The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
By far the most significant evidence in the Clarendon County case
came from a group of witnesses summoned by the plaintiffs to testify
on the psychological effects of segregation itself. Kenneth Clark,
assistant professor of psychology at the New York City College, was
a key figure in this phase of the NAACP’s assault. In the _Teachers’
College Record_ for October 1960, he revealingly describes the
fashion in which he was approached by Carter in February 1951,
on behalf of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, to prepare exhibits
and test findings that would support the plaintiffs’ side in the
School Segregation Cases. Carter wanted material that would show
how “segregation inflicts psychological damage on its victims,” and
Clark collaborated with the lawyers in preparing psychological data
“to be used in whatever ways they believed most effective in the
presentation of their case.” As part of the plan, Clark himself went
to Clarendon County, and administered the “doll test” to twenty-six
Negro children; in this test, the subjects are shown two dolls
identical except for skin coloring--one doll is white, the other
brown. They then are asked which doll they like best, which doll is
“nice,” which doll is “bad,” and which doll “is like you?” From the
answers to these questions, Clark testified in the Clarendon case,
“we get some picture of the child’s concept of his own color, and we
also get an indication of the child’s anxieties and confusions about
his color and his feelings.” Not surprisingly, the twenty-six pupils
Clark tested in Clarendon County were found to have been “definitely
harmed in the development of their personalities.”
Other witnesses for the plaintiffs included Harold McNalley,
associate professor of education at Columbia Teachers College; Ellis
O. Knox, professor of education at Howard University; James L. Hupp,
professor of education and psychology at Wesleyan College of West
Virginia; David Krech, professor of social psychology at Harvard;
and Mrs. Helen Trager, a lecturer in psychology at Vassar. Their
testimony, admitted over defense objections that it was irrelevant
and immaterial, was intended to support the plaintiffs’ primary
contention that segregation, in and of itself, caused emotional
damage to the Negro child, and that segregated schools could never be
made “equal” as a matter of law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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