Dark Ghetto: The Frustrations of Kenneth Clark

Dark Ghetto: The Frustrations of Kenneth Clark

Encyclopedia.com reported: America’s schools did not suddenly integrate themselves the day after Brown v. Board of Education; in most urban areas the growth of black ghettoes only reinforced the segregation of black and white schoolchildren. Clark understood that in order to improve the education of students of color, the African American community as a whole needed to lobby for a massive infusion of capital and commitment from the federal government and from private citizens. After sparring unsuccessfully with the New York City Board of Education during the late 1950s over issues of segregation, Clark was given a unique opportunity to effect a wholesale reformation of the school system in Harlem. As part of the “Great Society” plans inaugurated by the administrations of President John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, federal funds were provided in 1962 to create Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), the task of which was to study and suggest remedies for the causes of juvenile delinquency in the Harlem area.

Clark was appointed chairman of HARYOU, which over the next two years produced a 620-page report recommending, among other things, the “thorough reorganization of the schools” in Harlem. This would include increased integration, a massive program to improve reading skills among students, stricter review of teacher performance, and, most importantly, a high level of participation by the residents of Harlem in implementing these changes. HARYOU was the first example of what would later be known as a community-action program.

HARYOU was sabotaged by political power bargaining in New York, and few if any of its recommendations were followed. As Clark commented in the New Yorker, “As it turned out, all we did at HARYOU was to produce a document.” Clark’s community-based approach inspired many subsequent programs in the “War on Poverty,” but with few exceptions they too fell victim to the complexities of urban politics. Although his experience with HARYOU must be counted as a failure in terms of political reality, it did spur Clark to write the book for which he is best known, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. In this work, Clark goes beyond his HARYOU research to write what he describes in the introduction as “no report at all, but rather the anguished cry of its author”—an overview of black ghetto life that has become required reading in sociology classes around the country.

Kenneth Clark

In 1967 Clark formed and presided over a nonprofit corporation known as MARC Corp. (the Metropolitan Applied Research Center), composed of a group of social scientists and other professionals who hoped to identify and solve problems of the urban poor. MARC’s most significant work was undertaken in 1970, when the school board of Washington, D.C., asked Clark and his associates to design a new educational program for the city’s 150,000 schoolchildren, 90% of whom were black and the majority of whom were poor.

In an era of radical social and political experimentation, the Washington, D.C. school system offered Clark the chance to test his theories of education on a large scale and under ideal conditions. Clark outlined a program similar to the HARYOU program for New York, calling for a massive and immediate upgrading of reading skills, teacher evaluation based on student performance, and community involvement in the schooling process.

Once again, however, real life proved far more complex than theory: the Washington, D.C. teachers refused to make their pay and position dependent on the outcome of student tests, and a new superintendent of schools (elected in 1971) refused to cooperate with the plan and even challenged Clark’s central thesis that children of the ghetto could and should be expected to perform at “normal” levels. Ghetto life, argued this administrator, was anything but normal, and it would be unfair to hold teachers and schools responsible for the performance of students handicapped by living in the ghetto.

Continued to Argue for Integration in Education

Such a claim flew in the face of everything Kenneth Clark had learned and fought for since he was a grade school student. It also contradicted the findings of Brown v. Board of Education: if ghetto children could not be held to the same standards as other children, then the schools they were attending were obviously not “equal.” Clark’s defeat at the hands of political reality did not dampen his belief in integrated schooling, however; nor did he cave in to the demands of the politically fashionable black separatist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He opposed the creation of any organization based on racial exclusivity, including such projects as a black dormitory at the University of Chicago and Antioch College’s Afro American Institute. As a result, Clark was attacked as a “moderate” at a time of black radicalism, in some instances receiving personal threats for his adamant rejection of racial separatism.

After his retirement from City College in 1975, Clark and his wife and children founded a consulting firm called Clark, Phipps, Clark & Harris, Inc., helping large corporations design and implement minority hiring programs. The firm flourished, attracting prestigious clients such as AT&T, Chemical Bank, and Consolidated Edison, and Clark remained active in the burgeoning field of minority concerns in the 1990s workplace.

Back in 1982, Clark admitted in the New Yorker that the educational outlook was poor for children of color. “Things are worse. In the schools… more black kids are being put on the dung heap every year.” His wife, Mamie, was even more frank, stating: “More people are without hope now….I really don’t know what the answer is.” Viewing this discouraging prospect eight years later, Clark admitted that even he was beginning to doubt the possibility of racial harmony through integration. “I look back and I shudder,” he told the Washington Post, “and say, ‘Oh God, you really were as naive as some people said you were.’”

