CLARK, Kenneth Bancroft

(b. 24 July 1914 in the Panama Canal Zone), psychologist, educator, and civil rights leader best known for his influential research and writings on African Americans and institutionalized racism.

Clark grew up in the Harlem section of New York City, where he lived from the age of five. He had moved from the Panama Canal Zone with his mother, Miriam (Hanson) Clark, and his younger sister, while his father, Arthur Bancroft Clark, opted to remain alone in Panama, working as an agent for the United Fruit Company. Clark was deeply influenced by his mother, who worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop, where she helped to form a unit of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union. Clark graduated from George Washington High School in 1931, where he excelled in all subjects, especially economics. Clark matriculated at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and completed his B.A. in psychology in 1935 and his M.A. in 1936. He then joined the faculty at Howard and taught there for one year. Clark was the first black doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1940. From 1941 to 1942 Clark worked for the United States Office of War Information. He then joined the psychology faculty of the City College of New York (CCNY) and remained there from 1942 through his retirement in 1975 at the academic rank of Distinguished Professor. He was the first African American to be named a full professor at New York's city colleges. From its inception Clark's career was shaped by another woman—Howard undergraduate Mamie Phipps—who switched her major from mathematics to psychology after meeting the suave Clark. They wed on 14 April 1938 and had two children. Phipps completed her Ph.D. at Columbia in 1943, and the husband-and-wife team began collaborating on work concerning race relations.

In the 1960s Clark emerged as the outstanding black psychologist in the United States and became a cogent spokesperson for social justice inside and outside the American Psychological Association (APA). This role stemmed from his earlier work in 1938, when his wife worked in the Washington, D.C., office of the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She wrote her 1938 master's thesis at Howard on "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Preschool Children," which the two then published in 1939 in the Journal of Experimental Education. This was the Clarks' famous "doll study," introducing a subtle projective method by which they questioned black preschoolers from the ages of three to seven using two black and two white dolls. From their observations of the children's reactions to the dolls, they concluded that these children unconsciously suffered from low self-image and "selfdenigration" as a result of being in segregated schools. In 1951 Clark became a researcher with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), a division of the APA. He also prepared a "Social Science Appendix" for a 1952 NAACP legal brief, which was then cosigned by thirty-two leading U.S. social scientists.

History was made on Monday morning, 17 May 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education reversed 130 years of the court's rulings by decreeing that "separate but equal" education was unconstitutional. The unanimous decision was based in part on footnote eleven, citing the behavioral research findings by Clark and others. Oddly, except for jubilation within the SPSSI over the decision, the Court's citation of behavioral research and Clark's work went virtually unnoticed for years by the mass media, the APA, and the African-American community, much like the unspectacular reception of Clark's first book in 1955, Prejudice and Your Child.

Throughout this time, however, beginning in 1946, Clark quietly helped his wife in her dedicated if unglamorous mental hygiene work, serving Harlem's youth in their Northside Center for Child Development. (Mental hygiene work involves the maintenance of mental health and prevention of the development of psychosis, neurosis, or other mental disorders.)

In 1961 Clark received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal, which is awarded for work in advancing civil rights. Clark was also the founder of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) and worked with the organization from 1962 to 1964, producing research that provided much of the material for Dark Ghetto.

Clark was propelled to national prominence as the preeminent black psychologist and expert spokesperson on racial issues in America during the social ferment of the 1960s. He proved to be an articulate advocate and scientist who captivated the nation with the publication of his most riveting book, Dark Ghetto, in 1965. This graphic work went beyond his 1955 book to describe the pernicious effects of racism on whites as well as minority Americans and to call for national integration. For many observers, his depiction of inner-city ghettos as neocolonial enclaves full of "institutionalized pathology" and "cultural deprivation" offered a penetrating diagnosis and prognosis for the race riots that were erupting in U.S. cities.

Through the 1960s Clark also had an enduring impact on his field of psychology, first in 1960 as president of the SPSSI, then as a member of the APA board of directors in 1965, and finally as the president of the APA in 1970—its only African-American president before or since. In 1967 Clark formed the MARC Corporation (Metropolitan Applied Research Center), a nonprofit organization, to help solve the problems of the urban poor. In 1970 the public school system of Washington, D.C., which was 90 percent black, had MARC design a new educational program for the city's schools. In 1971 Clark spearheaded the new APA Committee (later Board) for Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology (BSERP), which for the first time added "public advocacy" alongside science and practice as a third mission of organized psychology. Clark's 1971 APA presidential address, "The Pathos of Power," was a bold call to action later reprinted in Pathos of Power (1974). Perhaps no presidential address to the association ever sparked more controversy, as Clark went far beyond decrying the racism he saw embedded within scientific and professional circles to encourage lateral thinking in the application of social engineering. Clark, noting that political leaders are often emotionally stressed, asserted that in this new era of psycho-technology and drug therapy, society might well require that "all power-controlling leaders … [use] biochemical intervention which would assure their positive use of power and reduce or block the possibility of their using power destructively." In 1978 Clark was the recipient of the first annual APA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology in the Public Interest, and in 1994 he received the APA Outstanding Lifetime Contribution Award, marking the fortieth anniversary of the 1954 Brown decision. This APA shift towards public advocacy marked a victory over some psychologists who might be termed scientific racists and others who felt that a scientific organization should remain aloof from social issues. Looking back on Clark's multiple contributions in the 1960s—as a scientist, author, administrator, and civil rights leader—some minimize his role as one of many actors in a partisan cause. Yet the much larger majority agrees with the 2002 assessment of historians Ludy Benjamin and Ellen Crouse that the Clarks' "research and work with the NAACP helped to change the course of American history." This accompanied his other enduring legacy within his field, to transform the APA by integrating public interest as one of U.S. psychology's basic goals.

Biographical information about Clark is in the article "The Integrationists," New Yorker (23 Aug. 1982) and in Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center (1996). The January 2002 issue of American Psychologist contains four articles on Clark as part of its "History of Psychology" series: Wade Pickren, "The Contributions of Kenneth B. and Mamie Phipps Clark"; Ben Keppel, "Kenneth B. Clark in the Patterns of American Culture"; Wade Pickren and Henry Tomes, "The Legacy of Kenneth B. Clark to the APA: The Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology"; and Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr., and Ellen M. Crouse, "The American Psychological Association's Response to Brown v. Board of Education: The Case of Kenneth B. Clark." Clark's writings on psychology and social science include an article written with his wife, Mamie Clark, "Segregation as a Factor in Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children, a Preliminary Report," Journal of Experimental Education, 8, (1939): 161–163; and five books, including Prejudice and Your Child (1955); The Negro Student at Integrated Colleges (1963), written with Lawrence Plotkin; Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965); The Negro American (1966), edited with Talcott Parsons; and Pathos of Power (1974).

Harold Takooshian