Brace yourselves, young 'uns. This is going to be a big year for baby boomer nostalgia.
And what a coincidence. The 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report just happens to occur as Democrats are deciding whether they will nominate their first black candidate or their first female candidate for president.
Much progress has been made since the historic report by President Lyndon B. Johnson's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner Jr.
Mr. Johnson named the 11-member panel to investigate the causes of 160 race riots that ripped through American cities in 1967, leaving more than 80 dead and more than $200 million worth of destruction. The report's ringing conclusion: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."
This had been said before. But for the first time, a distinguished presidential panel, not a bunch of black militants or lefty radicals, was saying that urban unrest had not erupted because of a communist conspiracy but because of white racism.
"White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto," the report declared. "White institutions created it and maintain it and white society condones it."
Today, it has become a cliche to say that we have come a long way, yet have a long way to go. It is more accurate to say that most of us African-Americans have come a long way from "the ghetto," as the Kerner report referred to overcrowded, low-income black neighborhoods, while too many of our former neighbors have been left behind.
We don't have waves of riots as we did in the 1960s, partly because we have locked up so many people who might cause one.
Last week, the Pew Center on the States issued a report that finds the U.S. leads the world in incarceration rates and raw numbers, especially for young black men. More than one in 100 adults in the U.S. is in jail or prison, the report said. That includes one in every nine black men ages 20 to 34.
Throwing more offenders in prison reduces crime, studies show, but so does reducing joblessness, raising wages and putting more police officers on the streets, according to Adam Gelb, who co-authored the Pew report.
America's low-income neighborhoods and their school systems are still segregated by race, but with a key difference from 1968: Today's racial divide is a consequence of an income divide. White flight to the suburbs in the wake of the riots in the 1960s was quickly followed by middle-class black flight. Today's urban poor are fewer in number but more isolated, not only from the white mainstream but also from upwardly mobile blacks.
Instead of traditional street riots, a group of experts who included former Kerner Commission members said in a follow-up report 20 years ago, we have "quiet riots" of street crimes, drug addiction, family violence and other self-destructive behavior stirred by rage, frustration and despair.
Ten years from now, as we look at the 50th anniversary of the Kerner report, I hope we can point to progress in closing the gap between the upwardly mobile and those stuck on the bottom. A presidential campaign is an excellent time to begin that task. We don't need to wait for a riot.
Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. His column appears weekly in The Sun. His e-mail is cptime@aol.com.