Clark, Kenneth Bancroft

Impact on the world

Co-developed, alongside his wife and primary research partner Mamie Phipps Clark, the 'doll test' studies on Black children's racial self-perception that became part of the social science evidence NAACP attorneys presented to the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), personally testifying as an expert witness in three of the case's four combined trials; he went on to become the first African American to earn a psychology PhD from Columbia University, the first Black permanent faculty member at the City College of New York, and in 1971 the first Black president of the American Psychological Association.

Life & background

Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1914, Clark moved to New York City with his mother and sister in 1919, eventually earning his bachelor's and master's degrees from Howard University, where in his final year he met and began encouraging fellow student Mamie Phipps to pursue psychology over mathematics, a relationship that led to their 1937 elopement and a lifelong research partnership. He completed his PhD in experimental psychology at Columbia in 1940, becoming the first African American to hold that degree from the institution, before briefly working as a research psychologist for the Office of War Information and then joining the faculty of the City College of New York, where he became the institution's first permanent Black faculty member and remained until his 1975 retirement. Although history has often credited him individually with the doll test, Clark himself acknowledged that the research had originally been his wife's own project, one he had joined only after she had already begun it; together the couple administered the doll studies to over 250 Black children, and Kenneth testified as an expert witness in three of the four school segregation cases combined into Brown v. Board, co-authoring a summary statement on the supporting social science research endorsed by 35 leading social scientists nationwide, testimony that proved influential in Chief Justice Earl Warren's eventual ruling. He and Mamie co-founded Harlem's Northside Center for Child Development in 1946 and Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited in 1962 to combat youth unemployment and school dropout rates, and in 1971 Kenneth became the first African American elected president of the American Psychological Association; he died in 2005, having outlived his wife and lifelong research partner by 22 years.

Sources

1. Library of Congress (African American Innovation guide); Open History of Psychology; Psychology Today; NAACP Legal Defense Fund