Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,410

This is the grave of Kenneth and Mamie Clark.

Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1914, Kenneth Clark started out pretty wealthy for a Black person in early 20th century America. His father was an agent for United Fruit and made good money. But then his parents separated in 1919. His mother moved to Harlem with her kids and had to work as a seamstress. She had a strong sense of justice and became a union organizer and later a shop steward in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. She would pass these ideas down to her son. In his schooling, Clark, like most Black kids, was trained more for the trades than higher education and his mom didn’t like that, so she moved around until he would have the classical education she wanted for him. He graduated from high school in 1931 and went to Howard University. He was a political science major but got very interested in psychology toward the end of his bachelor’s degree, so he stuck around for a master’s in that. Then it was off to Columbia for the Ph.D.

Mamie Phillips was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1917. She was a member of the Black elite too. Her father was a doctor, originally from the British West Indies. Of course, being in Arkansas in the Jim Crow South meant that the Black elite did not necessarily mean wealth and so he supplemented his income by managing some of the vacation properties in Hot Springs. Her family valued education for their children, boys and girls. They moved to Pine Bluff and actually were wealthy enough by the 1930s to live in a white part of town, evidently without too much resistance, though the kids went to the Black schools. She went to Howard University as well, majoring in psychology. She and Kenneth met, fell in love, and married upon her graduation in 1937, which was the deal she made with her parents.

But this was not to be some traditional marriage where he worked and she stayed at home. No, they became a powerhouse couple both within psychology and within the civil rights movement. Mamie got an internship with the leading Black lawyer Charles Houston in 1938. This put her in the big time circles, meeting Thurgood Marshall among others. She later claimed this was the key moment in her life, when she realized that segregation could be defeated. She then went on to get a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia. Kenneth was the first Black Ph.D. in that department, Mamie was the second.

Kenneth got a job at City College and basically founded the psychology department there. But it was harder for Mamie, who floated around, got jobs where she could, worked for the military during World War II, and then like so many women, was let go when the men returned from the war. In 1946, she got a job at the Riverdale Children’s Association, which was the old Colored Orphans Asylum. So she dealt with hard cases, deeply impoverished, abused, often abandoned young Black children. It was here that she began her serious work in developmental psychology. She realized that these kids were just spat out and thrown away by the system. There was nothing wrong with them mentally. It was a lifetime of being neglected. She appealed to the city’s social service agencies to up their services to these kids in Harlem, but none were interested.

So the Clarks decided to do it themselves. They opened what became known as the Northside Center for Child Development in a Harlem apartment. The goal was to match individual children with the social services they need. It still exists today. Mamie directed it for the next 33 years. It was here that the Clarks made their greatest contribution to American life–providing the social science data that informed what would become the Brown decision in 1954. Most notably, the developed what became known as “the coloring test.” This was an experiment, using 160 Black children between the ages of 5 and 7, where they had the kids color various objects and demonstrated that kids colored themselves lighter than they were, part of a larger theory that they already saw lightness as an escape from their reality.

Then there were the doll experiments. These came out of Mamie’s work at Columbia. She had already published papers on this back in the late 30s. They compared how Black children played with dolls, using kids at integrated New York schools and segregated Washington schools as the data. Of course, what they realized is that children as young as 5 years old already realized that social status and whiteness were connected in American society. That this was developed as a pure experiment and was not associated with any political group meant that when the politics came calling, as they did when the experiment was used as critical evidence in Brown, the objectivity of the data had greater power. This moved the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Brown, one of the most important cases in the history of the United States, although the U.S. has never in fact really desegregated its schools in any meaningful way. Have to make sure Connor and Maddie go to the best schools after all.

Of course, the Clarks were as hypocritical as any contemporary white here. In 1950, they moved to Westchester County for the schools. They admitted as such.

After 1954, the Clarks remained major figures, including their work with poor children in New York. Kenneth remained at Columbia the rest of his career and played a key role in negotiating the battles between left militants (including his own son) and the administration in the late 1960s. He also testified before the Kerner Commission on the riots of the late 60s. Mamie was more a background figure, despite her tremendous publications. Some of this may because she was more shy, some may have been slipping into traditional gender roles. People have speculated about this. Of course, it could be a little of both.

Mamie retired in 1979 and smoked herself into the ground in 1983. She was 66 years old. Kenneth lived over two decades longer, dying in 2005, at the age of 91.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark are buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other key figures in the civil rights movement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. This is naturally a common theme of this series, so we have visited quite a few over the years. John Lewis is in Atlanta and Rosa Parks is in Detroit. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.