Clark, Kenneth Bancroft

Source:

 African American National Biography

Clark, Kenneth Bancroft

(24 July 1914–1 May 2005),

psychologist, was born in the Panama Canal Zone, the son of the Jamaican immigrants Miriam Hanson Clark and Arthur Bancroft Clark. In 1919, Miriam left her husband and brought Kenneth and his sister Beulah to New York City. He attended public schools in Harlem, which were fully integrated when he entered the first grade, but were almost wholly black by the time he finished sixth grade. Kenneth's mother, an active follower of Marcus Garvey, encouraged her son's interest in black history and his academic leanings, and confronted his guidance teacher for recommending that Kenneth attend a vocational high school. A determined woman, active in the garment workers’ union, Miriam Clark persuaded the authorities to send Kenneth to George Washington High, a school with a reputation for academic excellence. In 1931 he won a scholarship to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Clark attended Howard at time of great academic and ideological ferment on campus. The faculty, arguably the greatest “dream team” of black academics ever assembled, included the philosopher Alain Locke, the political scientist Ralph Bunche, and the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. Charles Hamilton Houston and William Henry Hastie taught at Howard Law School in those years, and numbered Thurgood Marshall among their students. As editor of the Hilltop, the college newspaper, Clark immersed himself in the intellectual and political debates on campus and in 1935 was arrested for protesting segregation at the restaurant inside the U.S. Capitol building. Since Congress contributed to Howard's funding, several administrators proposed expelling the arrested students, but they were reprieved when Clark's mentor, Ralph Bunche, threatened to resign if such actions were taken. Clark graduated in 1931, remained at Howard to pursue a Master of Science degree, and taught in the Psychology Department at Howard for a year. He then moved to New York to pursue a PhD in Psychology at Columbia University, where his adviser discouraged him from choosing a “racial” topic for his dissertation for fear that it might harm his job chances. Clark's 1940 PhD, the first awarded to an African American at Columbia, was titled “Some Factors Influencing the Remembering of Prose Materials.” He taught briefly at Hampton Institute, a black college in Virginia, and in 1942 became the first black instructor appointed to the faculty of the City College of New York.

Kenneth Bancroft Clark conducting “the Doll Test” in 1947. Photograph by Gordon Parks. (AP Images.)

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By then, Clark had begun collaborating on a study of racial self-identity in childhood with Mamie Katherine Phipps, a fellow Howard graduate whom he had married in 1938. They had eloped—Howard prohibited its undergraduates from marrying—and would later have two children, Kate Miriam Clark and Hilton Bancraft Clark. Mamie Phipps Clark had begun her study of children's perception of race in a class taught by her future husband at Howard and completed her dissertation on that topic at Columbia in 1943. Five years later, the Clarks established the Northside Center for Child Development. The Center provided a full range of psychological consulting and testing services for children, the first such agency in Harlem, and also carried out studies of racial self-identity in children.

One of these studies, now known simply as “the doll test,” was to play a critical role in the NAACP's battle to end segregation. In the test, black children, aged between three and seven years old, were shown four identical dolls, two of them colored brown and two colored white, and asked to identify them as “Negro” or white. Three quarters of the children identified the dolls correctly. The psychologists then asked the children to give them the doll that they “liked best,” or that looked “bad,” or that is “a nice color,” or that was most like themselves. Most of the black children studied expressed a preference for the white dolls, and rejected the black dolls; some did so in tears. The tests suggested to the Clarks that racial prejudice—and racial self-hatred—was fixed at an early age, and that only early intervention could prevent further psychic damage. In 1951, Robert L. Carter of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund (LDF) read of the Clarks’ doll studies and urged Clark to serve as an expert scientific witness in their efforts to outlaw segregated schooling. Clark carried out the doll tests among black children in Clarendon County, South Carolina, one of the four cases later consolidated in Brown v. Board of Education. As in the previous tests, the majority of black children in the Clarendon study identified with the white dolls and rejected the black ones. Clark also served as the expert psychological witness in the South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware cases that formed part of Brown. More importantly, he acted as a liaison between the LDF and academics who submitted to the Court a legal brief outlining the psychological and sociological evidence of segregation's harmful impact on children. In May 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous Court in Brown that segregation was inherently unequal. Footnote 11 of that opinion cites the work of Kenneth B. Clark as evidence that segregation “retarded the educational and mental development of Negro children.” Warren added that such psychological knowledge had not been available to the Court in 1896 when it had rendered its “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Justices’ acceptance of psychological and social scientific testimony was unprecedented, and provoked controversy, though mainly among those who already opposed integration.

