Clark, Kenneth B. 1914-2005

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kenneth Bancroft Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark (1917–1983), were arguably the most famous African American psychologist couple of the twentieth century. Their research was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared segregated schools unconstitutional. During the 1940s and early 1950s, they conducted tests that were designed to identify racial identification and racial preference in young children. One of these experiments came to be known famously as the doll test. The Clarks concluded that racial segregation created psychological damage in African American and white children, although the Court neglected to address the latter issue. However, many scholars, teachers, and social welfare professionals since the 1960s have contended that this research was flawed, particularly the methodology used in the doll tests. They argued that the tests were too limited in their capacity to lead to the conclusion that African American children in particular were psychologically damaged. They maintained that the Clarks posed African Americans as damaged for political purposes in order to gain white support for racial integration.

Clark was born in Panama, the son of Jamaican migrant workers. When he was five, his mother moved to Harlem in New York City with him and his younger sister. He graduated from Howard University with B.A. and M.A. degrees in psychology in 1935 and 1936. His professors included political scientist Ralph Bunche (1904–1971) and Francis Cecil Sumner (1895–1954), the first African American to earn a PhD in psychology. In 1940 Clark became the first African American to receive a PhD in psychology from Columbia University; his wife became the second two years later (they had married in 1938). During graduate school, he worked on Gunnar Myrdal’s (1898–1987) famous study, An American Dilemma (1944). After teaching at Hampton University, Clark became in 1942 the first African American psychology professor at City College in New York. He remained there until his retirement in 1975.

Clark is best known for his involvement in the Brown case; much of his research was included in his first book, Prejudice and Your Child (1955). To his supporters, his career exemplified a steadfast dedication to integration; his detractors on the other hand ridiculed his integrationist positions. Yet Clark was far more complicated intellectually. He viewed racism as part of a larger problem involving what he called the “dilemma of power.” Because humanity had never resolved “the issue of power versus ideals,” human beings could rationalize conflicts between abstract concepts of justice and equality on the one hand, while maintaining privilege and status on the other. In other words, he pushed further W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1868–1963) contention that the problem of the twentieth century was the color line. Clark also disagreed with Myrdal’s position that racism contradicted the American creed; instead, he argued that beliefs in equality and white supremacy were not contradictory but compatible.

This intellectual framework shaped Clark’s research and activism during the 1960s and 1970s, especially his second and third books, Dark Ghetto, Dilemmas of Social Power (1965) and Pathos of Power (1974). The former work used Harlem as a prism to present a bleak and pessimistic view of the impact of ghettoization on the daily lives of its citizens. Many readers interpreted his work as an endorsement of the “culture-of-poverty” thesis that was in vogue at the time among many scholars in fields such as anthropology, sociology, and education, but Clark presented a much more complex analysis of African American life in the ghetto than he has generally been credited for. He was highly critical of the cultural approach, charging that such analyses substituted for discredited biological theories to explain and justify racial differences. Instead, he argued, for instance, that “educational deprivation” was a more accurate term to describe what was actually happening in schools once they became predominately poor and black; because of their powerlessness, they no longer received the basic services—good teachers, competent administrators, decent buildings—that wealthier and whiter communities received. In that sense, Dark Ghetto was more of an indictment of American society, rather than solely a critique of African American community life.

In addition to his writings, Clark was influential in both activist and policymaking circles. In 1946 he and his wife founded the Northside Center for Child Development, the first interracial institution of its kind in New York City. His research led to his participation in the 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth. Aware that the problems of education and poverty were linked, he designed the ambitious Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) program in the early 1960s as a model for the “war on poverty.” He was named in 1966 to the board of regents of the New York State Department of Education and in 1968 to the board of the New York State Urban Development Corporation. In 1967 Clark founded the Metropolitan Applied Research Center (MARC), which led a concerted effort to reject the culture-of-poverty thesis through publications and applied programs. MARC also worked to close the educational achievement gap through such efforts as its program (known as the Clark Plan) to reform the Washington, D.C., school system. Finally, in 1971, Clark became the first African American elected president of the American Psychological Association.

Despite his accomplishments, Clark grew pessimistic about the state of racial progress. He thought that he had failed at his most important work—HARYOU, the Clark Plan, and his efforts on school desegregation—to empower the black poor and close the educational achievement gap. Ironically, the man who wrote so eloquently about the lack of power in African American life concluded that he too lacked power.

SEE ALSO Achievement Gap, Racial; Brown v. Board of Education, 1954

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clark, Kenneth B. 1965. Dark Ghetto, Dilemmas of Social Power. New York: Harper and Row.

Freeman, Damon. 2004. Not So Simple Justice: Kenneth B. Clark, Civil Rights, and the Dilemma of Power, 1940–1980. PhD diss., Indiana University, Bloomington.

Markowitz, Gerald, and David Rosner. 1996. Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Damon Freeman