Kenneth and Mamie Clark




Kenneth Bancroft Clark (July 14, 1914 – May 1, 2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (April 18, 1917 – August 11, 1983) were African-American psychologists who as a married team conducted research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. They founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). Kenneth Clark was also an educator and professor at City College of New York, and first black president of the American Psychological Association.

They were known for their 1940s experiments using dolls to study children's attitudes about race. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in Briggs v. Elliott (1952), one of five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Clarks' work contributed to the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in which it determined that de jure racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Brown v. Board of Education opinion, "To separate them 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 to ever be undone."

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The Coloring Test

The coloring test was another experiment that was involved in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Mamie and Kenneth did this experiment in order to investigate the development of racial identity in African American children and examine how a negro child’s color and “their sense of their own race and status” influenced “their judgment about themselves” and their “self esteem.” The coloring test was administered to 160 African American children between the ages of five and seven years old. The children were given a piece of coloring paper with a leaf, an apple, an orange, a mouse, a boy and a girl on it. They were all given a box of crayons and asked to first color the mouse to make sure they had a basic understanding of the relationship between color and object. If they pass, they were then asked to color a boy if they were a boy and a girl if they were a girl. They were told to color the boy or girl the color that they are. They were then told to color the opposite sex the color
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Mamie Phipps Clark

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