I, Too, Sing America: Discourses of Discontent During the Civil Rights Era

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I, Too, Sing America

Discourses of Discontent During the Civil Rights Era

UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

Faculty of Humanities

Lisanne Brans

6059546

mr. dr. George Blaustein

June 2014

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I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed –

I, too, am America.

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Introduction

Earlier this year, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the second African

American Supreme Court Justice after Thurgood Marshall, made some comments about race during a talk at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida. ‘The worst I have ever been treated was by northern liberal elites,’ he told his audience, ‘not by the people of Savannah, Georgia.’1

Quickly picked up as a controversial statement by media both left and right, it spurred an ongoing debate about race consciousness.2 Thomas’s statement was taken slightly out of context, but originally meant to raise questions about the existence of and the necessity for race consciousness. Thomas’s main point was that the American society today is just as race conscious and difference conscious as it was when he grew up in the Jim Crow South during the 1960s – perhaps even more. Clarence Thomas firmly believes that in order to eliminate racism, the American society has to quit thinking along color lines. He regards any form of race consciousness, therefore, as inherently detrimental to achieving a colorblind society.

In present-day form, questions about the need for race consciousness are often related to discussions about affirmative action. Clarence Thomas repudiates any form of affirmative action, arguing that the Constitution as well as its interpretation is and should be truly colorblind. In April of this year, in a 6 to 2 ruling – Associate Justice Elena Kegan refrained from voting – the Supreme Court backed a Michigan state amendment that prohibited affirmative action, with Thomas concurring, revealing stark divisions within the judiciary about the role the government should play in the protection of minorities.3 In 2007, Thomas sided with Chief Justice John Roberts in a ruling that prohibited public schools in

Washington and Kentucky from applying racial classifications in order to achieve racial diversity. ‘The dissent would give school boards a free hand to make decisions on the basis of race – an approach reminiscent of that advocated by the segregationists in Brown vs. Board of

Education of Topeka,’ Thomas asserted.4 With this statement, Thomas referred back to the 1954 Supreme Court case that is often seen as the legal starting point of the Civil Rights

1. Chris Moody, “Clarence Thomas: Society is Overly Sensitive about Race”, February 11, 2014, http://news.yahoo.com/clarence-thomas-on-race-194104252.html

2. Since the term ‘race consciousness’ is used many times throughout this thesis, I should give a clear definition of its meaning as I employ it. Race consciousness is a neutral term, and it denotes the ways people, either black or white, are aware of race (that is, of categories of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’) and notice race as a factor of importance.

3. Schuette, Attorney General of Michigan vs. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and

Immigration Rights and Fight for Racial Equality by Any Means Necessary (BAMN) et al., 12-682 (2014).

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Movement. Questions about the necessity for affirmative action can be traced back to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board which was meant to tackle de jure segregation, but failed at battling de facto segregation.

Brown vs. Board also serves as the starting point for this thesis. Not only does the

case reflect – as Supreme Court cases often do – ongoing political, cultural and economic struggles in American society, Brown vs. Board also signifies the high point of new understandings of race, identity and rights that had come in to existence in the previous decades. With the Brown case, these new understandings were projected onto constitutional jurisprudence. Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka was the first major national case of Civil Rights legislation, and it entailed an attack on the judicial underpinnings of racial apartheid in the U.S., which were firmly established by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy

vs. Ferguson in 1896. The Brown vs. Board decision consisted of five different cases that

were combined and brought forward by the NAACP under the guidance of Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first African American Supreme Court Chief Justice. Arguing that segregated facilities are inherently unequal, the Warren Court unanimously declared racial segregation in public education to be in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As soon as the Supreme Court ordered desegregation to be set in motion “with all deliberate speed”, white Southerners started to implement a series of stalling tactics in order to prevent this from happening. The Brown vs. Board decision was met with fierce white backlash in the South, and proved to be a disillusioning process to those that supported the case and that had eagerly awaited the Warren Court’s decision as a means to dismantle Jim Crow. Although today often remembered and celebrated as a Supreme Court landmark case that exerted a strong influence on the African American struggle for civil rights and racial equality, the aftermath of the decision in the decades that followed turned out to be disappointing for black Americans.

The Civil Rights Era or its judicial starting point are not an unknown chapter in American history: it goes without saying that the Civil Rights Era has been subject of an abundance of scholarship. Harvard Sitkoff, in The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992, provided a rather traditional narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, in which Brown vs.

Board served as starting point for all events that followed throughout the 1960s up until the

1990s. In his From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle For

Racial Equality, professor of law Michael Klarman endeavored to take stock of the events

following Brown vs. Board, also regarding this Supreme Court decision as a catalyst spurring changes in the years to follow. Klarman analyzed the political, economic and cultural context

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that the Supreme Court operated in at the time, and argued that Brown mostly mobilized white Southern resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, rather than actively encourage the struggle for civil rights itself. With his Black Is A Country, Nikhil Pal Singh countered Sitkoff’s traditional narrative by tracing the Civil Rights Movement back to intellectual forces and hopes earlier in the twentieth century, long before Brown vs. Board. Singh

essentially presented an alternative perspective on the Civil Rights Movement by envisioning a ‘long civil rights era’, which was meant to challenge the ‘King-centric’ version of events. Mary Dudziak, in her turn, placed the Civil Rights Movement in a larger framework of the Cold War by explaining how international affairs affected racial domestic policy in the U.S. and vice versa. All of these scholars have shown that the Civil Rights Movement was not by any means an isolated movement, nor a monolithic one.

This thesis, therefore, is not an exhaustive overview of the Civil Rights Era. Rather, it is an inquiry into three different discourses of discontent, their narrators and their

accompanying vocabularies. The three protagonists of this thesis are Kenneth Clark (1914-2005), Malcolm X (1925-1965) and James Baldwin (1924-1987). Kenneth Clark, a

psychologist who subscribed to the ideology of racial liberalism, attempted to reveal the pernicious psychological effects of racial segregation on black children. The studies that he and his wife Mamie Clark conducted were cited as proof of these effects by Chief Justice Warren in the Brown vs. Board decision. Kenneth Clark used race consciousness as a tool in spurring institutional change, which, he believed, would in turn fundamentally change Americans’ perspective on race and racial identity. Malcolm X is often seen as one of the most radical voices of the Civil Rights Era. He was a member of the Nation of Islam until 1964, and in the last year of his life he redefined the ideology of black nationalism in order to be able to challenge the American government to fix its race problem on an international level. Continually reinforcing categories of blackness and whiteness in American society, Malcolm heavily relied on race consciousness in getting his message across to his audience. James Baldwin, in his turn, regarded African Americans as victims of the failure of American democracy, but at the same time he relied on democratic principles in order to challenge racial inequality. Baldwin regarded race consciousness as a necessary evil that would have to be employed in order to make Americans aware of a prevalent discourse of white hegemony. In other words, all three narrators of the discourses discussed in this thesis used race

consciousness as a tool that would help them to articulate their discontent, in order to eventually challenge racial inequity.