With the commitment of U.S. president Bill Clinton’s administration to equalize opportunities for all Americans, Clark continued to voice his outrage over the country’s lack of educational progress—in academic, social, and psychological terms—but offered a mandate for change in the nineties. In a 1993 essay for Newsweek titled “Unfinished Business: The Toll of Psychic Violence,” Clark commented: “We have not yet made education a process whereby students are taught to respect the inalienable dignity of other human beings…. [But] social sensitivity can be internalized as a genuine component of being educated. This is nonviolence in its truest sense. By encouraging and rewarding empathetic behavior in all of our children—both minority and majority youth—we will be protecting them from ignorance and cruelty. We will be helping them to understand the commonality of being human. We will be educating them.” (source: encyclopedia.com)

Kenneth Clark and Brown v. Board of Education

From "Novel Expert evidence in federal civil rights litigation" by Gordon Beggs (The American University Law Review, 45, 1995)

In the consolidated cases known as Brown v. Board of Education, federal civil rights litigation came of age. The case, which heralded great change in constitutional law, public schools, and the fabric of society, also introduced the civil rights field to the debate regarding the use of novel forms of scientific proof as evidence.

At trial in Brown's consolidated case Briggs v. Elliott, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) presented dramatic testimony by Professor Kenneth Clark of the City College of New York.Professor Clark performed innovative psychological tests utilizing dolls to identify harms inflicted on the plaintiff children due to segregation. Professor Clark described the tests and his conclusion in response to questioning by Robert Carter of the NAACP:

A. I made these tests on Thursday and Friday of this past week at your request, and I presented it to children in the Scott's Branch Elementary school, concentrating particularly on the elementary group. I used these methods which I told you about--the Negro and White dolls--which were identical in every respect save skin color. And, I presented them with a sheet of paper on which there were these drawings of dolls, and I asked them to show me the doll--May I read from these notes?

JUDGE WARING: You may refresh your recollection.

THE WITNESS: Thank you. I presented these dolls to them and I asked them the following questions in the following order: "Show me the doll that you like best or that you'd like to play with," "Show me the doll that is the 'nice' doll," "Show me the doll that looks 'bad'," and then the following questions also: "Give me the doll that looks like a white child," "Give me the doll that looks like a colored child," "Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child," and "Give me the doll that looks like you."

By Mr. Carter: Q. "Like you?"

A. "Like you." That was the final question, and you can see why. I wanted to get the child's free expression of his opinions and feelings before I had him identified with one of these two dolls. I found that of the children between the ages of six and nine whom I tested, which were a total of sixteen in number, that ten of those children chose the white doll as their preference; the doll which they liked best. Ten of them also considered the white doll a "Nice" doll. And, I think you have to keep in mind that these two dolls are absolutely identical in every respect except skin color. Eleven of these sixteen children chose the brown doll as the doll which looked "bad." This is consistent with previous results which we have obtained testing over three hundred children, and we interpret it to mean that the Negro child accepts as early as six, seven or eight the negative stereotypes about his own group. . . .

Q. Well, as a result of your tests, what conclusions have you reached, Mr. Clark, with respect to the infant plaintiffs involved in this case?

A. The conclusion which I was forced to reach was that these children in Clarendon County, like other human beings who are subjected to an obviously inferior status in the society in which they live, have been definitely harmed in the development of their personalities; that the signs of instability in their personalities are clear, and I think that every psychologist would accept and interpret these signs as such.

Q. Is that the type of injury which in your opinion would be enduring or lasting?

A. I think it is the kind of injury which would be as enduring or lasting as the situation endured, changing only in its form and in the way it manifests itself. MR. CARTER: Thank you. Your witness.

Professor Clark's testimony, while founded on scientific principle, carried great emotional power, and therefore caused vigorous debate among the litigants and scholars as to its import. NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall, arguing on behalf of plaintiff schoolchildren, asserted the broadest inference that could be drawn from results of these tests: they proved actual harm done by segregated schools. Thus, minority schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment because they could not satisfy the separate but equal standard announced by the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Other NAACP lawyers, like many civil rights practitioners who would follow in their footsteps, struggled with the meaning of the novel scientific evidence that they were attempting to develop. One historian subsequently reported that Professor Clark's tests using the dolls were "the source of considerable derision" among plaintiffs' attorneys. William Coleman, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, acknowledged, "Of all the debunkers, I was the most debunking. . . . I thought it was a joke." Professor Clark, who also served as principal advisor on the expert testimony for the school desegregation cases, was well aware of the controversy. He recalled:

Thurgood [Marshall] kept his options open. He played the role of conductor beautifully. It was clear that Bob Carter was the most persistent, consistent advocate of the involvement of the social scientists at the trial level. Bob was way out on the limb, pretty much by himself. Most of the other lawyers felt this approach was, at best, a luxury and irrelevant. Thurgood Marshall didn't tip his hand, except that he did let Bob and me go ahead with the dolls.

