In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report, academics and journalists have gathered for a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania to address issues of racial and socio-economic inequality in the United States.

The Kerner Report was commissioned in the 1960s in the wake of urban riots and concern over the growing racial gap in the U.S. The report’s conclusion that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal” was shocking to much of its audience.

The Philadelphia Daily News reports:

“A lot of what we’ve learned since Kerner is that we find ourselves in a different moment, a different place,” said Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology at UCLA. “We’re confronted with a lot of the same problems we were confronted with in 1968. We’ve seen some progress in certain spheres, but a lot of the underlying structure has remained largely unscathed.”