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As the underpinnings of Jim Crow were struck down one by one by what are often seen as executive, judicial and legislative triumphs in the struggle for racial equality, with Executive Order 9981 ordering desegregation of the army in 1948, the 1954 Brown vs. Board case ordering desegregation of public education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, racial

disparities continued to exist. Tearing down the formal remnants of racial inequalities turned out to be insufficient in challenging deep-rooted racism, an ingrained discourse of white hegemony and de facto segregation. This counters traditional national narratives that

underscore visions of racial unity that are traced back to the Civil Rights Movement up until this day. Kenneth Clark, Malcolm X and James Baldwin all felt a strong sense of discontent, which they attempted to translate into a meaningful vocabulary that would help them to challenge the racial status quo. Starting from the notion that there is no such thing as a monolithic Civil Rights Era discourse on the part of black Americans, each of these discourses deals with interpreting matters of race and prejudice in its own way. The protagonists of these discourses tried to make sense of an ongoing power imbalance in American society, and they each employed a different discourse in order to restore the balance. Each of these discourses evolved over time, all of them towards a standpoint that, in one way or another, implied the need for more cooperation with white Americans.

All three narrators had experienced racism throughout their lives, and their ideologies were therefore rooted in their personal experiences. All three of them were equally committed to translating their discontent into a method that would be able to bring about real, structural change with regard to America’s treatment of African Americans. The African American poet Langston Hughes managed to effectively capture a common feeling of discontent in his poem “I, Too”. The poem ends with the line “I, too, am America”. Its first sentence, however, “I, too, sing America”, is much more applicable to the narrators of this thesis. They were not just passively part of an America that refused to grant them their rights, rather, they actively endeavored to force their country to recognize their existence and human rights. Their discourses of discontent were not tacit, but loud and clear. The psychologist, the militant and the artist this thesis deals with have each narrated Brown vs. Board and the ensuing events in their own way. Their discourses of discontent are three different epistemologies of race, each with their own discursive strategy, functioning against the backdrop of a highpoint in Civil Rights legislation. I intend to analyze how these three, at some points ostensibly very different, discourses stand in dialogue with each other. Each of the discourses pertains to contrasting notions of the concepts of race and racial identity. Analyzing these three narratives will shed light on a larger framework of questions about race consciousness and

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colorblindness – matters that have been up for discussion until this day – and will prove that race consciousness is both risky as well as necessary.

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1. The Racial Liberalism of Kenneth Clark

“It is probably not enough to believe that racial prejudices, discrimination and segregation are morally wrong. In order to become actively involved in the struggle to eradicate these

symptoms of social maladjustment and save our children from their harmful effects, it is necessary to know why they are wrong.”5 – Kenneth B. Clark

1.1 Introduction

From the 1930s onwards, mainly in the decades following World War II, American public policies with regard to race came under increasing public scrutiny, especially in light of a war in which American soldiers were fighting for freedom in a racially segregated army. According to Lee Baker, ‘perhaps more than any other event, World War II illuminated the duplicity of state-sponsored racism. Allied rhetoric about the fight for the “four freedoms” encouraged African Americans to fight for freedom at home.’6 As a consequence of this, not only social but also psychological research on race and the effects of racial policies and prejudice became more common, and self-esteem became a factor of increasing importance in judging policies. In addition to this, uncovering which policies were inimical to self-esteem and why became more important as well. Social science, in the form of sociological, psychological and anthropological research, provided an important tool in this process. The kinds of studies conducted in these fields mostly focused on the nature of black personalities in order to prove that racism had a negative influence on black personality development. Social scientists endeavored to measure abstract concepts such as “identity”, “personality” and “family relations” in an attempt to not only limit psychological damage for African Americans, but to ultimately challenge institutional racism. The studies that were conducted were highly interdisciplinary, incorporating elements of both anthropology, psychology and sociology. These studies form part of an intellectual culture, slowly developing from the 1930s onwards, that attempted to put in motion social change. Intellectuals relied on a discourse of expertise in order to challenge racial inequities and discussions about race and race relations became ineluctably tied with psychology and psychoanalysis, as this was seen

5. Kenneth Clark in 1955, in Woody Klein, Toward Humanity and Justice: The Writings of Kenneth B. Clark,

Scholar of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Decision (Westport: Praeger, 2004): 15.

6. Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 193.

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as a valid tool to judge these matters. This chapter explores the racial liberalism of African American psychologist Kenneth Clark, who grew up in Harlem and received his PhD in psychology at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie Clark, who also obtained a PhD in psychology and worked together with her husband,

refused to be neutral or unbiased with regard to racial issues and they used racial liberalism in order to change the status quo and challenge the destructive forces of racism. For their entire lives, they were committed to peacefully bringing about radical social change and

overthrowing Jim Crow. This chapter analyzes Clark’s racial liberalism and his way of dealing with the predicament of race consciousness.

1.2 Social Science Dealing with the American Dilemma

In order to gain a better understanding of Clark’s approach, I will first look at a number of studies that he and his wife conducted during the years leading up to Brown. Then I will look at how Clark, as the protagonist of a racial liberal discourse, narrated Brown and the years to follow. First, however, it is important to note that the Clarks, of course, were not by any means the first social scientists to explore American race relations. One of the most well-known studies of race relations in America is that of Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who published his An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern

Democracy in 1944. Gunnar Myrdal became a mentor and friend to Kenneth Clark, who also

helped gather data for Myrdal’s ambitious project. The study was conducted between 1938 and 1940 and essentially provided an indictment of American racial oppression. Myrdal analyzed American race relations from a European perspective, at times comparing America to his home country Sweden. He asserted that ‘the subordinate position of Negroes is perhaps the most glaring conflict in the American conscience and the greatest unsolved task for American democracy.’7 Myrdal’s work provides a large body of empirical data relating to economy, politics, and culture in order to explain what this glaring conflict actually entailed and how it could be discerned in American society. According to Myrdal, ‘the Negro problem’ was a psychological problem in nature that burdened every American, black or white, and perpetually weighed on their conscience.