John W. Davis argued on behalf of the defendant school officials.60 Davis chose to attempt to undermine the doll tests' stature as scientific evidence by invoking a sarcastic style of argument. He pointed out that Professor Clark purported "to speak as an expert and informed investigator."61 From an "intensive investigation" and "thoroughly scientific test," Professor Clark reached the "sound conclusion" that the plaintiffs suffered harm in their development.62 Calling the result "sad," Davis declaimed that the court was "invited to accept it as a scientific conclusion."63 In concluding, however, Davis attempted to turn Professor Clark's published research64 in the defendant’s favor by pointing out that a greater percentage of black children in northern schools preferred the white doll, thought the white doll was nice, and thought the black doll was bad.65 He declared, "Now these latter scientific tests were conducted in nonsegregating states, and with those results compared, what becomes of the blasting influence of segregation to which Dr. Clark so eloquently testifies."

The Court ordered reargument of the cases 67 and did not issue its opinion until May 17, 1954. Holding that racial segregation of children in public schools was a per se violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court found that segregation "generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect the children's hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Noting the consistent findings in the Kansas and Delaware71 decisions that segregated schools injured the plaintiffs and denied them equal educational opportunities, the Court concluded that "[w]hatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority."

(http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/class/common/dolls_in_brown_vs_board.html)



The Open Mind Kenneth Clark and Brown v. Board of Education

Watch the full episode. See more The Open Mind.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Doll Study

Segregation Ruled Unequal, and Therefore Unconstitutional

Kenneth B. Clark & Mamie Phipps Clark

Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark Ph.d demonstrated that segregation harmed Black children's self-images. Their testimony before the Supreme Court contributed to the landmark Supreme Court case that desegregated American public schools: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS

Findings

In their groundbreaking studies, Kenneth and Mamie Clark investigated black children's racial identification and preference. Using drawings and dolls of black and white children, these researchers asked Black preschool and elementary school children to indicate which drawing or doll they preferred and which drawing or doll looked most like them. They also asked children to color line drawings of children with the color that most closely matched their own skin color. The Clarks found that Black children often preferred the white doll and drawing, and frequently colored the line drawing of the child a shade lighter than their own skin. Samples of the children's responses illustrated that they viewed white as good and pretty, but black as bad and ugly.

Clark and Clark concluded that many Black children at the time (1939-1950) "indicate a clear-cut preference for white and some of them evidence emotional conflict when requested to indicate a color preference. It is clear that the Negro child, by the age of five is aware of the fact that to be colored in contemporary American society is a mark of inferior status. A child accepts as early as six, seven or eight the negative stereotypes about his own group."

Significance

Until 1954, public schools were racially segregated, meaning that Black and White children could be forced to attend different schools. A Supreme Court ruling from 1892, Plessy v. Ferguson, legitimized these children's "separate, but equal" educations. With the help of Clark and Clark's research findings, that illustrated the effect of prejudice and discrimination on personality development, the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education were able to show that segregated schools were inherently unequal, and therefore unconstitutional.

Clark and Clark's research prompted several future studies about racial identification and preference among minority children.

Practical Application

The impact of their research is evident in the court's unanimous decision, as written by Chief Justice Earl Warren: "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has the tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system." In short, segregation failed to provide Black and White children equal protection under the law — a protection guaranteed by the 14th amendment. Segregation was therefore deemed unconstitutional. Chief Justice Warren noted Kenneth Clark as one of the "modern authorities" on which the decision was based. This acknowledgment was significant because it was the first time that psychological research was cited in a Supreme Court decision and because social science data was seen as paramount in the Court's decision.

source: American Psychological Association, May 28, 2003, Revised July 2007

Doll Cultural Study

Black doll White doll



The Barbie Doll Test



White Doll, Black Doll. Which one is the nice doll?

Dr. Kenneth Clark Interviews James Baldwin

James Baldwin Interview (1 of 3)

Dr. Kenneth Clark: Through a strange set of circumstances, we managed to record this conversation with James Baldwin immediately after both of us attended that now-famous meeting between a group of Mr. Baldwin's friends and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. I believe much of the emotion of that historic occasion spilled over into our conversation. In an attempt to ease the tension, I started by asking him to dig back and tell us something about his childhood and his growing up.

James Baldwin: My mind is someplace else, really. But to think back on it -- I was born in Harlem, Harlem Hospital, and we grew up -- first house I remember was on Park Avenue -- which is not the American Park Avenue, or maybe it is the American Park Avenue --

Clark: Uptown Park Avenue?

