Kenneth Clark was a pioneering psychologist and educator known for his research on racial segregation and its impact on African American children. He and his wife, Mamie Clark, conducted the famous doll study which demonstrated the detrimental effects of segregation on children's self-perception and identity. Their research played a crucial role in the Supreme Court's decision to end segregation in schools through the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Kenneth Bancroft Clark was born in the Panama Canal Zone on July 14, 1914. When he was five, his parents separated and his mother took him to the United States to live in Harlem in New York City.
Settling in the Harlem community of Manhattan, Miriam Clark struggled greatly and often, the Clark family had to move between tenement apartments. Despite living in impoverished and, at times, dangerous environments, Kenneth loved the life in Harlem. It was there that he was first introduced to and even interacted with many greats of the Harlem Renaissance. These persons include poet Countee Cullen, who taught Kenneth in junior high school; writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston; and bibliophile and curator, Arturo Schomburg. Kenneth Clark attended a segregated elementary and junior high and was trained to learn a trade, as were most Black students at this time.
His mother fought for Kenneth to be placed on an academic path geared for higher learning at a university. Kenneth was enrolled in the prestigious George Washington High School and graduated in 1931. Upon graduation, Kenneth B. Clark attended Howard University located in Washington, D.C., where he first studied political science with professors, which included Ralph Johnson Bunche and department chair of Psychology, psychologist Francis Cecil Sumner. Bunche was the first Black person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. Both Sumner and Bunche were highly influential on Clark. Clark completed his undergraduate work at Howard University and earned his bachelor degree in 1935.
The following year, he returned to complete his master degree in psychology. Kenneth Clark was hired to teach psychology at his alma mater for the 1937-38 academic year. In 1937, Clark, prompted by Sumner, entered the doctoral program at Columbia University to work with Otto Klineberg. Clark later received a doctoral degree in psychology from Columbia University, doing research to support the study of race relations. Kenneth was the first African American to earn a PhD in psychology from Columbia University in 1940. During the summer of 1941, the Dean of Hampton Institute asked Clark to start a department of psychology there. He stayed for a year teaching a few courses within the department.
In 1942 Kenneth Clark became the first African-American tenured full professor at the City College of New York. He held this position until he retired in 1975. Clark also was first Black president of the American Psychological Association. Clark married Mamie Phipps Clark, who also received a doctoral degree in psychology from Columbia. She started at Howard University in 1934, studying math and physics - two departments that were not supportive of her studies, due to prejudices against women. Professors felt that women weren't suited for such studies. But Mamie Phipps went beyond her professors expectation. She received her bachelor degree in 1938 and returned to Howard for her master degree.
Beginning as early as 1939 the Clarks conducted tests using dolls to determine the psychological effects of segregation on Black children. This research would be the focus of her Master of Arts thesis, “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children” at Howard University. Supporting each’s research, Kenneth and Mamie soon collaborated professionally, including publishing their findings on race recognition and self-worth in academic journals and presenting at conferences. The Clarks received a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship program in 1939, providing an additional three years of support for their research and her studies at Columbia University in the City of New York, where she too had entered to pursue her doctorate in psychology.
For the decade after graduating from Columbia, Kenneth B. Clark taught psychology and worked as a psychologist with the federal Office of War Information. His teaching began at Hampton Institute, but he resigned due to differences between him and administration. The Clarks opened their own agency in 1946 called the Northside Center for Child Development. This was the first full-time child guidance center offering psychological and casework services to families in the Harlem area. There they also continued conducting experiments on racial biases in education. They pursued research on racial identification in Black children. A critical instrument of their work and outreach was intelligence testing.
The Clarks used this to refute public schools’ ideology and disavow their intentional placement of minority children in programs for those with developmental delays. They published three articles that found differences between Black children attending segregated versus mixed schools, influencing their most famous “doll study” in 1950. Their studies found contrasts among Black kids attending segregated schools in Washington, D.C versus those in integrated schools in New York. Their paper, “Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development”. was highly influential in building with individuals and organizations.
The organization with whom the Clark couple became most famous for collaborating with against segregation was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Having studied more than two-hundred Black children, the Clarks’ work detailed their findings of race’s influence on self-identity and esteem in “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of De-Segregation: a Social Science Statement”. 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."
Thurgood Marshall, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, used the Clarks' study to challenge state-mandated segregation for public schoolchildren. He argued that the study confirmed that segregated education inflicted harm on Black children. As a result of the doll experiment, the Clarks testified as expert witnesses in several school desegregation cases, including Briggs v. Elliott, which was later combined into the famous Brown v. Board of Education. The case was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling that state laws of racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in a 9-0 decision, on the basis that it violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
The Supreme Court declared that separate but equal in education was unconstitutional because it resulted in Black children having "a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community." The Doll Study is cited in the 11th footnote of the Brown decision to provide updated and "ample" psychological support to the Kansas case. Ultimately, the Clarks helped end segregation in the American public school system. This groundbreaking decision greatly impacted Blacks and their opportunities for personal, familial and community advancement. The evidence provided by Clark helped end segregation in the public school systems.
The Clark’s doll experiment was cited as providing ample psychological support for the case of Black children feeling inferior. Clark in 1962 was among the founders of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), an organization devoted to developing educational and job opportunities. In order to devise programs, the Clark couple undertook extensive research of factors impacting Harlemites. These factors include education levels, housing, income and incarceration. President Lyndon B. Johnson administration earmarked more than $100 million for the organization. Kenneth B. Clark actively promoted racial integration but his focus was always for the betterment, especially psychological, of Blacks.
Over the next two decades Kenneth Clark published numerous books and articles in the field of social psychology. The recipient of the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1961, he became the first African American to be appointed to the New York State Board of Regents in 1966. Working to ensure that educational opportunities were equitable for all children, he was a member of this Board for twenty years. Following race riots in the summer of 1967, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the “Kerner Commission”. The Commission called Kenneth Clark among the first experts to testify, consulting on psychological and social issues in urban communities.
He was the recipient of a number of accolades, including the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award and the Presidential Medal of Liberty. Kenneth Bancroft Clark made extremely impactful contributions both in psychology and to society as a whole. An advocate for racial integration, Clark was a board member and Chairman Emeritus of the New York Civil Rights Coalition until his death on May 1, 2005. He left a huge lasting impact on racial desegregation models as well as attempts at understanding racism on a psychological level.