On March 1, 1968, the commission issued its final report.

Government researchers found one common denominator among those most likely to riot: They had experienced or witnessed an act of police brutality.

What causes racial riots?

In recent years, especially following the disturbances that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland following the police-involved deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, pundits and editorial writers have offered many different explanations for what causes riots. Conservatives and most mainstream media outlets often view these disturbances as “riots”—uncontrolled and irrational spasms of reckless violence usually instigated by a handful of unrepresentative malcontents and always the result of a breakdown of respect for authority. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to take a more sympathetic view of the riots and the rioters, blaming the unrest on deep-seated racism and the economic disadvantage that it produced.

The reality, however, is far more complicated and exposes the limits of the conventional wisdom on both sides of the ideological spectrum. In fact, the last time the federal government took a hard look at the causes of urban unrest was in the late 1960s, the most complex findings proved too controversial to be politically palatable. So they were excised from the final report and physically destroyed.

The year was 1967, and the nation had just experienced a series of long hot summers of rioting that culminated with the conflagrations in Newark and Detroit. While the fires were still burning in the latter city, President Lyndon Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, popularly known as the Kerner Commission, to identify the causes of the disturbances and to propose solutions to prevent them from happening again. On March 1, 1968, the commission issued its final report. In stark language the report concluded: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, and one white—separate and unequal.” It placed blame for urban ills on “white racism.” “White institutions” created the ghetto, the report stated, “white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

On March 1, 1864, Rebecca Lee Crumpler becomes the first African American woman to earn a medical degree. For much of her career she practiced community medicine in Boston, but in the aftermath of the Civil War she traveled south to treat thousands of formerly enslaved refugees. Crumpler wrote one of the first medical manuals by an African American doctor in the United States—and by a woman.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler was born Rebecca Davis in 1831 in Christiana, Delaware. She spent her formative years living in Philadelphia with her aunt, a respected community healer. After moving to Massachusetts and practicing nursing for several years, Rebecca Davis, now Rebecca Lee, applied to the New England Female Medical College in Boston, the first women’s medical school in the nation. The college admitted her in 1860, based on her nursing experience and strong recommendations from doctors familiar with her work. She graduated in 1864 as a “Doctress of Medicine.”