Kenneth and Mamie Clark Totally Explained

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Kenneth Bancroft Clark (July 24, 1914–May 1, 2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (1917-1983), were a husband-and-wife team of African American psychologists who founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). They were known for their 1940s experiments using dolls to study children's attitudes about race, which grew out of Mamie Clark's master's degree thesis. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in Briggs v. Elliott, one of the cases that was later combined into the famous Brown v. Board of Education, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court officially overturned racial segregation in public education.

Mamie Clark

Mamie Phipps Clark was one of the first African American women (and only second African American after her husband) to receive a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University in 1943. It is important to mention that Mamie received her degree after Inez Beverly Prosser, who in 1933 received a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Cincinnati.
   At the end of the Second World war, two young psychologists with doctorate degrees from Columbia University, one an assistant professor at the City College of New York and the other a psychological consultant doing psychological testing at the Riverdale Children's Association, decided to try to do something about the lack of services for troubled youth in Harlem. Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark approached nearly every social service agency in New York City with a modest proposal. They urged the established agencies to expand their programs to provide social work, psychological evaluation, and remediation for youth in Harlem, since there were virtually no mental-health services in the community. Each agency they explored the proposal with rejected it....The Clarks "realized that we were not going to get a child guidance clinic opened that way. So we decided to open it ourselves."
   Thus began the idea for the Northside Center for Child Development, first called the Northside Testing and Consultation Center. It started in a basement apartment of the Dunbar Housing Project on 135th Street. Two years later, in 1948, Northside moved to 110th Street, just across from Central Park, on the sixth floor of what was then the New Lincoln School. And in 1974, Northside moved to the quarters it now occupies in Schomburg Plaza.
   Northside Center for Child Development Inc.
   Our mission Northside Center fosters the healthy development of children and families and seeks to empower them to respond constructively to negative societal factors including racism and deprivation. Through comprehensive, high quality mental health and educational services, coupled with research, children and families are aided in developing to their full potential.
   Our goal The helping efforts of Northside Center are geared to the many needs of the families that come to us. While addressing the emotional, developmental and educational needs of the children and families we serve, Northside strives to develop and enhance the self-esteem and self-respect of all children and families.
   Northside believes that:
By strengthening the family unit; giving individual attention to the needs of each member and the family as a whole, and by helping families understand and address the impact of societal forces on their lives, children and families can develop to their fullest potential and achieve a sense of mastery and power over their lives.
   Northside, fulfills a function that's broader than clinical and educational; it encompasses community education, action and advocacy.
   Our vision Our vision is to be a change agent in the development of treatment modalities, educational approaches and public policy affecting children and families.
   http://www.northsidecenter.org

Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Clark was born in the Panama Canal Zone where his father worked as an agent for the United Fruit Company. When he was five, his mother took him and his younger sister to the U.S. to live in Harlem in New York City.
   Clark attended Howard University, where his professors included Ralph J. Bunche. During his time there, he participated in research in support of a study of race relations by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s - "An American Dilemma."
   In 1940, Clark was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. Dr. Clark was a distinguished member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Incorporated.
   Kenneth Clark became the first African American tenured full professor at the City College of New York in 1942, and later was the first African American on the New York State Board of Regents and the first African American to be president of the American Psychological Association.
   When President Lyndon Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) following race riots in dozens of American cities in the summer of 1967, Clark was among the first called to testify.
   Clark retired from City College in 1975, but remained an active advocate for integration. He died in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York in May 2005, from cancer.

Family

The Clarks' son Hilton was a leader of the Society of Afro-American Students during protests at Columbia University in 1968. Daughter, Kate Clark Harris, was director of the Northside Center for Child Development for four years after her mother's death.

Doll experiments

The Clarks' doll experiments grew out of Mamie's master's degree thesis and yielded three papers between 1939 and 1940. They found that Black children often preferred to play with white dolls over black; that, asked to fill in a human figure with the color of their own skin they frequently chose a lighter shade than was accurate, and that they viewed white as good and pretty, but black as bad and ugly. They viewed this as evidence of internalized racism caused by stigmatization.
   The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in several school desegregation cases including Briggs v. Elliott, one of the cases that were later combined into the famous Brown v. Board of Education, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court officially overturned racial segregation in public education. According to Woody Klein's Toward Justice and Humanity: The Writings of Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, Scholar of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision, this was the first time the Court ever admitted social science studies as hard evidence. Yet Klein was mistaken with this precedent. Kenneth Clark himself wrote a history called The Social Scientist as an Expert Witness in Civil Rights Litigation, in which he states that Robert Redfield, an anthropologist from the University of Chicago was the first expert witness called to testify as a social scientist in Sweatt v. University of Texas in 1946.
   Kenneth Clark advocated several different methods of improving schools in black ghettos, and in 1964 persuaded the Johnson administration to back his ideas with $110 million in federal funding. Teen filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated that study in a 2006 film entitled "A Girl Like Me", and stunningly received the same results as did Dr. Clark and his wife in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
   After Brown v. Board, the findings of the doll studies were more carefully scrutinized and heavily criticized as unfalsifiable. As Garfinkel notes in his Social Science Evidence and the School Segregation Cases, "Clark had no rigorously obtained data whereby he could systematically connect the broad effects of discrimination on personality to the school segregation in these cases." Clark had even found evidence which contradicted this conclusion: 1) He found that more black children in integrated schools preferred and would rather play with the white doll (see table below). He also found that after black children entered segregated schools, they approved more highly of the black dolls.

	North (integrated schools)	South (segregated schools)
Prefer to play with white doll	72%	62%
White doll is "nice"	68%	52%
Black doll is "bad"	71%	49%

While the interpretation of this data is complex, it doesn't on the face of it support Clark's connection between school segregation and doll interaction.

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