Kenneth and Mamie Clark

Kenneth Bancroft Clark (July 24, 1914 – May 1, 2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (April 18, 1917 – August 11, 1983) were American psychologists who as a married team conducted research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. They founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). Kenneth Clark was also an educator and professor at City College of New York, and first Black president of the American Psychological Association.

They were known for their 1940s experiments using dolls to study children's attitudes about race. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in Briggs v. Elliott (1952), one of five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Clarks' work contributed to the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in which it determined that de jure racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Brown v. Board of Education opinion, "To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone."

Mamie Phipps Clark

Early life

The oldest of three children, two girls and one boy, Mamie Phipps was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Harold and Katie Phipps. Her father was a doctor, a native of the British West Indies. Her father also supplemented his income as a manager at a nearby vacation resort. Her mother helped him in his practice and encouraged both their children in education. Her brother became a dentist. Even though Phipps Clark grew up during the Depression and a time of racism and segregation, she had a privileged childhood. Her father's occupation and income allowed them to live a middle-class lifestyle and even got them into some White-only parts of town. Phipps Clark, however, still attended segregated elementary and secondary schools, graduating from Pine Bluff's Langston High School in 1934 at only 16 years old. This upbringing gave her a unique perspective on how society treated White and Black people differently. This realization contributed to her future research of racial identity in Black children. Despite the small number of opportunities for Black students to pursue higher education, Phipps Clark was offered several scholarships for college. Phipps Clark received scholarship offers from two of the most prestigious Black universities at that time, Fisk University in Tennessee and Howard University in Washington D.C. Both Kenneth and Mamie went on for additional study at Columbia University. They later had two children together, Katie Miriam and Hilton Bancroft.

In the fall of 1938 Mamie Clark went to graduate school at Howard University to get a master's degree in psychology and while she was enrolled her father would send her an allowance of fifty dollars a month. The summer following her undergraduate graduation Mamie worked for Charles Houston as a secretary at his law office. At the time, Houston was a popular civil rights lawyer and Mamie was privileged to see lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall come into the office to work on important cases. This thesis was the basis from what would later become the Clarks' famous doll study on racial preference. At Riverdale, she conducted psychological tests and counseled young, homeless Black people. Her vision of social, economic, and psychological advancement of African-American children resonates far beyond the era of integration.

Legacy

Phipps Clark's work provided key contributions to the fields of developmental psychology and the psychology of race by shedding light on the impact of racial discrimination. She made lasting contributions at the United States Armed Forces Institute and the Public Health Association. Her unrelenting research on the identity and self-esteem of Black people expanded work on identity development.

Clark is not as famous as her husband. It has been noted that she adhered to feminine expectations of the time and often took care to "remain in the shadows of her husband's limelight". She often presented as shy. It should also be noted, that Phipps Clark's tendency to remain in her husband's shadow occurred in the backdrop of blatant sexism and racism in the psychological field and it is believed that the extent of her contributions was significantly downplayed.

Phipps Clark retired in 1979 and died of lung cancer on August 11, 1983, at 66 years old at her home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Kenneth Clark

Early life and education

Kenneth Clark was born on July 24, 1914 in the Panama Canal Zone to Arthur Bancroft Clark and Miriam Hanson Clark. His father worked as an agent for the United Fruit Company. When he was five, his parents separated and his mother took him and his younger sister Beulah to the US to live in Harlem in New York City. Miriam Clark worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop, where she later organized a union and became a shop steward for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Kenneth Clark arrived in New York City as ethnic diversity of Harlem was disappearing such that his elementary school was predominantly black. Clark noted that he first "became aware of color" when he was taught by a black teacher, who happened to be Hubert Thomas Delaney.

Clark attended Howard University, a historically black university, where he first studied political science with professors including Ralph Johnson Bunche. During his years at Howard University, he worked under the influence of mentor Francis Cecil Sumner, the first African American to receive a doctorate in psychology. He returned in 1935 for a master's in psychology. After the Brown v. Board of Education case, Clark was still dissatisfied by the lack of progress in school desegregation in New York City. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Clark expressed his doubts about the efficacy of certain busing programs in desegregating the public schools. Clark also felt very discouraged by the lack of social welfare organizations to address race and poverty issues. He argued that a new approach had to be developed to involve poor blacks, in order to gain the political and economic power needed to solve their problems. He called his new approach "internal colonialism", with hope that the Kennedy-Johnson administration's War on Poverty would address problems of increasing social isolation, economic dependence and declining municipal services for many African Americans (Freeman, 2008).

In 1962, Clark was among the founders of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), an organization devoted to developing educational and job opportunities. With HARYOU, Clark conducted an extensive sociological study of Harlem. He measured IQ scores, crime frequency, age frequency of the population, drop-out rates, church and school locations, quality of housing, family incomes, drugs, STD rates, homicides, and a number of other areas.

