[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 56 (Tuesday, May 3, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E845-E847]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 IN RECOGNITION OF THE GREAT EDUCATOR, HUMANITARIAN, AND CIVIL RIGHTS 
                     ACTIVIST, DR. KENNETH B. CLARK

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 3, 2005

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor an outstanding 
American whose tireless work helped end segregation, raised the 
educational expectations of generations of New Yorkers, and advanced 
the idea of a truly integrated society. My dear friend, Dr. Kenneth B. 
Clark died on May 1, 2005 and he will be missed by all who knew him. I 
extend my condolences to his family and I know I am joined by thousands 
of New Yorkers, as well as those throughout the Nation, who benefited 
from his work to end the injustice of legally imposed racial 
segregation and to create a society where all could have an equal 
opportunity to succeed.
  Kenneth B. Clark was a brilliant scholar and teacher who influenced a 
generation of social scientists by his work and his example as a 
teacher at the City College of New York. He was also, and at heart 
perhaps he was even moreso, an activist who sought to bring about the 
social change required to attain equality of opportunity for African-
Americans in our society. He inspired the vision of Dr. Martin Luther 
King, Jr. and those who led the great Civil Rights Movement toward a 
society in which people would be judged, as Dr. King put it ``by the 
content of their character and not the color of their skin.''
  Dr. Clark was committed to the achievement of an integrated society 
in America that would remove the barriers to full participation by 
blacks, but would also make whites more aware of the benefits to be 
derived from participation by all based upon talent.
  Dr. Clark had an impressive career of working for civil rights and 
education. His research in the 1950s established the inherent problems 
of segregated system and alerted the Supreme Court and the Nation to 
the negative effects of segregation on African-American youth. As a 
member of the New York State Board of Regents for twenty years, he 
continually advised elected officials on ways to transform and improve 
their school systems. He was a passionate advocate for children and did 
not spare those who failed them.
  Dr. Clark was an exemplary American who worked to improve the life of 
all persons in America. I knew him as an exceptional individual and a 
trusted friend. The attached obituary from the New York Times (May 2, 
2005) highlights the life story and accomplishments of Dr. Clark.

            Kenneth Clark, Who Helped End Segregation, Dies

       New York, NY--Kenneth B. Clark, the psychologist and 
     educator whose 1950 report showing the destructive effect of 
     school segregation influenced the United States Supreme Court 
     to hold school segregation to be unconstitutional, died 
     yesterday at his hpme in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 90.
       His death was reported by daughter, Kate C. Harris.

[[Page E846]]

       Dr. Clark was a leader in the civil rights movement that 
     developed after World War II. He was the first black to earn 
     a doctorate from Columbia University, the first to become a 
     tenured instructor in the City College system of New York, 
     and, in 1966, the first black elected to the New York State 
     Board of Regents.
       He wrote several influential books and articles and used 
     his considerable prestige in academic and professional 
     circles and as a participant on many government bodies and 
     Congressional committees to advance the cause of integration. 
     He battled white supremacists and black separatists alike 
     because he believed that a ``racist system inevitably 
     destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and 
     dehumanizes them, black and white alike.''
       It was his research with black schoolchildren that became a 
     pillar of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court 
     decision that toppled the ``separate but equal'' doctrine of 
     racial segregation that prevailed in 21 states.''
       While for decades Dr. Clark was one of the great national 
     authorities on integration, his effect was particularly 
     profound in New York City and New York State. Mayors and 
     governors consulted him, and he expressed firm views about 
     virtually every delicate racial matter from school busing to 
     housing discrimination.
       He was often fearless and blunt about his views, and 
     willing to change them when the empirical evidence led him to 
     believe that his original sentiments were wrong. An early 
     champion of a sweeping reorganization of New York City 
     schools that gave greater control to community school boards, 
     Dr. Clark later commented that ``the schools are no better 
     and no worse than they were a decade ago.''
       ``In terms of the basic objective,'' he said, 
     ``decentralization did not make a damn bit of difference.''
       Dr. Clark, who grew up in New York, gained firsthand 
     knowledge of the effects of legally entrenched segregation in 
     an extended visit, in the 1950's, to Clarendon County in 
     central South Carolina. Its school system had three times as 
     many blacks as whites, but white students received more than 
     60 percent of the funds earmarked for education.
       Dr. Clark administered a test, which he had devised years 
     earlier, to 16 of those black children, who were ages 6 to 9. 
     He showed them a black doll and a white doll and asked them 
     what they thought of each. Eleven of them said that the black 
     doll looked ``bad,'' and nine of them thought that the white 
     doll looked ``nice.'' Seven of the 16 told Dr. Clark that 
     they actually saw themselves as being closest to the white 
     doll in appearance when asked, ``Now show me the doll that's 
     most like you.''
       ``These children saw themselves as inferior, and they 
     accepted the inferiority as part of reality,'' Dr. Clark 
     said.
       Dr. Clark's testing in Clarendon County was used by 
     Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational 
     Fund in its challenge to the constitutionality of the 
     separate-but-equal doctrine because it showed actual damage 
     to children who were segregated and a violation of equal 
     protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
       On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl 
     Warren announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 
     and Marshall, who had argued the case before the court, 
     called Dr. Clark with the news. Dr. Clark recalled that 
     Marshall told him that ``Justice Warren had specifically 
     mentioned the psychological testimony as key.''
       Dr. Clark added: ``I confidently expected the segregation 
     problem would be solved by 1960. That shows how naive I 
     was.''