Myrdal’s work can be seen as a call for radical social change, even though his extensive body of statistics did not provide clear guidelines on how to achieve that change. According to Myrdal, every American lives by a set of values called the American Creed.

7. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro in a White Nation (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1944): 21.

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These core premises are related to respecting the rule of law, but also to equality and

democracy. It is thus not surprising, according to Myrdal, that race relations and white racial attitudes in the U.S. formed a huge threat to the American Creed. However, Myrdal strongly believed, slightly naively, that the American Creed that held the American society together and underpinned the American way of life was strong enough to prevail and restore social justice. This belief was tied to a certain sense of trust in the psychological nature of

Americans, which Myrdal believed to be inherently morally just. According to Ellen Herman, ‘Myrdal was certain that psychology held the key to undoing racism.’8

Americans’ psychological commitment to the American Creed would eventually help the Creed to

prevail. As will become clear in this chapter, this conviction signifies an important difference between Myrdal and Kenneth Clark. Myrdal’s An American Dilemma consisted of facts about education, housing, health and other areas relating to African Americans, ultimately dealing with the psychology of Americans. Its ultimate goal was to exert an influence on that psychology by appealing to American moral values. Merely pointing out what the problem entailed would, in Myrdal’s eyes, ‘awaken’ Americans, and in that way essentially strengthen their commitment to the Creed. This increased commitment, in turn, would naturally solve the race problem. Kenneth Clark, however, favored a much more psychologically active approach than Myrdal, as will become clear in this chapter. That is not to say that Myrdal’s work was of no value in making the American public aware of its race problem, since it was most certainly not overlooked by policy makers at the time. An American Dilemma was referred to in the Truman administration’s report To Secure These Rights, which was published by Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights in 1947. Moreover, according to Lee Baker, ‘the legal arm of the NAACP began to see it as solid and well-respected evidence for overturning Plessy.’9 Eventually, the NAACP chose to use both Kenneth Clark’s work and Myrdal’s work in their attempt to legally dismantle Jim Crow, as both were cited as proof in the Brown case.

At the time it was first published, Myrdal’s study also had a huge influence on the academic world. Herman asserts that Myrdal’s work stimulated a large amount of studies about American race relations and their underlying psychology. The importance of An

American Dilemma in creating a subfield of psychological and sociological studies about race

relations should therefore not be underestimated. According to Herman, pre-World War II

8. Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 180. 9. Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 195.

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psychological research on race issues mostly dealt with differences in intelligence, whereas post-war research tended to be broader, ‘grappling with new topics and promoting a

decidedly environmentalist approach (culture over nature) that toppled conventional assumptions about the existence and permanence of white racial superiority.’10

Myrdal’s work, even though he started assembling his data before World War II, can be placed in the latter category. Despite the fact that Myrdal’s unwavering trust in the American Creed was slightly naïve, he was definitely ahead of his time in this regard. After World War II, behavioral scientists realized that they actually had a pivotal role to fulfill in creating a non-racist environment. This gave their work a particular task and it burdened them with a kind of public obligation: research was not merely conducted to uncover certain facts, but also to stimulate social change. This held particularly true from the 1950s onwards, when the Civil Rights Movement gained influence in America and members of the movement expressed concern with regard to the psychologically damaging effects of American race relations. By the 1960s, self-esteem had become a solid factor in policy forming as policy makers realized they would have to refrain from articulating policies that damaged self-esteem. According to Herman, the fact that self-esteem became more and more important with regard to public policy can be related to ‘the persuasiveness of the postwar experts’, ‘the progress of the Civil Rights Movement, and a social context hospitable to turning psychology into public policy.’11 However, psychological research with regard to the effects of racial issues predates World War II, and Myrdal was not the only social scientist concerned with the effects of American race relations during the first decades of the twentieth century.

1.3 Psychological Research

As with Myrdal’s study, the research that Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie conducted also falls in the category of post-World War II research as described by Herman, even though some of it was conducted before the war. Psychologist Kenneth Clark worked with Gunnar Myrdal and his staff in obtaining the data that were used to write An American

Dilemma. Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie Clark explored the issues of racial

identification with relation to self-esteem on a scale that was much smaller than Myrdal’s research, but certainly not less significant. Kenneth and Mamie Clark both received their PhD at Howard University, and they were the first African American man and woman to do so at this university. From the mid-1930s onwards, the Clarks published a number of studies on

10. Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 181. 11. Ibid., 193.

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black children and their self-image. These studies originated from the research Mamie had conducted while writing her master’s thesis at Howard University, titled “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children”, which she completed in 1939. According to Kenneth Clark, ‘as she [Mamie Clark] saw the larger implications of the first stages of this work, she was kind enough to invite me to join her in a more probing empirical and theoretical exploration of the nature and determinants of the self-image.’12 In that same year, Kenneth and Mamie conducted a research at a nursery in New York and a nursery in Washington, the results of which were published in The Journal of Experimental Education. The New York nursery was partially mixed, the Washington nursery completely segregated. They investigated the influence of segregation on the development of racial identification of black pre-school children. The Clarks used what they called the ‘Horowitz picture technique’, in which black children were shown different pictures of both black and white children, different animals and a clown. The children were then asked to state with which picture they identified themselves the most. A choice for either one of the animals or for the clown would be regarded as an irrelevant choice. The Clarks concluded that

‘the tendency to identify with either the colored or the white boy seems to approximate a chance frequency among those Negro children in nursery schools where there are both white and colored children, while a trend toward identifying with the colored boy is more pronounced in the Negro children in the semi-segregated group and even more so in the all-Negro nursery schools.’13

Moreover, the Clarks identified a trend in the number of children identifying themselves with irrelevant pictures of animals or clowns. They found that around the four year level, black children from segregated nurseries stopped pointing out those pictures altogether, where black children from non-segregated nurseries continued to identify themselves with irrelevant pictures. This, according to the Clarks, suggested that children at segregated nurseries were far more self-aware and identified themselves in respect to others much more than children from non-segregated nurseries. The Clarks asserted that the most obvious reason for the fact that children from non-segregated schools still identified themselves with irrelevant pictures around age four, was the presence of white children of the same age in the nursery.

According to the Clarks, ‘this factor seems at present to be the determinant of the deviation in

12. Woody Klein, Toward Humanity and Justice: The Writings of Kenneth B. Clark, Scholar of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Decision (Westport: Praeger, 2004): 127.

13. Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “Segregation as a Factor in the Racial Identification of Negro Pre-School Children: A Preliminary Report.” The Journal of Experimental Education 2 (1939): 161.

