Known as the ‘doll man’ for his research using brown and white dolls, social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark became a lightning rod for criticism from supporters as well as opponents of the historic rulings.

The lawyers who waged war against Jim Crow schools in the early 1950s turned for ammunition to the social scientists of their day--none more prominently than Kenneth B. Clark.

Debate still swirls around the role of the New York City-based social psychologist in the cases that culminated in the Brown v. Board of Education decisions in 1954 and 1955. Known as the "doll man" for his research using brown and white dolls, Clark became a lightning rod for criticism from supporters as well as opponents of the historic rulings.

Still, Clark's role in marshaling evidence and mobilizing a cadre of like-minded social scientists set the stage for desegregation litigation for decades to come. The collaboration in the Brown cases was a forerunner of similar partnerships that yielded starring roles for social scientists as expert witnesses, desegregation planners, and court-appointed monitors in cases across the country.

"This was a watershed," says Mark A. Chesler, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who has studied the role of social scientists in school desegregation cases. "There was a partnership created here that was semi-institutional."

Toys as Research Tools

The partnership began as lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund prepared their challenges to segregated schools in four states and the District of Columbia in 1951. As the cases proceeded, the No. 2 man at the fund, Robert L. Carter, began looking for scientific evidence that segregation damaged black children.

His search led to Clark, then a 36-year-old professor at City College of New York. In the 1930s and 1940s, Clark and his wife, Mamie, had used dolls and crayons in conducting research on the racial self-concepts of young black children in Northern and Southern cities.

In the now-famous tests, the Clarks asked black children ages 3 to 7 to choose dolls based on such criteria as which one was white, which was "Negro," which one they would like to play with, which one they considered nice, and which was "bad." They found that more than three-quarters of the children were color-conscious, and that some 60 percent "preferred the white doll or rejected the brown doll."

In the crayon tests, among other things, the researchers asked black 5- to 7-year-olds to color pictures in shades that corresponded to their own skin tones. They found that about one in six children with medium- or dark-brown complexions chose white or a color such as green or blue.

Yet in both the doll and coloring tests, the Northern black children were found to be more likely to express preference for white skin than Southerners, and to display more "emotional turmoil" over the issue.

Those latter findings helped convince some critics that Clark had twisted the facts to show that segregated Southern schools were detrimental--a charge he staunchly denied. Critics also argued that because the children were so young, it was unlikely that school segregation was the crucial factor in their views about race.

Lawyers Skeptical

From the beginning, not all the lawyers for the black schoolchildren were enthusiastic about Clark. "[H]is dolls were the source of considerable derision, and the social-science approach itself was viewed as unlikely to sway the justices," Richard Kluger writes in Simple Justice, his 1976 book on Brown v. Board of Education.

Still, partly because of Carter's advocacy, Clark testified in the Delaware, South Carolina, and Virginia cases that were consolidated with Brown, though not in the Kansas case for which the decision was named.

When the cases reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Clark and two colleagues produced a "Social Science Statement" arguing both that state-sanctioned segregation was harmful and that obstacles to desegregation were surmountable.

The defense fund ended up appending the statement, signed by 32 other social scientists, to the brief it submitted in the consolidated Brown case in 1952.

The NAACP's strategy paid off on May 17, 1954, when the high court's decision overturning school segregation acknowledged the evidence presented by the social scientists. The justices quoted at length from a lower court's finding in the Kansas case that segregation damages black children mentally and educationally. The high court said the finding was "amply supported by modern authority," then cited a list of seven social-science works--a report by Clark first among them. The footnote became, in Kluger's words, "one of the most debated in the annals of the court."

After the 1954 ruling, Clark continued his involvement by helping the defense fund prepare for arguments on the implementation of the decree.

John J. Jackson Jr., an ethnic-studies instructor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says that Clark may have "dropped the ball" by advancing some questionable conclusions in the pursuit of victory, but that "way, way, way too much attention has been paid" to Clark's doll tests as opposed to his role "as a synthesizer of other people's materials."

And he argues in a recent article on the subject that Clark never saw his interest in ending segregation as overriding his obligations to scientific rigor. Instead, he says, Clark and his colleagues believed that it was only through professional detachment that they could effectively make a case for change. "For Clark," Jackson writes, "the dichotomy between advocacy and objectivity was a false one."