                        An Unwavering Insistence

       To the end, Dr. Clark remained committed to integration, 
     although he grew more pessimistic. For this, in part, he 
     blamed neoconservative whites who, he thought, had betrayed 
     the civil rights struggle; those blacks who thought they 
     could succeed in isolation from whites; politicians of both 
     races who made empty promises; and defeatists who came to 
     think that integration and real racial harmony were ``too 
     difficult to achieve.''
       Renowned for the power of his oratory and writing over a 
     career that spanned more than 50 years, Dr. Clark was 
     uncompromising in his insistence that blacks be given equal 
     rights and that even in the face of violence at the hands of 
     racists, they must ``adopt a courageous, calm and confident 
     position.''
       Besides Ms. Harris, of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Osprey, 
     Fla., he is survived by his son, Hilton B. Clark of 
     Manhattan, three grandchildren and five greatgrandchildren. 
     Dr. Clark's wife died in 1983.
       Kenneth Bancroft Clark was born in the Panama Canal Zone on 
     July 14, 1914, the son of Arthur Bancroft Clark and Miriam 
     Hanson Clark. His parents did not get along. Mrs. Clark 
     yearned to return to the United States. Mr. Clark, a 
     passenger agent with the United Fruit Company in Latin 
     America, felt he wanted to stay where he was in order to earn 
     a living. When Kenneth was only 5, his mother decided to 
     leave her husband. She took Kenneth and his younger sister, 
     Beulah, to New York City, where Mrs. Clark took a job as a 
     seamstress in a sweatshop, struggling to pay the rent on a 
     tenement apartment in Harlem. Later, she helped organize a 
     union where she worked and became a shop steward for the 
     International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Mrs. Clark and 
     Kenneth had a strong bond and years later, he would recall 
     that she ``somehow communicated to me the excitement of 
     people doing things together to help themselves.''
       In 1920, Kenneth entered Public School 5 in Harlem and soon 
     thereafter switched to P.S. 139, which later also educated 
     James Baldwin. At first, the student body reflected the fact 
     that Harlem contained substantial populations of Irish and 
     Italians. By the time Kenneth Clark reached the ninth grade, 
     however, Harlem was changing and most of the students around 
     him were black. At school, he was told to learn a trade and 
     prepare for vocational training. Miriam Clark would have none 
     of that. She walked into school one day, told the counselor 
     what she thought of vocational schools and made it clear that 
     as far as she was concerned, her son was better than that. 
     Kenneth thus went to George Washington High School in Upper 
     Manhattan.
       He was admitted to Howard University, where he studied 
     political science with Dr. Ralph Bunche and where he came to 
     admire Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. He earned his 
     bachelor's degree in 1935 and returned to Howard the next 
     year for his master's degree in psychology. He also taught at 
     Howard for a time, but soon departed for New York, where he 
     pursued doctoral studies at Columbia University, receiving 
     his Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1940.
       From 1939 to 1941 he took part in the classic study of the 
     American Negro that was organized by Gunnar Myrdal, the 
     Swedish economist. The study, which documented the 
     inequalities that obtained among American whites and blacks, 
     would be required reading in colleges and universities for 
     years.
       In 1942, Dr. Clark served for a time in the Office of War 
     Information, for which he traveled about the United States in 
     order to assess morale among blacks. He returned to New York 
     late in the year and joined the faculty of City College.
       Mamie Phipps Clark, whom he had married in 1938, also 
     earned a doctorate in psychology from Columbia and in 1946 
     joined him in founding the Northside Center for Child 
     Development, which treated children with personality 
     disorders. At first, its services were offered only to blacks 
     but in 1949, it became available to whites, too. That year, 
     Dr. Clark was promoted to assistant professor of psychology 
     at City College.
       His interest in black children's perceptions of themselves 
     went back to 1939 and 1940, when he and his wife conducted 
     tests with dolls in New York and Washington. In those days, 
     Washington had a segregated school system, and the tests 
     showed that black children in Washington had lower self-
     esteem than their peers in New York City.
       On another occasion, Dr. Clark was in rural Arkansas and 
     when he asked one black child which doll was most like him, 
     the little boy smiled and pointed to the brown doll and 
     replied: ``That's a nigger. I'm a nigger.'' Dr. Clark said he 
     found that ``as disturbing, or more disturbing, than the 
     children in Massachusetts who would refuse to answer the 
     question or who would cry and run out of the room.''
       Taken as a whole, Dr. Clark said, the results repeatedly 
     confirmed that American society in the segregated South was 
     telling blacks that they were ``inferior to other groups of 
     human beings in the society.''
       Throughout the 1950's and 1960's, Dr. Clark was most active 
     in New York City. In 1954 he had assailed the city school 
     system with permitting de facto segregation, pointing out 
     that because of this, especially in places like Harlem, 
     ``children not only feel inferior but are inferior in 
     academic achievement.'' After an investigation supported his 
     charges, he was named to lead a Board of Education commission 
     to see to the integration of city schools and to push for 
     smaller classes, an enriched curriculum and better facilities 
     in the city's slum schools.
       During this period he also served as a visiting professor 
     both at Columbia and at the University of California, 
     Berkeley. He became a full tenured professor in the city 
     university system in 1960 and in 1961 won the Spingarn Medal 
     of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 
     People for his contributions to promoting better race 
     relations.