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responses of this mixed group from responses of the other two groups.’14 This, the Clarks claimed, suggested that black children who go the same nursery as white children are less burdened with race consciousness than black children from segregated nurseries. As will become clear in this chapter, Kenneth Clark attempted to challenge the destructive forces of this form of race consciousness by pointing out its existence and using it to reveal the pervasiveness of racism.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark seemed to be aware of some of the problematic factors of their research. The number of children that took part in the investigation was relatively small. Moreover, the question remained whether or not the children who pointed to irrelevant pictures fully understood the question they were asked. Therefore, the Clarks remarked that intelligence was a factor that would have to be investigated as well before drawing definite conclusions from the research. They seemed, however, certain that black children at

segregated nurseries were far more aware of their skin color and identified themselves much more on the basis of their skin color than their counterparts at non-segregated nurseries. The research method the Clarks used was borrowed from Ruth Horowitz, who had conducted a similar type of research earlier that year. Horowitz was interested in the earliest stages of what she called ‘attitude formation’ and the development of self-consciousness. Horowitz thought that race was an important factor in this process and she set out to research the consequences of that factor for children’s future attitude formation. Since she assumed that the process of self-development and growing self-awareness takes place around the age of three or four, Horowitz decided to investigate nursery children who were no older than four years.

In order to be able to question the children without being dependent on the inherently biased medium of language, she developed a picture technique. The children were asked to identify themselves, their brother or a cousin from a number of different pictures depicting white children, black children, animals and a clown. They were also shown pictures of black and white children one by one and asked to answer whether or not the picture reflected them. Where the research of the Clarks focused on different groups of black children from

segregated and non-segregated nurseries and did not include white children at all, the Horowitz research focused on both groups of white children and groups of black children. The Horowitz research only included 24 children, all from the same mixed nursery. Horowitz concluded that the black children ‘seemed to have a more definite concept of their difference

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from one group and similarity with another than the white group.’15 Group consciousness and group identification, Horowitz claimed, are ‘an intrinsic aspect of ego-development and basic to the understanding of the dynamics of attitude function in the adult personality.’16 However, Horowitz recognized that the research she had conducted was fairly small and that additional research was needed in order to draw conclusions from the trend she had discerned in her research.

1.4 “Give me the doll that looks like you”

The Clarks built on her research, as we have seen, by borrowing the picture technique she had developed and they implemented it in the study they conducted in 1939. In 1940, they conducted another more extensive research, which included 150 black children, using the same technique. As a result of this study, the Clarks stated that ‘whatever the concepts of self in relation to society as found in Negro adolescents and adults, whether they result in adjustments or conflicts, they are certainly to be conceived as part of a total pattern of development in which these findings are primordial.’17

They discerned patterns of race

consciousness in young black children that they believed would have a crucial impact on their further lives and how they would perceive themselves in relations to others. In 1947, the Clarks took on a different approach in order to investigate the effects of race consciousness in young black children. In a study called “Racial Identification and Preference in Negro

Children”, the Clarks used a couple of different methods, one of which became known as the ‘dolls test’.Chief Justice Earl Warren, in the 1954 decision of Brown vs. Board, would refer to evidence that was found in this study as proof of the detrimental psychological effects of racial segregation on black children. The study was substantially larger than previous studies the Clarks had conducted, with a total of 253 black children participating, both from Southern segregated schools in Arkansas and from Northern non-segregated schools in Massachusetts. Much like in the other studies, the Clarks were primarily interested in race consciousness, which they described as ‘a consciousness of the self as belonging to a specific group which is differentiated from other observable groups by obvious physical characteristics which are generally accepted as racial characteristics.’18

Important to emphasize here, is that – as the Clarks also state – the concept of race consciousness itself does not inherently carry a

15. Ruth Horowitz, “Racial Aspects of Self-Identification in Nursery School Children.” The Journal of

Psychology 7 (1939): 97.

16. Ibid., 99.

17. Kenneth Clark, “Skin Color as a Factor in Racial Identification of Negro Preschool Children.” The Journal

of Social Psychology 11 (1940): 168.

18. Kenneth Clark, “Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children”, in Readings in Social Psychology, ed. Gordon Allport et al. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947): 169.

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negative connotation. Its effects, however, turned out to be detrimental to black children’s developing sense of self-esteem. The Clarks set out to investigate how and to what extent this consciousness affected young black children.

In the dolls test, the children were given four dolls, two of them brown with black hair and the other two white with yellow hair. The children were asked a series of questions, such as which doll they liked best and which doll they thought looked bad. These questions were designed to reveal preferences for particular dolls, to reveal children’s knowledge of the difference in race that the two different dolls were supposed to reflect, and to give more insight into the process of racial self-identification. The latter part of the research was investigated through the use of questions such as “Give me the doll that looks like a colored child”, “Give me the doll that looks like a white child” and “Give me the doll that looks like you”. The children included in the research were between three and seven years old and, both male and female. Moreover, the Clarks made a distinction between ‘light’ skinned children, ‘medium’ and ‘dark’ skinned children (they made sure, however, to explicitly state that all the children participating in the research were in fact ‘Negro children’). The Clarks found that a majority of the children preferred the white dolls and rejected the brown dolls. One could easily raise questions about the reliability of the conclusions the Clarks drew from these results. The study is rather one-sided, as it does not include white children, but only focuses on black children. Including an equally large group of white children (both from segregated and non-segregated schools) would have provided more insight into the process of racial identification. Moreover, the use of dolls (rather than pictures of actual children, as the Clarks used in their previous research) is questionable as well. Boys are perhaps less likely to identify with dolls than girls, therefore the use of dolls may not be an objective tool.

Interestingly enough, the Clarks did not perceive significant differences in results with regard to segregated and non-segregated schools. Over all, the Southern children were a little less pronounced in their preference for the white doll than the Northern children. Moreover, Southern children were a little less likely to completely reject the brown doll than Northern children:

‘In general, it may be stated that Northern and Southern children in these age groups tend to be similar in the degree of their preference for the white doll – with the Northern children tending to be somewhat more favorable to the white doll than are the Southern children. The Southern children, however, in spite of their equal

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favorableness toward the white doll, are significantly less likely to reject the brown doll.’19

These results seem contrary to what the Clarks may have expected, and they are significant to say the least. If children from segregated schools were less likely to reject the brown doll and less pronounced in their preference for the white doll than the children from non-segregated schools, one could argue that means that segregation has less negative consequences for black children than the Clarks thought, and perhaps even positive consequences. Of course,

drawing such a conclusion would be premature. It is hard to isolate school segregation as the main reason for black children’s preference for white dolls. There were, of course, other forms of segregation in the South at the time, such as residential segregation and segregation in public transport and public health facilities, that could perhaps influence black children’s perception of themselves and of those around them. To the Clarks, however, school

segregation was part of a bigger problem, namely that of a segregated society. The Clarks admitted that they could not isolate school segregation in order to judge its effects, but studying one aspect of segregation in general did prove the detrimental effects of racial segregation as a whole.