Baldwin: Uptown Park Avenue, where the railroad tracks are. We used to play on the roof and in the -- I can't call it an alley -- but near the river -- it was a kind of dump, garbage dump. Those were the first scenes I remember. I remember my father had trouble keeping us alive -- there were nine of us. I was the oldest so I took care of the kids and dealt with Daddy. I understand him much better now. Part of his problem was he couldn't feed his kids, but I was a kid and I didn't know that. He was very religious, very rigid. He kept us together, I must say, and when I look back on it -- that was over 40 years ago that I was born -- when I think back on my growing up and walk that same block today, because it's still there, and think of the kids on that block now, I'm aware that something terrible has happened which is very hard to describe.

I am, in all but technical legal fact, a Southerner. My father was born in the South -- no, my mother was born in the South, and if they had waited two more seconds I might have been born in the South. But that means I was raised by families whose roots were essentially rural --

Clark: Southern rural...

Baldwin: Southern rural, and whose relation to the church was very direct, because it was the only means they had of expressing their pain and their despair. But 20 years later the moral authority which was present in the Negro Northern community when I was growing up has vanished, and people talk about progress, and I look at Harlem which I really know -- I know it like I know my hand -- and it is much worse there today than it was when I was growing up.

Clark: Would you say this is true of the schools too?

Baldwin: It is much worse in the schools.

Clark: What school did you go to?

Baldwin: I went to P.S. 24 and I went to P.S. 139. Frederick Douglass...

Clark: We are fellow alumni. I went to 139.

Baldwin: I didn't like a lot of my teachers, but I had a couple of teachers who were very nice to me -- one was a Negro teacher. You ask me these questions and I'm trying to answer you. I remember coming home from school -- you can guess how young I must have been -- and my mother asked me if my teacher was colored or white, and I said she was a little bit colored and a little bit white. But she was about your color. As a matter of fact I was right.

That's part of the dilemma of being an American Negro; that one is a little bit colored and a little bit white, and not only in physical terms but in the head and in the heart, and there are days -- this is one of them -- when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How, precisely, are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel, white majority, that you are here? And to be here means that you can't be anywhere else.

I'm terrified at the moral apathy -- the death of the heart which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long, that they really don't think I'm human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters. It's a terrible indictment -- I mean every word I say.

Clark: Well, we are confronted with the racial confrontation in America today. I think the pictures of dogs in the hands of human beings attacking other human beings --

Baldwin: In a free country -- in the middle of the 20th century.

Clark: In a free country. This Birmingham, clearly not restricted to Birmingham, as you so eloquently pointed out. What do you think can be done to change -- to use your term -- the moral fiber of America?

Baldwin: I think that one has got to find some way of putting the present administration of this country on the spot. One has got to force, somehow, from Washington, a moral commitment, not to the Negro people, but to the life of this country.

It doesn't matter any longer, and I'm speaking for myself, for Jimmy Baldwin, and I think I'm speaking for a great many Negroes too. It doesn't matter any longer what you do to me; you can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you'd done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?

James Baldwin Interview (2 of 3)


Dr. Kenneth Clark: You mean the attorney general of the United States?

Baldwin: Mr. Robert Kennedy -- didn't know that I would have trouble convincing my nephew to go to Cuba, for example, to liberate the Cubans in defense of a government which now says it is doing everything it can do, which cannot liberate me. Now, there are 20 million people in this country, and you can't put them all in jail. I know how my nephew feels, I know how I feel, I know how the cats in the barbershop feel.

A boy last week, he was sixteen, in San Francisco, told me on television -- thank God we got him to talk -- maybe somebody thought to listen. He said, "I've got no country. I've got no flag." Now, he's only 16 years old, and I couldn't say, "you do." I don't have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house, because San Francisco is engaging -- as most Northern cities now are engaged -- in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out. It means Negro removal, that is what it means. The federal government is an accomplice to this fact.

Now, we are talking about human beings, there's not such a thing as a monlithic wall or some abstraction called the Negro problem, these are Negro boys and girls, who at 16 and 17 don't believe the country means anything that it says and don't feel they have any place here, on the basis of the performance of the entire country.

Clark: But now, Jim --

Baldwin: Am I exaggerating?

James Baldwin Interview (3 of 3)


Clark: What do you see? Are you essentially optimistic or pessimistic, and I really don't want to put words in your mouth, because what I really want to find out is what you really believe.

Baldwin: I'm both glad and sorry you asked me that question, but I'll do my best to answer it. I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives -- it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face, and deal with, and embrace this stranger whom they maligned so long.

What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it.

The question you have got to ask yourself -- the white population of this country has got to ask itself -- North and South, because it's one country, and for a Negro, there's no difference between the North and South. There's just a difference in the way they castrate you. But the fact of the castration is the American fact. If I'm not a nigger here and you invented him, you, the white people, invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it's able to ask that question.

Clark: As a Negro and as an American, I can only hope that America has the strength and the capacity --

Baldwin: And the moral strength.