Clark retired from City College in 1975 but remained an active advocate for integration throughout his life, serving on the board of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, of which he was Chairman Emeritus until his death. He opposed separatists and argued for high standards in education, continuing to work for children's benefit. He consulted to city school systems across the country and argued that all children should learn to use Standard English in school. (1963)

A Relevant War Against Poverty (1968), co-written with Jeannette Hopkins
A Possible Reality (1972)
Pathos of Power (1975)
King, Malcolm, Baldwin: Three Interviews (1985)

The Coloring Test

The coloring test was another experiment that was involved in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The coloring test was administered to 160 African American children between the ages of five and seven years old. The children were given a piece of coloring paper with a leaf, an apple, an orange, a mouse, a boy and a girl on it. They were all given a box of crayons and asked to first color the mouse to make sure they had a basic understanding of the relationship between color and object. If they pass, they were then asked to color a boy if they were a boy and a girl if they were a girl. They were told to color the boy or girl the color that they are. They were then told to color the opposite sex the color that they want that sex to be. The Clarks categorized the responses into reality responses (accurately colored their skin color), fantasy responses (very different from their skin color), and irrelevant responses (used bizarre colors like purple or green). The Clarks examined the reality and fantasy responses to conclude that children typically color themselves noticeably lighter than their actual color, while the fantasy responses reflect children trying through wishful thinking to escape their situation. Although 88% of the children did draw themselves brown or black, they oftentimes drew themselves a lighter shade than the mouse. Children that were older generally were more accurate at determining how dark they should be. When asked to color the picture of the child that was the opposite sex, 52% put either white or an irrelevant color. The doll experiment involved a child being presented with two dolls. Both of these dolls were completely identical except for the skin and hair color. One doll was white with yellow hair, while the other was brown with black hair. The child was then asked questions inquiring as to which one is the doll they would play with, which one is the nice doll, which one looks bad, which one has the nicer color, etc. The experiment showed a clear preference for the white doll among all children in the study. One of the conclusions from the study is that a Black child by the age of five is aware that to be "colored in American society is a mark of inferior status". The study was published only in the Journal of Negro Education before appearing before the Court. In a 9–0 decision for Brown, the Court decided that segregation based on race in public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Supreme Court declared that separate but equal in education was unconstitutional because it resulted in African American children having "a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community." Garrett advocated in his Virginia school board testimony that if a negro child had access to equal facilities surrounded by his own teachers and friends, "he would be more likely to develop pride in himself as a Negro, which I think we would all like to see him do – to develop his own potential, his sense of duty…" and Garrett even claimed that they would "prefer to remain as a Negro group" instead of mixing and facing hostility, animosity, and inferiority. Garrett and his colleague Wesley C. George’s 1964 letter to the Science journal further questioned the Brown decision, claiming the only reference to science in the entire decision is in footnote 11. Garrett and George argue that the Court overlooked the "mental difference" between races, and that Clark’s evidence was invalid and misleading because "integration, not segregation, injured the Negro child’s self-image." In an alternative interpretation of the Clark doll experiments, Robin Bernstein has recently argued that the children's rejection of the black dolls could be understood not as victimization or an expression of internalized racism but instead as resistance against violent play involving black dolls, which was a common practice when the Clarks conducted their tests. Historian Daryl Scott also critiqued the logic of the Doll Study, because contemporary studies suggest that black children with greater contact with whites experience more psychological distress. The Clark Doll Study was influential scientific evidence for the Brown v. Board decision, but a few academics questioned the study.

In 2005, filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated the doll study and documented it in a film entitled A Girl Like Me. Despite the many changes in some parts of society, Davis found the same results as did the Drs. Clark in their study of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the original experiments, the majority of the children chose the white dolls. When Davis repeated the experiment 15 out of 21 children also chose the white dolls over the black doll.

CNN recreated the doll study in 2010 with cartoons of five children, each with different shades of skin color. The experiment was designed by Margaret Beale Spencer, a child psychologist and University of Chicago professor. Children were asked to answer the same doll test questions, such as "who is the nice child" or "who has the skin color most adults like" and choose between the cartoon people arranged in order of lightest to darkest skin. The results were interpreted as indicating "white bias," meaning that children (mostly white, but also "black children as a whole have some bias") continue to associate positive attributes with lighter skin tones, and negative attributes with darker skin tones. Kenneth Clark said: "My children have only one life and I could not risk that."

1983 – Mamie Phipps Clark receives a Candace Award for Humanitarianism from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women
2002 – Molefi Kete Asante named Kenneth Clark on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
2003 – American Psychological Foundation establishes the Kenneth B. and Mamie P. Clark Fund, to support "research and demonstration activities that promote the understanding of the relationship between self-identity and academic achievement with an emphasis on children in grade levels K-8".
2017 – Columbia University Department of Psychology established the Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth B. Clark Distinguished Lecture Award, which recognizes "extraordinary contributions of a senior scholar in the area of race and justice".

References

External links

Notable New Yorkers – Kenneth Clark, Oral History Research Office at Columbia University.
Notable New Yorkers – Mamie Clark, Oral History Research Office at Columbia University.
Dr. Kenneth Clark (archived 2014-04-29) interviewed on the WGBH-TV series The Ten O'Clock News in 1988
Mamie Phipps Clark at LC Authorities with 2 records (see 'Clark, Mamie Katherine (Phipps)', previous page of browse report)
"Eyes on the Prize; Interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark; Interview with Kenneth Clark", 1985-11-04, American Archive of Public Broadcasting