1.5 Convergence of Academic and Political Paths

The Clarks were looking to expose the negative influences of institutional racism on black children’s self-esteem and they attempted to do so by pointing out the existence of race consciousness and its effects. Drawing definite conclusions from the kind of research they conducted, however, is rather difficult. The Clarks apparently thought that they were able to objectively measure things that are inherently subjective. But this raises questions about what they expected to find, and the significance they attached to these findings. What is the

significance of a black child identifying him or herself with a white doll rather than with a brown doll? And what is the significance of asking a black child to point out the doll that he or she thinks looks colored? Does pointing to a doll with a particular color mean that the child identifies his or herself with the doll in question, and does a four year old even

understand the concept of “identifying yourself with something”? The point here, however, is not to question the legitimacy of the Clarks’ tests in particular, but rather to understand them in a larger framework of how the Clarks articulated their discourse of discontent. The dolls test epitomizes the ultimate attempt to provide an intellectual framework that can be used to understand and judge primary emotions. But more than that, the dolls test provides a

19. Ibid., 178.

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particular kind of psychological discourse that is meant to spur social change. The Clarks attempted to achieve institutional change so that eventually, they would be able to bring about a change in Americans’ perception of and attitude about race. The Clarks’ research reflects a broader trend to validate claims about the injustice of racial inequality by providing empirical data to support such claims. Scientifically speaking, there is a danger inherent to this method: the Clarks were politically committed to reforming race relations in America, and were thus set on obtaining data that would prove their point. But that is beside the point, as it goes without saying that the Clarks were biased. The question is, however, how this bias affected their way of thinking and writing about the racist patterns in American society they wished to challenge. As will become clear in this chapter, racial liberalism provided Kenneth Clark with the opportunity to use his psychological discoveries about race consciousness as a means to implement and eventually challenge that same race consciousness.

In the published version of the research, the Clarks seemed rather hesitant to state that segregation in education was the single cause for the tendency among black children to prefer the white dolls over the brown dolls. One of their findings, however, seems to be irrefutable evidence to support their claims, namely that ‘the crucial period in the formation and

patterning of racial attitudes begins at around four and five years. At these ages these subjects appear to be reacting more uncritically in a definite structuring of attitudes which conforms with the accepted racial values and mores of the larger environment.’20 In other words, they asserted, like Horowitz, that the process of self-identification in relation to race takes place at a very young age: children start identifying themselves along publicly accepted racially defined lines around the age of four or five. This suggests that the form of education black children receive is of pivotal importance with regard to the development of their

self-awareness: how they perceive themselves and how they perceive others. In the conclusions to their earlier research, the Clarks provided a fairly subtle indictment of racial segregation in public schools by linking segregation to personality damage. This message, however, became stronger and stronger as they continued their research.

Even though they were sometimes hesitant to state it explicitly, the Clarks themselves were convinced that the results provided irrefutable proof of the detrimental effects of

segregation. Kenneth Clark, in an interview with Lawrence Nyman, claimed that at the time, he was shocked that the research they had conducted had given such clear insights into the damaging effects of segregation. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘were these literally defenseless human

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beings required to incorporate into the developing sense of their own being their

consciousness of rejection; negative awareness of the fact that the society rejected [them].’21 Even though the Clarks were obviously both emotionally as well as politically engaged, Kenneth Clark claimed that initially, they were hesitant to publish the results because they found them so disturbing: ‘Mamie and I knew that it was important, but I think we tended to assess its importance in terms of its effect upon us.’22 Before 1950, Kenneth Clark was first and foremost an academic, or what he himself called a ‘pure psychologist, teaching and doing research with Mamie.’23 This made him hesitant to publish research that was so politically outspoken. It should be noted, however, that the Clarks were expanding their horizons outside of merely academic work well before 1950, when they founded the Northside Testing and Consultation Center in Harlem in 1946. The Northside Center offered psychological

treatment for children in racially segregated neighborhoods in Harlem. Mamie Clark was the main director of the center, but Kenneth Clark was involved in the project as well. According to Shafali Lal, ‘Mamie Clark conceptualized the work of the center as providing

compensatory doses of love and acceptance. If the Clarks’ psychological experiments uncovered the psychological needs of African American children, the center catered to the fulfillment of those needs.’24

The Northside Center gave Mamie the opportunity to combine academics with groundwork in the form of providing service to those who needed it most.

1.6 Kenneth Clark’s Racial Liberalism

In other words, by starting the Northside Center, the Clarks had already found a way to translate academics into something that was more practically useful, or at least responded to a sense of urgency they both felt. Their efforts, both in the academic world and in the daily life of Harlem, are part of a broader tradition that gained influence at the time, namely that of racial liberalism. Lani Guinier has outlined the basic premises of post-World War II racial liberalism – and what she perceives as its failures. According to Guinier, ‘racial liberalism positioned the peculiarly American race “problem” as a psychological and interpersonal challenge rather than a structural problem rooted in our economic and political system.’25 Guinier articulates racial liberalism as a rather naïve approach, implying that racial liberals,

21. Lawrence Nyman, “Documenting History: An Interview with Kenneth Bancroft Clark.” History of

Psychology 1 (2010): 76.

22. Ibid., 76. 23. Ibid., 78.

24. Shafali Lal, “Giving Children Security: Mamie Phipps Clark and the Racialization of Child Psychology.”

American Psychologist 1 (2002): 25.

25. Lani Guinier, “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma.” The Journal of American History 1 (2004): 100.

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by merely focusing on the psychological side of racism, failed to recognize the underlying power structures of a racist society. Guinier asserts that, to racial liberals like the Clarks, solving the American race problem was merely a matter of removing psychological and interpersonal misunderstandings among black and whites. In other words, according to Guinier, racial liberals underestimate the depth of American racism because they do not comprehend that racism is a deep-rooted, structural problem that underlies the entire American society and all of its institutions. Guinier argues that racial liberalism is a purely top-down ideology, since racial liberals believe that obtaining legal equality for African Americans will naturally lead to a better understanding of the effects of segregation and prejudice. Since the immediate effects of Brown vs. Board on public education were limited and the case was met with fierce white backlash, Guinier argues that racial liberalism has failed.

