Clark, Kenneth Bancroft

▪ 2006

      American psychologist (b. July 14, 1914, Panama Canal Zone—d. May 1, 2005, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.), conducted pioneering research into the impact of racial segregation on children. With his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, he administered the “doll test” to African American schoolchildren in the 1940s and '50s. The test involved presenting a child with a black doll and a white doll and asking the child to select a favourite doll. In the segregated South the black children preferred the white doll by a wide margin, with many children identifying the black doll as “bad.” Clark's research played a key role in arguments during the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation to be unconstitutional. Clark helped develop integrationist educational policies for both federal and state governments. In his career he established several institutions, including in 1946 the Northside Child Development Center in Harlem, meant to foster positive identity and improved opportunities for African Americans. He was active during the civil rights movement and wrote extensively about the plight of African Americans in urban slums. He was committed to integration and strongly opposed both white and black separatists. Late in life he expressed his disappointment that the United States had not made greater progress in race relations.

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