A dramatic episode in Black history is told in vivid detail for the first time in Tim Spofford’s What The Children Told Us. Unfolding like a novel, it’s the biography of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark, the Harlem psychologists who developed the legendary doll test. Using brown and white dolls, their experiment played a key role in the landmark Supreme Court ruling against segregated school systems in 1954. Today, Clark dolls are on exhibit at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, and at the Brown v. the Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas. The Clark experiment is conducted today by students and scholars around the world.
In 1940, the Clarks gained a grant to study Black pupils’ dawning sense of racial identity in the nominally integrated North – Springfield, Massachusetts – and in the strictly segregated South, Mamie’s hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas. They used four similar baby dolls in the testing: two of them brown with hair painted black, and two white with hair painted yellow.
Among those tested was little K.J., a shy 8-year-old boy in a blue suit. Kenneth showed him the four dolls. “Give me the doll you like to play with, the doll that you like best,” he said. The dark-skinned boy chose a white doll. Next, Kenneth said, “Give me the doll that is a nice doll,” and K.J. picked the same white doll. “Give me the doll that looks bad.” This time he chose a brown doll. Asked to show the doll “that is a nice color,” K.J. again picked a white doll. “Give me the doll that looks like you.” K.J. hesitated, looked embarrassed, and selected a brown doll. Did he like that doll? “No – I don’t like that one.”
Two-thirds of the 252 other Black pupils tested preferred a white doll to one of their own race. Some even denied their race. “I look brown because I got a suntan,” said Edward D., nearly age 8, who preferred a white doll. “I’m a white boy.” To Kenneth, these Black children had internalized the low opinion of their race in a segregated nation.
The Clarks went on to found a psychiatric clinic for Harlem kids that operates to this day, Northside Center for Child Development. They also worked with NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall in the federal courts to end school segregation. Mamie helped found Head Start, and Kenneth helped found Haryou, another War on Poverty agency. He was president of the prestigious American Psychological Association, bestselling author of the 1960s classic, Dark Ghetto, and the most prominent Black scholar of the civil rights era.
Spofford has a doctorate in English and worked for years in classrooms and newsrooms. He’s written for the New York Times, Newsday, Mother Jones magazine, Columbia Journalism Review and other publications. He’s also the author of Lynch Street, a documentary account of the Jackson State killings in Mississippi in May of 1970. What the Children Told Us was recently published by Sourcebooks. For more information, visit timspoffordbooks.com. You can reach the author at spoffordtim@gmail.com and summers at 413-394-4298 or 727-289-1068 the rest of the year.
Original source can be found here