This seems to me a simplification of the matter. Even though, as will become clear later in this chapter, Kenneth Clark became increasingly frustrated with how slow progress was taking place, his method of racial liberalism employed an instrument that Guinier does not take into account – that of race consciousness. The Clarks were deeply aware of the power structures that underlined racism in the American society. Kenneth Clark’s

contributions to Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and his own work Dark Ghetto – which will be discussed at the end of this chapter – serve to prove that point. Clark very well understood that racism was not merely a matter of psychology, but that issues related to class, economics and politics formed a society based on structuralized racism. With his racial liberalism, Kenneth Clark did not mean to create a psychological version of events: rather, his psychological analysis served as a method to observe structuralized racism pervading every facet of American society, as Myrdal had laid bare in his An American Dilemma. Clark’s method of racial liberalism essentially dealt with the predicament of race consciousness. Clark’s research had shown that race consciousness had detrimental effects on black people’s self-esteem. The abolition of racial segregation would, in Clark’s eyes, eliminate these effects – but in order to achieve this, the American population would first have to become more aware of categories of race and how these categories pervaded American culture and society. Race consciousness was a necessary evil that had to be employed in order to eventually achieve the goal of an equal society. This means that, in Clark’s approach, race consciousness functioned not merely top-down, but the other way around as well.

Kenneth Clark’s form of racial liberalism undoubtedly implied, as Guinier articulated, an attempt to remove psychological misunderstandings, and Clark’s research serves to prove

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that point. But more than that, Clark’s approach was based on a rejection of scientific racism: race consciousness served to replace scientific racism. Categories of race, according to Clark, existed in people’s minds – and consequently in American society – but they were not truly or inherently meaningful as scientific racism had suggested. Clark’s rejection of scientific racism is in line with Herman’s suggestion of a post-World War II shift from a focus on differences in intelligence to a ‘culture over nature’ approach – which can essentially be characterized as a shift from nature to nurture. Clark’s approach was meant to function not merely top-down, but both ways. By investigating the psychological effects of America’s racially defined society, social and institutional change could be spurred with help of the legislative branch, which would in turn again increase awareness of the psychological effects of racism. Thus, race consciousness serves both ways here and in this way, Kenneth Clark’s racial liberalism was meant to deal with both the cause and the effects of racism.

Clark’s approach, therefore, was much more active than that of his friend and mentor Myrdal, who had also tried to make sense of the depth of the American race problem, but who seemed to have an unwavering faith in the conviction that the American Creed would naturally prevail eventually. But Clark himself was not entirely devoid of naiveté either. Unlike Guinier suggested, Clark was aware of underlying power structures of racism. However, one important effect of employing race consciousness as a means to eventually challenge it, Clark seems to have failed to anticipate. He underestimated that his actions would increase white racial consciousness in the form of strong white resistance to any form of integration. He had hoped that attacking state-sponsored racism, in the form of de jure segregation, would be sufficient in countering the racism that pervaded every aspect of society – whether it be issues related to economics, politics or class. Attacking de jure segregation, however, would not be sufficient in order to also destroy de facto segregation. Clark’s racial liberalism not only pointed out black racial consciousness, it (re)energized white racial consciousness, which, especially in the South, would serve as a strong counterforce to racial liberalism and its attempts to change American society.

In 1950, academics and politics became inextricably linked for the Clarks when Kenneth Clark was approached by the NAACP Legal Defense Team. He and Mamie were asked to work with them in order to prove that segregation was inherently damaging to young black children’s self-esteem and to bring this case to court. Thrilled at the opportunity to effectively challenge institutional racism in America, Clark agreed to work with the NAACP. ‘I was full of optimism at the time of the Brown decision,’ Clark said decades later, in 1992, ‘Thurgood Marshall and the other lawyers, and my social science colleagues, whom I

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involved in working with me, thought this was going to be a turning point. How naïve I was!’26

Clark initially underestimated this effect of his method of racial liberalism, but ultimately, as will become clear in the next part of this chapter, it proved to him the necessity of black and whites working together in finding a solution.

1.7 Brown vs. Board and its Aftermath

The Clarks testified in the Briggs vs. Elliott case of 1952, using their psychological research as evidence for the detrimental effects of school segregation on black children.

Briggs vs. Elliott was later combined, with four other cases, into the Brown vs. Board case of

1954. The NAACP Legal Defense Team, who sponsored the case, asked the Clarks to compile a Brandeis brief in order to support the case and help the defense in convincing the Supreme Court and Kenneth Clark agreed to this.27 The brief was titled “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A Social Science Statement”, or simply “Social Science Statement”, and filed as an appendix to the appellants’ brief in September 1952, when the Supreme Court first came together to discuss the Brown vs. Board case. Kenneth Clark was the principal author, along with psychologists Isidor Chein and Stuart W. Cook, and the statement was signed by thirty-five psychologists and doctors. By relying on psychological evidence, the defense was hoping to stimulate racial progress by challenging de jure segregation, and eventually de facto segregation. Kenneth Clark used evidence gathered in the dolls test and other studies he had conducted with his wife while writing the brief, and explicitly referred to these studies.

The use of the Clarks’ research in the Brown vs. Board case was, however, most certainly not uncontested. After the case was decided in 1954, critics mostly focused on the seemingly contradictory findings of the dolls test, namely that Southern children were less pronounced in their preference for white dolls and less likely to reject the brown dolls than Northern children. They claimed that this particular finding seemed to plead for segregation rather than against segregation. However, critical remarks were not just made by those who

26. Woody Klein, Toward Humanity and Justice: The Writings of Kenneth B. Clark, Scholar of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Decision (Westport: Praeger, 2004): 79.

27. In 1908, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in Muller vs. Oregon. The Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon law passed five years earlier, thereby affirming the opinion of the Supreme Court of Oregon. The law in question set a maximum amount of ten working hours a day for women in factories, mechanical establishment or laundries in order to protect women, their health and public welfare. In order to support the case, the defense submitted a brief containing socially scientific data in order to prove that long working hours had detrimental effects on women. This 113 page brief became known as the Brandeis brief. The Brandeis brief is significant because it signifies the first time that the Supreme Court relied on extralegal evidence in order to prove their argument. In this sense, Brown vs. Board was not the first case that took into account scientific evidence.

