LESSONS UNLEARNED.

The following is Contemporary Relevance, isn't it? "Commonly sparked by repressive and violent police actions, urban uprisings were political acts of self-defense and racial liberation on a mass, public scale. Legislative successes at the federal level with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were not reflected in the daily lives of African-Americans facing police misconduct, economic inequality, segregated housing, and inferior educations."

But that's from a 2018 Smithsonian article by Alice George, about the apparently-forgotten Kerner Commission report on urban unrest.  Unfortunately, the commission's report sought to fix things without the agency of the people it was supposed to be helping.

Newsweek interviewed a city planner who believed the answer lay in regimented integration. Under his plan, only a certain number of blacks would be re-located in each suburb so that whites would never feel threatened by their black neighbors. This would a create an integrated society, but would integration be right if it was achieved by once again limiting black options? As [museum curator William] Pretzer suggests, the magazine’s exploration of radical change somehow still managed to treat African-Americans more like chess pieces than human beings, who might want to choose where they lived.

That has always been the way of technocrats, Adam Smith had them diagnosed a quarter-millennium ago; and in some ways "inclusive" education is again depriving the people it intends to include of agency.

But the legend lives on.  "Ultimately, going to the moon was far easier than solving the nation’s racial issues. Politically, spending billions on space travel was more saleable than striving to correct racial inequality."  I remember the canard, "If we can put a man on the moon, we can ..."  Sorry, no.  Building a launch vehicle capable of sending a payload to the moon with enough fuel and life support to get back is a problem in applied mathematics, with relatively straightforward equations of motion.  Complex adaptive systems, which is to say, the class of systems including those of human interaction, are not so easily modelled or managed.