - failed to learn in the fifty years that followed. Failed to take anything like enough action.

But what I notice here is the chairman of the commission, Otto Kerner of reference 4.

Kerner was of Czech background, but born in Chicago in 1908. Well educated in the US and the UK, he joined the National Guard in 1934, retiring from it in 1954, having served in the army proper during the second world war. Having got in with the Democrats, he served in Illinois, becoming governor there in 1960. Appointed to the the chairmanship of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1967.

But after his report, things went downhill, and he was convicted of taking bribes when governor from the owner of a racetrack (reference 4), bribes to give the race track good race days, whatever that might mean. Bribes in the form of cheap stock options which both he and his briber declared on their tax returns. It being the US, what he was actually charged with and convicted of was mail fraud. He started his sentence, but was released early because he had terminal cancer. He died not long after, in 1976. There is a suggestion that had he lived, his conviction might have been overturned on appeal.

Is there a whiff of conspiracy here? That the whole sorry business was stirred up by right wing, white supremacists? Or perhaps just patriotic Republicans?

His report has a large footprint on the Internet. Plenty of material about the report. Plenty of summaries. Various people are happy to sell me a copy of the report in book form. But no-one seemed to want to give me the book in pdf form. However, I persisted and eventually Google turned up a digital image version offered by the Hathi Trust. A version digitised by Google from a copy which belonged to the University of Michigan. To be found at reference 3. All 400 pages of it.

Reference 1: A warning ignored - Jelani Cobb/NYRB - 2021. August 19th.

Reference 2: The Kerner Report - National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders - 1968.

Reference 3: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015000225410&view=1up&seq=8.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Kerner_Jr..

Reference 5: https://www.arlingtonpark.com/.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-record.html. The Hathi Trust pops up from time to time, with this being the most recent notice. A hare which was not, in the event, chased very far.

Reference 7: https://www.hathitrust.org/. 'Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests'. Something to do with the University of Michigan, from where the present text was taken. I have failed to find out who or what 'Hathi' was.