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opposed segregation. Some of the lawyers of the NAACP felt ambiguous about these results as well, even before they decided to use them. Thurgood Marshall, who would later become Chief Justice, represented the plaintiffs in Brown vs. Board and was hesitant to use the Clarks’ research as evidence in the case because he doubted whether it was convincing enough. Kenneth Clark was aware of this, but he justified the rather controversial findings in a manner that eventually persuaded Marshall to use their research after all. According to Clark, the findings showed

‘that black children of the South were more adjusted to the feeling that they were not as good as whites and, because they felt defeated at an early age, did not bother using the devices of denial. But that’s not health. Adjusting to a pathology is not health. The way the Northern kids were fighting it should be seen as a better sign. The little Southern children would point to the black doll and say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s me there – that’s a nigger – I’m a nigger,’ and they said it almost cheerfully. In the Northern cities, the question clearly threw the kids into much more emotional state and often they’d point to the white doll.’28

The fact that children in the South displayed no sense of discomfort with regard to identifying themselves as black led the Clarks to conclude that these children were deeply

psychologically damaged – perhaps even beyond repair – by racial segregation. The black children in the North did display discomfort with racial identification and, which, according to the Clarks, was much healthier: at least they showed signs of resistance. It seemed that children in the South were experiencing a subdued form of race consciousness, which was perhaps even more detrimental than active race consciousness. The harsh realities of

segregation in the South had led Southern children to meekly accept racial stigmas, which to the Clarks only proved the pernicious effects of segregation. By explaining this, the Clarks managed to convince the hesitating members of the NAACP Legal Defense Team of the importance of including the socially scientific evidence they had gathered over the years in the Brandeis brief. Apparently, the defense thought that merely providing a judicial

interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in order to challenge segregation would not suffice. In this sense, Brown vs. Board reflects a broader cultural need for a certain kind of scientific certitude with regard to race and the effects of race relations in America.

Brown vs. Board was argued on May 17, 1954 and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who

had been appointed by Eisenhower a year earlier when Chief Justice Fred Vinson died,

28. John Monahan and Laurens Walker, Social Science in Law: Cases and Materials (New York: The Foundation Press Inc., 1985): 93.

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managed to deliver a unanimous opinion, in which he ordered that desegregation be set in motion “with all deliberate speed”. The decision did not explicitly reject the Plessy vs.

Ferguson decision of 1896, but rather stated that scientific knowledge that proved the

harmful effects of segregation was not available at the end of the nineteenth century.

However, in the 1950s, the evidence was overwhelming. ‘Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy vs. Ferguson,’ Warren stated, ‘this finding [that segregation is harmful] is amply supported by modern authority.’29

This sentence is followed by footnote 11, in which the Supreme Court refers to both the brief Kenneth Clark helped to compile and Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. Even though the NAACP Legal Defense Team had pressed for direct integration, the Supreme Court did not

immediately formulate decrees with regard to setting desegregation in motion, and did not reconvene until April 1955 in order to discuss the practical side of the matter. In Brown vs.

Board, the Court was mainly concerned with invalidating segregation itself, rather than with

providing specific guidelines to push for desegregation. Much to the relief and joy of the Clarks, however, Warren stated: ‘We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. (…) We have now announced that such segregation is a denial of the equal protection of the laws.’30

Brown vs. Board led to outbursts of violence and met with huge resistance, mostly in

the South. The amount of resistance dismayed the Clarks, who were convinced that the Supreme Court decision would be the first step in dismantling Jim Crow. They had hoped that the Supreme Court decision would play a catalyst role in challenging race relations in America. However, desegregation turned out to be a painfully slow process. 31 In other words, the immediate effects of Brown vs. Board were disappointing to the Clarks. As time

progressed, Kenneth Clark became more and more politically engaged, while Mamie remained in the background. In 1963, Kenneth Clark, along with other prominent African American activists, was invited by James Baldwin to discuss the state of race relations with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This meeting will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3

29. Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 30. Ibid.

31. Michael Klarman writes extensively about this fierce white backlash. See: Michael Klarman, From Jim

Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2004): 349. According to Klarman, in 1960 only ‘98 of Arkansas’s 104,000 black school students attended desegregated schools; 34 of North Carolina’s 302,000; 169 of Tennessee’s 146,000; and 103 of Virginia’s 203,000. In the five Deep South states, not one of the 1.4 million black children attended a racially mixed school until the fall of 1960.’

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of this thesis. In 1965, a little over a decade after the Brown vs. Board decision was handed down, Kenneth Clark published Dark Ghetto, a study that was, contrary to the studies Clark had published with his wife in the 1940s and 1950s, more in line with the type of research that Gunnar Myrdal had conducted in the late 1930s. Dark Ghetto, sketching a rather bleak image, epitomizes the pessimism that had come to take a hold of Kenneth Clark after Brown

vs. Board failed to set in motion the radical change in American society that he and his wife

had hoped for. Myrdal wrote a foreword to the book, claiming that Clark ‘is tired of the false objectivity, the “balanced view” of many of his liberal white friends on the other side of the horribly tangible plate glass, which is philosophically made possible by the inherited Anglo-Saxon naiveté and lack of clarity regarding the value problem.’32

This implies that Kenneth Clark, unlike Lani Guinier suggests, was most certainly aware of the depth of the American race problem as a structure underlining the entire American society: however, he was mostly disillusioned with white American’s failure to cooperate in solving the problem.

Dark Ghetto relies in part on data gathered by Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited

(Haryou), a social activist organization founded by Kenneth Clark in order to increase economic and educational opportunities for young black people in Harlem. Dark Ghetto sketches the social dynamics and power structures of the ghetto in order to gain a better understanding of slum problems. Kenneth Clark, who himself had lived in Harlem for a large part of his life, was chief project consultant and chairman of the board of directors of the Harlem program that was designed to study black youth in Harlem and to develop concrete plans that would help to improve the situation. In 1964, Haryou published a 620 page report titled Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for

Change. The report served as a departure point for Clark’s next work Dark Ghetto, in which

he also reflects on the American ghetto, its conditions and its effect on American black youth. According to Clark, ‘the pathologies of the ghetto community perpetuate themselves through cumulative ugliness, deterioration, and isolation and strengthen the Negro’s sense of

worthlessness, giving testimony to his impotence.’33

The project seems to be another of Clark’s attempts to make quantifiable matters that are inherently unquantifiable, such as emotions and self-esteem. However, the project also proves that Clark’s racial liberalism did not merely rely on psychological evidence in order to solve America’s race problem, but that he was aware that racism was a deeper, structural problem that had to be tackled on different levels. Clark ends his Dark Ghetto asserting that ‘the poetic irony of American race relations

32. Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1965): x. 33. Ibid., 12.

