Kenneth Clark was a noted authority on integration, and in particular, he and his wife were closely involved in the integration efforts of New York City and New York State. During the ’50s and ’60s, the Clarks focused on New York City schools. In 1946, the Clarks founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, where they conducted experiments on racial biases in education. Kenneth Clark was dismayed that the court failed to cite two other conclusions he had reached: that racism was an inherently American institution and that school segregation inhibited the development of white children, too. The Supreme Court cited Clark’s 1950 paper in its Brown decision and acknowledged it implicitly in the following passage: “To separate from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Dr. Kenneth Clark provided testimony in the Briggs, Davis, and Delaware cases and co-authored a summary of the social science testimony delivered during the trials that were endorsed by 35 leading social scientists. Robert Carter, in particular, spearheaded this effort and worked to enlist the support of sociologists and psychologists who would be willing to provide expert social science testimony that dovetailed with the conclusions of “the doll tests.” Dr. The Brown team relied on the testimonies and research of social scientists throughout their legal strategy. We did it to communicate to our colleagues in psychology the influence of race and color and status on the self-esteem of children.” And we told them it was up to them to make that decision and we did not do it for litigation. In fact, we did the study fourteen years before Brown, and the lawyers of the NAACP learned about it and came and asked us if we thought it was relevant to what they were planning to do in terms of the Brown decision cases. We’ve now-this research, by the way, was done long before we had any notion that the NAACP or that the public officials would be concerned with our results. We worked with Negro children-I’ll call black children-to see the extent to which their color, their sense of their own race and status, influenced their judgment about themselves, self-esteem. Kenneth Clark recalled: “The Dolls Test was an attempt on the part of my wife and me to study the development of the sense of self-esteem in children. In an interviewon the award-winning PBS documentary of the Civil Rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” Dr.
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