"In 1968 the Kerner Commission established by Lyndon Johnson to examine the causes of the racial riots of the previous few summers released its report which rendered the failings of institutions and social forces that had delivered the country to that moment of racial reckoning, beginning in the Colonial era and continuing through the formation of what were then called ghettos. The report stated, bluntly, that what white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, maintain it, and condone it. The report is best remembered for its warning that, barring corrective measures, the nation would continue on its path toward becoming two societies — one black, one white — separate and unequal." . . .