[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 58 (Thursday, May 5, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E891-E892]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 IN HONOR OF THE RESEARCH AND CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE LATE DR. KENNETH B. 
                                 CLARK

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 5, 2005

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize and honor the 
research and contributions of the late Dr. Kenneth B. Clark who passed 
away on Monday. In his 90 years, Dr. Clark through his research helped 
to end segregation, fought to improve educational opportunities and 
services in minority communities, and drew attention to the 
psychological challenges of minorities.
  Dr. Clark's research as an educational psychologist focused on the 
effects of racial prejudices in shaping identity and influencing 
educational achievement. His research demonstrated that segregation 
cultivated feelings of inferiority in minority students. Thurgood 
Marshall convincingly used Dr. Clark's research on inferiority in 
segregated school systems to argue that ``separate but equal'' was 
unconstitutional.
  Like most of us, Dr. Clark's mother played an important role in his 
educational commitment. She insisted in 1920's America that he not go 
to vocational school as advocated by guidance counselors. Instead, she 
was determined that her son could do and was worthy of much more. She 
stressed to him the value of a quality education and he worked to 
ensure that same standard for all Americans.
  Dr. Clark worked to restructure the public school systems in New York 
and Washington. Committed to the importance of integration and the 
value of a quality education, Dr. Clark proposed major reforms in the 
school systems that would bring students from different backgrounds 
together and would challenge them academically.
  Needless to say, Dr. Clark has long been a vocal and critical 
advocate for sound education policy and social justice. His research 
has already had a great impact on this country. I would further honor 
my dear friend, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, by inserting the following two 
tributes to his memory. The first is a statement issued by Dennis 
Courtland Hayes, Interim President and CEO of the NAACP, and Julian 
Bond, Chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors. The second is a piece 
from the Washington Post about the research and life of Dr. Clark.

 NAACP Mourns Death of Kenneth B. Clark, Psychologist and Educator Who 
                     Helped End School Segregation

       Dr. Clark was a national authority on the negative effects 
     of entrenched segregation.
       May 2, 2005.--The NAACP mourns the passing of Dr. Kenneth 
     B. Clark, whose groundbreaking studies of African American 
     children in the south influenced the U.S. Supreme Court to 
     rule that school segregation was unconstitutional. Clark died 
     yesterday at his home in Hastings-on-the-Hudson, N.Y.
       NAACP Interim President and CEO Dennis Courtland Hayes 
     said: ``Dr. Clark made a monumental contribution to the 1954 
     Brown v. Board of Education decision that has proven so 
     important in this country. His research has been key to the 
     understanding by African Americans that we are all created 
     equal in the eyes of God and to value our heritage.''
       Clark's research verified the damaging effect of racial 
     segregation to black school children in the early 1950's. 
     This testimony was used by attorney Thurgood Marshall and the 
     NAACP to challenge the constitutionality of the separate-but-
     equal doctrine that violated the equal protection clause of 
     the Fourteenth Amendment.
       Clark's testing of children in South Carolina showed that 
     African American children educated in a segregated school 
     system saw themselves as inferior and, as he wrote, 
     ``accepted the inferiority as part of reality.''
       In 1961, Clark was awarded the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP's 
     highest award. Clark, a longtime professor at City College of 
     New York, wrote several influential books and articles 
     advancing the cause of integration.
       Founded in 1909, the National Association for the 
     Advancement of Colored People is the nation's oldest and 
     largest civil rights organization. Its half-million adult and 
     youth members throughout the United States and the world are 
     the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities 
     and monitor equal opportunity in the public and private 
     sectors.
                                  ____


             Kenneth Clark Dies; Helped Desegregate Schools

       May 3, 2005.--Kenneth B. Clark, 90, an educational 
     psychologist whose experiment with dolls of different colors 
     helped convince the U.S. Supreme Court that racially 
     segregated public schools were inherently unequal, died of 
     cancer May 1 at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
       In the seminal 1954 desegregation case in U.S. history, 
     Brown v. Board of Education, the court used Dr. Clark's 
     findings to buttress its ruling that ``separate but equal'' 
     public schools encouraged feelings of inferiority among black 
     children, not only damaging their self-esteem but also 
     adversely affecting their ability to learn.
       As early as 1939, Dr. Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps 
     Clark, had begun conducting tests to assess black youngsters' 
     self-perception. Using dolls they bought for 50 cents apiece 
     at the Woolworth's on 125th Street in Harlem (one of the few 
     places that sold black dolls), they showed groups of black 
     and white children two black dolls and two white dolls and 
     asked them to choose which doll was nice, which was pretty 
     and which was bad. The data from their tests showed that both 
     groups overwhelmingly favored the white dolls.
       Dr. Clark concluded that the children he studied, ``like 
     other human beings who are subjected to an obviously inferior 
     status in the society in which they live, have been 
     definitely harmed in the development of their personalities; 
     that the signs of instability in their personalities are 
     clear. . . .''
       Dr. Clark repeated the experiment in 1950 in Clarendon 
     County, S.C., where white students in the school system 
     received more than 60 percent of the funds earmarked for 
     education, even though the schools had three times as many 
     black students. The results confirmed, in Dr. Clark's view, 
     that the black children saw themselves as inferior.
       Thurgood Marshall, then an attorney for the NAACP, seized 
     on Dr. Clark's findings as evidence that segregated schools 
     did harm and that minority-only schools violated the 14th 
     Amendment because they could not meet the separate-but-equal 
     standard enshrined by the court in the case of Plessy v. 
     Ferguson more than a half-century earlier.
       Some of Marshall's colleagues on the case were dismissive, 
     even derisive, of Dr. Clark's dolls. They assumed Marshall 
     would use the social-science findings tangentially, but the 
     data turned out to be decisive. The court accepted Dr. 
     Clark's premise that school segregation contributed heavily 
     to the psychological damage of black youngsters.
       Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that separating black 
     children from white children ``solely because of their race 
     generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the 
     community that may affect the children's heart and minds in a 
     way unlikely ever to be undone.''
       A decade later, Dr. Clark observed: ``The court saw the 
     issue clearly and in the same human terms in which [African 
     Americans] had felt it. A racist system inevitably destroys 
     and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes 
     them, blacks and whites alike.''
       Kenneth Bancroft Clark was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 
     1914. When he was 5, his mother decided to move to the United 
     States with her son and 2-year-old daughter, even though her 
     husband vehemently objected. The family, without the father, 
     settled in Harlem.
       Dr. Clark recalled that when he started school, Harlem was 
     still integrated. By the time he reached the ninth grade, his 
     school was predominantly black, and teachers were encouraging 
     black students to go to vocational school.
       ``Mama stormed into school, more the shop steward than the 
     lady she usually was,'' Dr. Clark recalled in a 1964 
     interview with the New York Post. ``She told my counselor, `I

