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Difficulty: HardThe Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s

"This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. . . . Segregation and poverty have created in the Racial Ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."
— Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission), 1968

Based on the excerpt, which of the following developments in the mid-to-late 1960s most directly contributed to the findings and conclusions expressed by the commission?

  1. A
    A growing consensus among civil rights organizations to abandon nonviolent direct action in favor of Black nationalist separatism.
  2. B
    The expansion of the containment doctrine to domestic social policy in an effort to suppress civil rights activism.
  3. Growing frustration over persistent economic inequality and informal segregation in urban areas outside the South, which sparked widespread civil unrest.Answer
  4. D
    The implementation of New Deal programs that successfully dismantled the legal structures of Jim Crow segregation in Northern states.

Answer

Growing frustration over persistent economic inequality and informal segregation in urban areas outside the South, which sparked widespread civil unrest.
The correct answer is correct because the Kerner Commission was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 to investigate the causes of the devastating urban riots in cities like Detroit, Newark, and Los Angeles (Watts). The commission concluded that the unrest was caused by frustration over de facto (informal) segregation, systemic racism, and the lack of economic mobility for African Americans in urban centers.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the source and historical context of the stimulus.
The stimulus is from the 1968 Kerner Commission Report, which analyzed the causes of the major urban riots/civil disorders that occurred between 1965 and 1967.
Understanding when and why the commission was created is essential to identifying the correct historical context.
2
Evaluate the core argument of the excerpt.
The report concludes that white racism, segregation, and systemic poverty created the destructive environment of the urban 'Racial Ghetto,' dividing the nation into two unequal societies.
This links the commission's findings directly to the frustrations of African Americans living in urban centers outside the Jim Crow South, where de facto segregation and economic inequality persisted.
3
Assess the options against historical evidence and rule out distractors.
Identify that the civil rights movement was not unified (ruling out the option about consensus), the containment doctrine was a foreign policy framework (ruling out the containment option), and the New Deal did not address Jim Crow (ruling out the New Deal option). This leaves the option about urban frustration and civil unrest as the correct answer.
Verifying that the distractors rely on historical misconceptions ensures the validity of the final choice.

Key Concept

Internal divisions, urban civil unrest, and the limitations of civil rights legislation in addressing de facto segregation and economic disparities in the late 1960s.
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Topics

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s

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