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is that the rejected Negro must somehow also find the strength to free the privileged white.’34

With this statement, Clark implicitly refers back to the work that his mentor and friend Myrdal published more than two decades before, by claiming that American whites feel highly ambivalent about what Myrdal had dubbed ‘the Negro problem’. Like Myrdal, Clark explained that American whites have grown up to embrace and celebrate American ideals of equality and democracy but are now faced with a glaring discrepancy between ideals and reality since the American Creed does not hold true for African Americans. Unlike Myrdal, however, Clark better grasped the depth of this problem and he understood that it would not be solved naturally over time. White Southern resistance to desegregation served to prove this. Caught in the disillusioning aftermath of Brown, Clark realized that white cooperation was of pivotal importance. He concluded his Dark Ghetto by stating that the main question America had to face was ‘whether the relationship between the white liberal and the Negro, who have needed each other in the past, will survive the test of transformation of roles from the dependence of the advantaged and disadvantaged upon each other to a common

commitment to mutually desired goals of justice and social good.’35

1.8 Conclusion

Kenneth and Mamie Clark played an important role in shaping the American discourse on race and racial issues in the decades leading up to Brown vs. Board and the decades following the landmark decision. Even though Mamie was just as politically engaged as her husband, she remained a little more in the background than Kenneth, in a way fulfilling the role of the more quiet accomplice. Kenneth received much more attention for his efforts, even though he always made sure to underscore the important role his wife played in their research. The Clarks clung to racial liberalism as a means to challenge institutional racism. They had a strong desire to achieve their goal, and the psychological research they conducted from the mid-1930s onwards provided a first step in the right direction. They were

determined in their belief that racism is not an inherent given for white Americans but rather something that they have come to accept as normal because it is embedded in American institutional life. Their approach therefore, is in line with the shift Herman has perceived in the way in which social science approached the race problem before and after World War II. The Clarks were eager to participate in the Brown vs. Board case in order to stimulate change from top to bottom, but also the other way around by continuing to implement race

34. Ibid., 240.

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consciousness as a means to reveal structuralized white hegemony. Heavily disappointed with the results of Brown vs. Board case, the Clarks eventually started to doubt whether or not the change they had hoped for all their lives was even possible because racism was so very much ingrained in the American culture. In May and June 1963, Kenneth Clark interviewed James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. The three interviews were recorded for a television program titled “The Negro and the American Promise” and the transcriptions of the interviews were bundled in a book titled The Negro Protest. The television program was meant to take stock of different approaches to the race problem and Clark chose his three interview subjects because, to him, each of them represented a different style of ‘Negro protest’. Clark’s interviews will be discussed in more detail in the ensuing chapters and they will shed light on how the other two narrators of the discourses discussed in this thesis approached the American race problem. In the last decades of his life, Kenneth Clark seems to have become more and more pessimistic and more unsure of his own tactics. The fierce resistance to desegregation had proven to him how very much the discourse of white hegemony was ingrained in American society. He would persist in his belief that the necessary evil of race consciousness was an essential tool in making the American public aware of that, but he seemed less sure as to what would really be needed to bring about meaningful change on an institutional level. Almost twenty years after Brown, a rather bitter sounding Kenneth Clark tells us the following:

‘…if one changed the institutional patterns, this would in turn affect the attitudes. I still believe that theoretically, but what’s worrying me is what triggers [a] genuine attempt at institutional change? And when I have to focus on that question, then I don’t see any other out other than attitudinal changes as they are operative in the decision-makers; these people have been socialized in a racist society. They control the direction and the rate of institutional change so you are not going to get

institutional changes through generosity, and clearly you don’t get it by court decisions and I’m stuck. I am a much sadder, no wiser person in ’75 than I was in ’55.’36

Clark admitted that he had been naïve and that he had grossly underestimated the depth of American racism. Two decades later, in a 1995 New York Times interview, a reporter asked

36. Lawrence Nyman, “Documenting History: An Interview with Kenneth Bancroft Clark.” History of

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Kenneth Clark: ‘You’ve seen the evolution from Negro to black to African-American. What is the best thing for blacks to call themselves?’ To which Clark answered: ‘White.’37

37. Sam Roberts, “Conversations: Kenneth B. Clark; An Integrationist to This Day, Believing All Else Has Failed,” New York Times, May 7, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/07/weekinreview/conversations-kenneth-b-clark-integrationist-this-day-believing-all-else-has.html

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2. The Black Nationalism of Malcolm X

“I’m telling it like it is! You never have to worry about me biting my tongue if something I

know as truth is on my mind. Raw, naked truth exchanged between the black man and the white man is what a whole lot more of is needed in this country – to clear the air of the racial

mirages, clichés, and lies that this country’s very atmosphere has been filled with for four hundred years.”38 – Malcolm X

2.1 Introduction

This chapter will be concerned with Malcolm X’s ideology of black nationalism as a counter-narrative to the discourse of racial liberalism as employed by Kenneth Clark. As will become clear in this chapter, prison served as a recurring theme throughout Malcolm X’s life. Malcolm’s way of approaching the American race problem was essentially rooted in his prison experiences. While he was in prison, serving a seven year sentence for larceny, Malcolm first became acquainted with the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad’s preaching. Staunchly opposed against the notion of turning the other cheek, Malcolm was often accused of being prone to violence, but also of black supremacy and racism. Critics regarded Malcolm as dangerously extremist and were wary of his influence on young black people. Malcolm’s position in the field of black Americans’ struggle for civil rights,

therefore, is controversial to say the least and the path he followed until his untimely death in 1965 is far from clear-cut, his statements often being unclear or even contradictory.

Malcolm’s beliefs, though ever evolving, form a point of convergence for convictions that all spring from the same source: that is, a strong feeling of rage about black people’s inferior status in America. Malcolm left the Nation of Islam in 1964, after which he started his own movement. By reversing the logic of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm created his own discourse which combined both black nationalist and integrationist elements and equated the struggle of African Americans to the struggle that Africans were facing all over the world. He used this discourse, which was rooted in the traditional beliefs of the Nation of Islam and heavily relied on race consciousness, as a revolutionary counter voice in order to radically change the status quo and to confront white hegemony. Malcolm’s rhetoric, which was highly religiously inflected, challenged the prevalent discourse of Christianity and was meant to unveil white

38. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1964): 276.