After Brown, Clark attempted to bring the psychological arguments made famous in that decision to a broader audience. The results were mixed. His 1955 book, Prejudice and Your Child, sold poorly, but Clark was much more successful as a public intellectual. He appeared in Commentary and other liberal journals, and the national media anointed him the black academic, much as it had anointed his friend James Baldwin as the black writer, and Martin Luther King Jr. as the civil rights leader. By 1963, when King, Baldwin, and thousands of lesser-known protestors had forced white Americans to look more deeply at the problems of racism, a second edition of Prejudice and Your Child found a larger audience. So, too, did Clark in a public television series, The Negro and the Promise of American Life, in which he interviewed the three most prominent African Americans of that era: Baldwin, King, and Malcolm X. (Clark was a confidant of both King and Malcolm, and arranged the brief, but symbolic, meeting between the two leaders in 1964.) The interviews, published as The Negro Protest (1963), expressed Clark's belief that the United States had failed to live up to the promise of Brown. He envisioned only two ways in which America could avoid the racial explosions that would result from that unfulfilled promise: “One would be total oppression; the other total equality” (Keppel, The Work of Democracy, 138).

In the 1960s, Clark believed that latter goal was still possible. Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), a grassroots antipoverty project which Clark founded, was influential in the growing intellectual and public policy debate about poverty. The project envisioned job training schemes, pre-school “academies,” and a network of self-governing community councils dedicated to fighting poverty. Many of those programs were replicated in President Johnson's War on Poverty; HARYOU's pre-school academies, for example, served as the model for Head Start. Clark's experiences with HARYOU informed his most widely read book, Dark Ghetto (1965). He argued that America's inner cities were “colonies,” exploited by the broader society's lack of interest in the educational, psychological, and economic well-being of African Americans. Until the nation responded to the institutionalized pathology of the ghetto with radical reforms, Clark concluded, America would “remain at the mercy of primitive, frightening, irrational attempts by prisoners in the ghetto to destroy their own prison” (quoted in Keppel, Work of Democracy, 159). Though some in the civil rights movement criticized the book's emphasis on black victimhood, others, notably black power advocates such as Stokely Carmichael, were influenced by Dark Ghetto's discussion of African Americans’ “colonial” status.

Clark did not advocate the separatist solutions offered by Carmichael, but America's retreat from the cause of racial justice in the 1970s and 1980s left him profoundly pessimistic about the future of civil rights. In 1990, he feared that the United States would never eradicate racism or achieve true integration. Looking back at the 1950s and 1960s, he shuddered at “how naïve we all were in our belief in the steady progress racial minorities would make through programs of litigation and education.” Clark reflected that his life had been a “series of glorious defeats” (Clark, “Racial Progress and Retreat,” 18).

Though it is true that the United States has far to go in achieving full integration, Dr. Clark's self-assessment seems unnecessarily negative. As the NAACP recognized in awarding him the Spingarn Medal in 1961, Clark's work as a psychologist was instrumental in the Brown decision, which set in motion an invigorated civil rights movement in the 1960s. It is also significant that in 1970–1971 Clark served as the first black president of the American Psychological Association and also received that organization's Gold Medal Award for “contributions by a psychologist in the public interest.” Kenneth Clark served that public interest by arguing persistently, with dignity and passion, that only radical change could eradicate the deep-rooted scars of racism in American society. Clark died of cancer at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, on 1 May 2005.

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