[[Page E892]]

     don't give a damn where you send your son, but mine isn't 
     going to any vocational school. . . .''
       Dr. Clark graduated from George Washington High School in 
     New York City and then enrolled at Howard University, where 
     Ralph J. Bunche, a political science professor and later a 
     Nobel Peace Prize winner, became a mentor. He received his 
     undergraduate degree in psychology from Howard in 1935 and 
     his master's degree in the same discipline from there the 
     following year. He taught psychology at Howard in the 1937-38 
     school year.
       In 1940, he became the first black person to receive a 
     doctorate in psychology from Columbia University. Years 
     later, while teaching at Columbia, he would mediate between 
     students who had taken over a campus building and 
     administrators trying to oust them.
       From 1939 to 1941, Dr. Clark participated in a study of 
     U.S. race relations headed by the Swedish economist Gunnar 
     Myrdal. The results of the study were published in the book 
     ``An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern 
     Democracy'' (1944), a milestone in the nation's gathering 
     awareness of the corrosive effects of racial prejudice.
       Dr. Clark was an assistant professor of psychiatry at the 
     Hampton (Va.) Institute in 1940-41, and he joined the 
     psychology department at the City College of New York in 
     1942.
       In 1946, Dr. Clark and his wife founded the nonprofit 
     Northside Testing and Consultation Center in New York City to 
     provide psychological services to Harlem residents. He later 
     accused the New York City school system of allowing de facto 
     segregation in some of its schools. Although school officials 
     denied his charges, an investigation confirmed them and led 
     to major reforms.
       In 1960, Dr. Clark became the first black tenured professor 
     at City College, and in 1966 the first black person to be 
     elected to the New York state Board of Regents, where he 
     served for 20 years.
       In the early 1970s, the District of Columbia school board 
     hired Dr. Clark as a consultant to revamp the schools. He 
     submitted a comprehensive plan to focus on reading, 
     mathematics and the measurement of teacher skills through 
     student achievement. The ``Clark plan'' sparked controversy 
     between the school board and the teachers union, and Dr. 
     Clark cut his ties with the District after two years, with 
     only pieces of his plan implemented.
       He left with a rebuke of Superintendent Hugh Scott. ``I'm 
     glad the superintendent laughs at critics,'' he told The 
     Washington Post in April 1972. ``I'm glad he can laugh at 
     anything. I can't laugh at the fact that these kids are no 
     better off now than two years ago.''
       Dr. Clark retired from teaching in 1975 and formed a 
     consulting firm that specialized in equal employment 
     opportunity and affirmative action. He was the author of 
     numerous books, including ``Prejudice and Your Child'' 
     (1955), ``Dark Ghetto'' (1965), ``A Possible Reality'' (1972) 
     and ``Pathos of Power'' (1975).
       Dr. Clark's wife, his closest colleague, died in 1983.
       Always one to speak his mind, Dr. Clark continued to 
     express his support for integration, although as the years 
     passed he began to express dismay at the lack of progress in 
     race relations.
       ``I believed in the 1950s that a significant percentage of 
     Americans were looking for a way out of the morass of 
     segregation,'' he told the New York Times in 1984. ``It was 
     wishful thinking. It took me 10 to 15 years to realize that I 
     seriously underestimated the depth and complexity of Northern 
     racism.''
       Once described by a colleague as ``the incorrigible 
     integrationist,'' he lamented in later years that perhaps he 
     had devoted himself to a lost cause. He felt that many old 
     allies in the battle for an integrated, nonracist society, 
     both black and white, had abandoned the struggle. He also 
     lived long enough to witness an evolving uncertainty about 
     Brown v. Board of Education and the unrealized benefits of 
     school integration.
       ``I look back and I shudder and say, `Oh God, you really 
     were as naive as some people said you were,' '' he told The 
     Post in 1990. ``My life has been a series of glorious 
     defeats.''
       Survivors include a daughter, Kate C. Harris of Lausanne, 
     Switzerland, and Osprey, Fla.; a son, Hilton B. Clark of New 
     York City; three grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

                          ____________________