RIP Kenneth B. Clark

Kenneth B. Clark, a pioneer in research of the effects of racial discrimination on black children, has died.

Kenneth B. Clark, an educator and psychologist who spent his life working for improvement in the education of black children and influenced the Supreme Court's decision to strike down school segregation, has died at age 90, his son said Monday.

Hilton Clark said his father died early Sunday morning at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson after a long battle with cancer.

[…]

In the 1950s, Clark conducted a study he had devised years earlier which showed that school segregation marred the development of black students. The Supreme Court cited those findings in its unanimous 1954 decision [on Brown v. Board of Education].

In his research, Clark showed black schoolchildren black and white dolls and asked what they thought. Most preferred the white doll and said the black doll looked "bad." When asked which doll looked more like themselves, some said the white doll. Others refused to answer the question or cried.

Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that separating black children from white "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."

Thirty years after that landmark ruling, Clark described himself as "bewildered" at the persistence of de facto segregation and inferior education for many blacks.

[…]

He never abandoned his belief in the importance of education in overcoming racism. "I think that white and blacks should be taught to respect their fellow human beings as an integral part of being educated," he said.

"A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike," he wrote.

Though Clark was a psychologist, much of the research he did had a sociological element that was of interest to me. If you’ve never read any of his work, I highly recommend it.