Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report

In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that America was heading toward “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Today, America’s communities are experiencing increasing racial tensions and inequality, working-class resentment over the unfulfilled American Dream, white supremacy violence, toxic inaction in Washington, and the decline of the nation’s example around the world.

In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report. This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work—and not work. 

Contributors include: Oscar Perry Abello, Elijah Anderson, Anil N.F. Aranha, Jared Bernstein, Henry G. Cisneros, Elliott Currie, Linda Darling-Hammond, Martha F. Davis, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Delbert S. Elliott, Carol Emig, Jeff Faux, Ron Grzywinski, Michael P. Jeffries, Lamar K. Johnson, Celinda Lake, Marilyn Melkonian, Gary Orfield, Diane Ravitch, Laurie Robinson, Herbert C. Smitherman, Jr., Joseph Stiglitz, Dorothy Stoneman, Kevin  Washburn, Valerie Wilson, Gary Younge,  Julian E. Zelizer, and the editors

• What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America
• Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism
• White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
• How Democracies Die
• Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
• White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
• We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
• Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap (Multicultural Education Series)
• The Kerner Report (The James Madison Library in American Politics)