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Kenneth B. Clark, Educator, and Psychologist born

Kenneth B. Clark

This date marks the birthday of Kenneth Clark in 1914. He was a Black psychologist, educator, and social activist. His research, particularly his "doll study,” was crucial to the desegregation of American public schools.

Kenneth Bancroft Clark grew up with his mother in Harlem. His childhood heroes included poet Countee Cullen, who taught at his junior high school, and book collector Arthur Schomburg, who served as a curator at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. After attending integrated elementary and junior high schools, Clark graduated from George Washington High School in New York in 1931.

Clark was well-known as an undergraduate at Howard University; he led demonstrations against segregation in Washington, D.C. He met Mamie Phipps at Howard, with whom he became engaged and later married, and who also became his closest intellectual collaborator. The Clarks then attended Columbia University to study psychology, and in 1940, Kenneth Clark became the first Black student to receive a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia. Clark joined the faculty of City College in the early 1950s. He frequently served as an expert witness for the NAACP in its legal struggles against segregation.

His greatest fame, however, stemmed from his research on the self-image of Black children. Clark studied the responses of more than 200 Black children who were given a choice of white or brown dolls. From his findings that the children preferred the white dolls from as early as three years old, Clark concluded that segregation was psychologically damaging. This conclusion was pivotal in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregated education.

He was at the forefront of articulating the intersectionality of societal racism and self-esteem from a psychological perspective. Although Clark fought for racial integration, his book “Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power” (1965) was popular among Black Nationalists because it compared the situation of Black citizens to that of colonized people. Clark's other writings include “Prejudice and Your Child” (1953), “Crisis in Urban Education” (1971), and “The Negro American” (1966), which he co-edited with Talcott Parsons. His televised interviews with James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were published in a book entitled “The Negro Protest” in 1963.

In addition to his scholarly activities, Clark was involved in various community development programs and served as an adviser to local and national policymakers. In 1946, he and his wife founded the North Side Child Development Center in Harlem to serve the needs of emotionally disturbed children. In 1962, Clark also played a key role in founding Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, a program that influenced President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty program.

As the only Black member of the New York Board of Regents, he continued his fight against segregated education. In 1961, Clark's work for civil rights earned him the NAACP's Spingarn Medal. Clark was also elected president of the American Psychological Association for his significant contributions to the field of psychology, receiving the association's Gold Medal Award.

Through his work, he advocated for family consumer services and established a consulting firm specializing in racial policies. Dr. Kenneth B. Clark died on May 1, 2005.

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