                           A Fight for Harlem

       In 1962, Dr. Clark organized Harlem Youth Opportunities 
     Unlimited, or Haryou, in an effort to recruit educational 
     experts to reorganize Harlem schools, provide for preschool 
     programs and after-school remedial education and reduce 
     unemployment among blacks who had dropped out of school. Two 
     years later, a committee headed by Attorney General Robert F. 
     Kennedy endorsed. Haryou's work, and as a result, President 
     Lyndon B. Johnson's administration earmarked $110 million to 
     finance the program.
       But the program was placed under the administration of a 
     joint organization formed by the merger of Haryou and 
     Associated Community Teams, a pet project of Adam Clayton 
     Powell Jr., the Harlem Congressman and minister. Mr. Powell 
     and Dr. Clark, who served as acting chairman of Haryou-Act, 
     clashed over the selection of an executive director. Mr. 
     Powell charged that Dr. Clark stood to profit personally from 
     control of the program. Dr. Clark denied this and said that 
     Mr. Powell saw the Haryou-Act program mostly in terms of the 
     political power it gave him.
       The struggle between the two was long and heated, and 
     journalists reported that the two grew to despise each other, 
     something that Dr. Clark denied.

[[Page E847]]

       ``I liked him,'' Dr. Clark said of Mr. Powell. ``Adam was 
     one of the most honest, corrupt human beings I have ever met. 
     One of the reasons I liked Adam is that he had so few 
     illusions.''
       Dr. Clark quoted Mr. Powell as telling him, in the middle 
     of the controversy, ``Ah, Kenneth, stop being a child. If you 
     come along with me, we can split a million bucks.'' Dr. Clark 
     explained that what Mr. Powell didn't understand was: ``I 
     didn't want any million dollars. What the hell was I going to 
     do with a million dollars?''
       In 1950, Dr. Clark became convinced he should move his 
     family from New York City to Westchester County. He wanted to 
     leave Harlem because he and his wife could not bear to send 
     their children to the public schools that he was trying so 
     hard to improve but were failing anyhow. ``My children have 
     only one life,'' he said.
       At the same time, he decided that perhaps the way to hasten 
     the improvement of city schools was to decentralize them. But 
     after the schools were decentralized, they continued their 
     decline. Dr. Clark came to think of the decentralization 
     experiment as a ``disaster,'' failing to achieve any of the 
     educational objectives he had sought.
       By the 1970's, after the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. 
     Martin Luther King Jr. and John and Robert Kennedy, and the 
     difficulty in achieving integration in the North, many blacks 
     were growing more wary of whites, more doubtful about 
     overcoming prejudice and achieving racial equality. Dr. Clark 
     was discouraged too, but he remained a firm advocate of the 
     integration of American society. His colleagues described him 
     as ``an incorrigible integrationist,'' convinced of the 
     rightness of the civil rights struggle and certain that the 
     nation could not and should not go back.
       In 1973, with a backlash to integration mounting, Dr. Clark 
     said in an interview in The New York Times Magazine that 
     ``one of the things that disturbs me most is the 
     sophisticated form of intellectual white backlash,'' citing 
     the writings of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among others. ``In 
     their ivory towers, they have lost all empathy with low-
     income people and black people. They are seeking to repudiate 
     their own past liberal positions, fighting against their own 
     heritage at the expense of the poor.''
       Dr. Clark said he neither admired nor respected such 
     intellectuals and said he was ``breaking all ties with 
     them.'' A registered Democrat, Dr. Clark went out of his way 
     in 1976 to support the incumbent United States senator, James 
     L. Buckley, a conservative Republican, in his unsuccessful 
     race against Mr. Moynihan, the Democratic candidate.
       Dr. Clark's candor was evenhanded. Late in life, he said he 
     had not been heartened by the ascendancy of blacks in public 
