The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
This footnote directed the inquisitive reader to seven sources.
The first was a paper prepared by Kenneth B. Clark, “The Effect of
Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development,” delivered
at the 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth; Clark,
a professor of psychology at the College of the City of New York,
was then at least presumptively on the payroll of the NAACP--he was
“social science consultant for the NAACP’s legal and educational
division.” A second source was “Personality in the Making,” by Helen
Leland Witmer and Ruth Kotinsky. The third was a report of a survey
conducted for the American Jewish Congress in 1947 by Max Deutscher
and Isidor Chein. They sent a questionnaire to 849 social scientists,
asking, first in the affirmative and then in the negative, “[Do
you] believe that enforced segregation has (has not) a detrimental
psychological effect on members of the racial or religious groups
which are segregated?” A second question, similarly phrased, sought
the social scientists’ opinions on whether such segregation has
detrimental effects on the majority group imposing the segregation.
All told, 517 of those queried returned the questionnaire (32 of the
517 were from the South). Not surprisingly, 90 per cent of the 517
obligingly answered Ja to the first question and 83 per cent said Ja
to the second. Had there been an opportunity to put Deutscher and
Chein on a witness stand, counsel for the South might have sought
clarification on what was meant by “enforced,” what by “segregation,”
and what by “detrimental,” and rebuttal witnesses might have been
summoned to testify on the effects, detrimental or otherwise, of
enforced integration on the majority group.
The fourth authority cited by the court was a paper by Chein in a
publication of such large obscurity and small circulation that few
persons can have examined it: “What are the Psychological Effects
of Segregation under Conditions of Equal Facilities,” in Volume 3
of the _International Journal of Opinion and Attitude Research_
(1949). Fifth on the list was “Educational Costs in Discrimination
and National Welfare,” by Theodore Brameld, then a professor of
educational philosophy at the University of Minnesota. The sixth
reference was to Edward Franklin Frazier’s _The Negro in the United
States_. Frazier is a Negro sociologist, professor of sociology at
Howard University, who served as chairman of UNESCO’s committee of
experts on race.
And finally, said the court, “see generally Myrdal, _An American
Dilemma_.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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