The Essential Kerner Commission Report
with Jelani Cobb

Wednesday, October 27, 2021 | 7:00 pm
​Byrd Center Auditorium
Jelani Cobb will discuss his recently published The Essential Kerner Commission Report.  Cobb is a staff writer for the New Yorker and Professor of Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. He is a leading public intellectual on racial topics and public affairs.
 
The Kerner Commission Report: the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson and published to acclaim in 1968. It reported on the attitudes of Black and White Americans about the racial violence of the Civil Rights era, looked at policing practices, the causes of violence, the problem of law enforcement, and the tangle of issues in Black/White relationships that had deep roots from the time of slavery.
 
It became one of the most widely read government studies in history. A month after its publication Martin Luther King was assassinated and violence erupted in more than 100 cities across the nation, which only added urgency to the subject of the report. The Report asked: 
  • How can we as a people end the resort to violence while we build a better society?
  • How can the Nation realize the promise of a single society—one nation indivisible—which yet remains unfulfilled?
As Cobb writes, the report was “crucially fated to be taken as a forecast rather than a review” of the past. In the present time of civil disorders a look back at the world of the 1960s casts revealing insights into our current crisis. More than a half century after the Kerner Commission Report this look back is a look at our troubling present.

Ray Smock, former Historian of the House of Representatives and currently Interim Director of the Byrd Center, will introduce Professor Cobb.  Following the presentation Jelani Cobb will answer questions from the auditorium audience as well as from Zoom viewers via chat.
 
This is your chance to hear a dynamic speaker discuss an urgent topic. While space will be limited to 100 seats at the Byrd Center auditorium, Zoom participation is virtually unlimited. This is a premier event and one of the few Jelani Cobb will be doing in regard to this publication.  ​
Jelani Cobb joined the Journalism School faculty in 2016. He has contributed to The New Yorker since 2012, and became a staff writer in 2015. He is the recipient of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Award for Opinion and Analysis writing and writes frequently about race, politics, history and culture.

He was most recently an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut where he specialized in post-Civil War African American history, 20th century American politics and the history of the Cold War. Dr. Cobb is also a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright and Ford Foundations.
He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress as well as To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. His articles and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, The New Republic, Essence, Vibe, The Progressive, and TheRoot.com. His collection The Devil and Dave Chappelle and Other Essays was published in 2007. He has also contributed to a number of anthologies including In Defense of Mumia, Testimony, Mending the World and Beats, Rhymes and Life.
​
He is editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader. Born and raised in Queens, New York. He is a graduate of Howard University and Rutgers University where he received his doctorate in American History.
This event is sponsored by the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education in partnership with Shepherdstown's Four Seasons Bookstore.