"Jelani Cobb's Essential Kerner Commission Report is more than essential. Today its relevance is existential."
-David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963

"Jelani Cobb, as one of the nation's preeminent journalists and scholars, reminds us in The Essential Kerner Commission Report that knowing history is no guarantee of not repeating it, especially when the majority of voters and politicians refuse to take heed to the facts, time and time again. Perhaps with this must-read volume in the era of Ferguson and Floyd, things will be different."
-Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America

"Much of what is in the Kerner Commission Report is as relevant today as in 1968. Jelani Cobb's powerful introduction provides the context, and his clear presentation of the report is stunning in illuminating the ongoing problems of racial injustice."
-Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law