     life because it had not translated into a fundamental change 
     in the condition of ordinary black people. He said he thought 
     white Americans admired accomplished blacks like Colin Powell 
     as long as there were not ``too many of them'' and they did 
     not threaten white hegemony in American society.
       He remained active and vocal. In the 1980's, he expressed 
     anger over assertions that blacks were the cause of their own 
     problems. In 1986, he called on the New York State Board of 
     Regents to supersede the authority of local school boards if 
     they chronically reported low test scores. He also spoke out 
     on deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews, asserting 
     that the dialogue had been too much about anti-Semitism among 
     blacks and not enough about anti-black sentiment among the 
     Jews.
       He irritated separatists when he quit the board of Antioch 
     College after it agreed to black demands for the 
     establishment of a dormitory and study program that excluded 
     whites. And some blacks in Washington became upset with Dr. 
     Clark, whom they had hired to evaluate their black-run school 
     system, when he concluded that it wasn't very good and that 
     what students needed was better teachers and tougher basic 
     courses. He also suggested that whatever argot black children 
     spoke in the streets, they ought to be required to use 
     standard American English in school.
       Dr. Clark was something of a legend in the City University 
     system. And he was quick to say what all really great 
     teachers say: that in the process of teaching, a good 
     professor learned more than his students.
       He retired from City University in 1975 and, looking back 
     on more than a third of a century of work there, said he 
     thought that the students of the 1940's and '50's had been 
     better at asking probing questions. Dr. Clark was not so 
     impressed with the students of the 1960's and said he thought 
     their revolution ``was pure fluff.'' He also retired from the 
     Metropolitan Applied Research Center, which he had founded 
     eight years earlier, and embarked on a consulting business on 
     race relations and affirmative action.
       Dr. Clark's books included ``Dark Ghetto'' (1965); ``A 
     Relevant War Against Poverty'' (1969); ``A Possible 
     Reality,'' (1972); and ``Pathos of Power'' (1974).
       Despite the many honors he won and the respect he 
     commanded, Dr. Clark said he thought his life had been a 
     series of ``magnificent failures.'' In 1992, at the age of 
     78, he confessed: ``I am pessimistic and I don't like that. I 
     don't like the fact that I am more pessimistic now than I was 
     two decades ago.''
       Yet as a conscience of New York politics and of the civil 
     rights movement, he remained an unreconstructed, if 
     anguished, integrationist. A decade ago, during one of his 
     last lengthy interviews, he chain-smoked Marlboros in his 
     home, flanked by vivid African carvings and walls of books 
     wrapped in sun-faded dust jackets, as he professed optimism 
     but repeatedly expressed disappointment over dashed 
     expectations about experiments in school decentralization, 
     open admissions at City University and affirmative action.
       ``There's no question that there have been changes,'' he 
     said then. ``They are not as deep as they appear to be.''
       Among the cosmetic changes was an rhetorical evolution from 
     Negro to black to African-American. What, he was asked, was 
     the best thing for blacks to call themselves?
       ``White,'' he replied.
       He said a lack of meaningful progress could be blamed on 
     blacks who saw themselves only as victims and on whites too 
     narrow-minded to recognize their own self-interest in black 
     success. As whites become a minority in a polyglot country, 
     he was asked, won't they see that it is in their interest 
     that blacks succeed?
       ``They're not that bright,'' he replied. ``I don't think 
     you can expect whites to understand the effects of prejudice 
     and discrimination against blacks affecting them. If whites 
     really understood, they would do something about it.''

                          ____________________