Said@Duke: Urban Policy Historian Rick Loessberg on the Kerner Report and Pervasive Discrimination

Rick Loessberg, an urban policy historian and retired director of planning and development for Dallas County in Dallas, Texas, recently spoke at a Wednesdays at the Center event. He wrote numerous articles on the Kerner Report and conducted an oral history interview of Kerner Commission member Fred Harris for the LBJ Presidential Library. The 1968 report was in response to the summer of uprisings in 1967, which led President Lyndon Johnson to establish the 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to examine causes and prevention of such riots.

Loessberg also has had a more than 30-year career working for or with local, state, and federal government and administering many of the types of programs that the Kerner Report recommended.

The Wednesdays at the Center is a topical weekly series in which scholars, artists, journalists, and others speak informally about their work in conversation with the audience. This event was hosted by the John Hope Franklin Center.

View more from the Said@Duke series.