Unlike Ferguson, a small suburb of St Louis, Baltimore is a city of more than 600,000 people. The city is about two-thirds African-American.Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the African-American mayor of Baltimore, called the rioting "heart breaking" but said there was no excuse for violence, whatever the community frustrations over Mr Gray's death. The Telegraph
A National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner, Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member commission established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots in the United States and to provide recommendations for the future.
The Kerner Commission report's most famous passage warned, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."