Story 04
The Kerner Commission
When riots tore through dozens of American cities in the late 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson created an Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—known as the Kerner Commission—which identified systemic racism as the driving force behind violent upheaval in impoverished Black neighborhoods from Watts to Detroit to Newark.
The Commission argued that racism within the media was part of the problem: reporting and writing "only from the standpoint of the white man's world… is not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of our society." Further, the Commission reported, “the journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring and promoting Negroes… We urge the news media to do everything possible to train and promote their Negro reporters." The Post lagged in doing so, and in 1972 seven Black reporters filed a discrimination complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Gilliam later wrote in her memoir that she felt proud of the "Metro Seven," and felt sure that their complaint helped her land her editing job.
