One day in 1940, young Dr. Kenneth Clark walked into a Harlem Woolworth’s store and bought four baby dolls: two brown, two white, but otherwise the same. They weren’t for the baby that he and his wife, Mamie, were expecting – but for their new psychology experiment in racial identity. Working in schoolrooms, Kenneth asked more than 250 Black children which of the four dolls they preferred. One boy, 7-year-old Edward D., chose a white doll over the brown ones. “I look brown and they always call me a nigger but I’m not – I’m a white boy,” he said. Calculating the test results, Mamie found that two-thirds of the children preferred a white doll to one of their own race.
Word of the doll test quickly spread and helped open doors that led the Clarks to New York’s City Hall, the U.S. Supreme Court and even the White House. They played a historic role in Brown v. the Board of Education, the 1954 court ruling against school segregation. For decades they ran a child guidance clinic in Harlem, home base for their social activism. The Clarks were one of the most celebrated Black couples of their era, and What the Children Told Us is their story.
A Story of Family
Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark
Creators of the doll test, the first African-Americans awarded a Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia University.
Katie and Dr. Harold Phipps
Mamie’s parents, members of the Black elite in the resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas. They opposed Mamie’s marriage to Kenneth in 1938.
Miriam Hanson Clark
Kenneth’s mother, a hard-working seamstress in New York’s garment district. She backed her son’s decision to elope with Mamie.
Kate and Hilton Clark
The Clarks’ two children, raised first in Harlem and then in suburban Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
Myths & Misconceptions
Kenneth Clark was a sociologist.
No, he never took a sociology course. Kenneth was a social psychologist.
The doll test was Mamie’s idea.
Mamie’s master’s thesis was the precursor to the doll test, but it’s unclear who first suggested using dolls. Kenneth called it a “joint” decision.
The 1954 Brown ruling was based on the doll test, which was created to win a victory for the NAACP in the Supreme Court.
No on both counts. First, although the ruling’s famous Footnote 11 first credits a study written by Kenneth, it also gives credit to other social scientists. Second, the Clarks had reported their doll test data in 1941, a decade before the court’s ruling.
The doll test results were based on only a tiny sample of children.
Kenneth tested 253 children in Massachusetts and Arkansas.
Excerpts
Kenneth Clark, born in Panama
He was born in the wet season as workers were finishing the new Panama Canal. It was July 14, 1914, warm and muggy at the port of Colon, where the tropical rains came in cataracts, rattling the tin roofs of shacks and spawning clouds of mosquitoes. The baby boy’s mother was nineteen, the daughter of Jamaican shopkeepers. The father, also of Jamaican descent, was ten years older and a supervisor on the docks of Colon. Married just a year, they marveled at the baby they named Kenneth. Fatherhood was a point of pride with Arthurton Clark, and his young wife, Miriam, was determined that this wriggling mass of boyhood would thrive.
Mamie Phipps, born in Arkansas
She was their second child and born at home in the resort town of Hot Springs. It was October 18, 1917, a balmy day, when Katie Phipps went into labor. Harold, her husband, was one of the town’s Black doctors, so there was no need to call Mana Funches, a midwife. Dr. Phipps could well afford a hospital bed for Katie, but Black babies were usually born at home. No white hospital would have them.
An immigrant boy in Harlem, 1923
To little Kenneth, Harlem was far more exciting than Colon. There were canyons of brick buildings with people sitting on the stoops out front and up on the fire escapes in back over the alleys where peddlers sold used clothing and chanted, “Old clothes! Old clothes!” Kids played in the streets. “We did a lot of stickball and a lot of roller skating,” John Moseley, a 141st Street neighbor, recalled. “The street was your big playground.” Kids vied for space with horse-drawn wagons and tradesmen pushing carts and hawking their wares.
A doctor’s daughter in Hot Springs, 1921
Without kindergartens in town, Mamie’s mother read books to her and enrolled her at 4 years old in St. Gabriel’s, a Catholic school run by white nuns on the outskirts. Her brother, Harold Jr., also attended. Black parents gave high marks to the nuns. “The sisters were real kind,” recalled Ida Fort Thompson, a lifelong resident. Mamie had likely noticed the white kids scampering up the dirt road in front of her house on their way to Central School on her street. Would she join them there someday? She must have asked her parents that, and their answer had to be no. Central School was for white kids only.
Meeting at Howard University, 1934
At a formal dance one night, Mamie looked up and spotted Kenneth in a tuxedo by the balcony spotlight. He stood smoking, his left hand tucked into his jacket with his gaze fixed on the dance floor below – the campus big shot surveying his domain. Mamie was impressed by campus leaders like Kenneth. So when he asked her to dance, she was perplexed but willing. As they locked hands and glided across the floor, she addressed him coolly as Mr. Clark. Recalling orientation week when he had yelled “Shut up!” at the freshmen, she silently vowed to avenge her class, especially the girls.
The doll test, Springfield, Mass., 1940
Kenneth met his first test subjects on a chilly Thursday in a Springfield schoolroom. One of them was K.J., a dark-skinned 8-year-old boy in a blue suit. He seemed shy, and to set him at ease, Kenneth chatted awhile before showing him four dolls in an integrated lineup…. “Give me the doll you like to play with, the doll that you like best.” The dark-skinned boy overlooked the Black dolls and picked a white one this time. “Give me the doll that is a nice doll.” He chose the same white doll again. “Give me the doll that looks bad.” He now selected a Black doll.