[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.''
____________________