kenneth clark experiment

The Legacy of Dr. Kenneth B. Clark

Black is beautiful: the doll study and racial preferences and perceptions.

Psychologists Kenneth Bancroft Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, designed the “Doll Study” as a test to measure the psychological effects of segregation on black children. The Clarks’ “Doll Study” became the first psychological research to be cited by the Supreme Court and was significant in the Court’s decision to end school segregation.

Using four plastic, diaper-clad dolls, identical except for color, African American children between the ages of three and seven were asked questions to determine racial perception and preference. Discouragingly, the majority of the children preferred the white doll and attributed positive characteristics to it, while attributing negative characteristics to the black doll. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination and segregation” caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred. Clark concluded, “If society says it is better to be White not only White people but Negroes come to believe it. And a child may try to escape the trap of inferiority by denying the fact of his own race.” 1

1 Clark, 1955, p. 37.

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How Dolls Helped Win Brown v. Board of Education

By: Erin Blakemore

Updated: September 29, 2023 | Original: March 27, 2018

Dolls are for kids. So why were they in front of the most esteemed judges in the United States?

As they deliberated on Brown v. Board of Education , the landmark 1954 case that eventually overturned “separate-but-equal” segregation in the United States, the Supreme Court Justices contemplated oral arguments and pored over case transcripts. But they also considered baby dolls—unexpected weapons in the plaintiffs’ fight against racial discrimination.

The dolls were part of a group of groundbreaking psychological experiments performed by Mamie and Kenneth Clark, a husband-and-wife team of African American psychologists who devoted their life’s work to understanding and helping heal children’s racial biases. During the “doll tests,” as they’re now known, a majority of African American children showed a preference for dolls with white skin instead of Black ones—a consequence, the Clarks argued, of the pernicious effects of segregation.

The Clarks’ work, and their testimony in the underlying cases that became Brown v. Board of Education , helped the Supreme Court justices and the nation understand some of the lingering effects of segregation on the very children it affected most.

For the Clarks, the results showed the devastating effects of life in a society that was intolerant of African-Americans. Their experiment , which involved white- and brown-skinned dolls, was deceptively simple. (In a reflection of the racial biases of the time, the Clarks had to paint a white baby doll brown for the tests, since African American dolls were not yet manufactured.) The children were asked to identify the diapered dolls in a number of ways: the one they wanted to play with, the one that looked “white,” “colored,” or “Negro,” the one that was “good” or “bad.” Finally, they were asked to identify the doll that looked most like them.

All of the children tested were Black, and all but one group attended segregated schools. Most of the children preferred the white doll to the African American one. Some of the children would cry and run out of the room when asked to identify which doll looked like them. These results upset the Clarks so much that they delayed publishing their conclusions.

Mamie Clark had connections to the growing legal struggle to overturn segregation—she had worked in the office of one of the lawyers who helped lay the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education. When the NAACP learned of the Clarks’ work, they asked them to participate in a case that would later be rolled into the class-action case that went to the Supreme Court. So Kenneth Clark headed to Clarendon County, South Carolina, to replicate his test with Black children there. It was a terrifying experience, he recalled later, especially when his NAACP host was threatened in his presence. 

“But we had to test those children,” he recalled . “These children saw themselves as inferior and they accepted the inferiority as part of reality.”

Thurgood Marshall was eager to use the Clarks’ work in the bigger class-action case that would become Brown v. Board of Education , but not everyone was convinced. Attorney Spotswood Robinson  told an observer that it was “crazy and insulting to persuade a court of law with examples of crying children and dolls,” writes historian Martha Minow.

But the court didn’t think so. Kenneth Clark testified at three of the trials and helped write a summary of all five trials’ social science testimony that was used in the Supreme Court case. He told judges and juries that African American children’s preference for white dolls represented psychological damage that was reinforced by segregation.

“My opinion is that a fundamental effect of segregation is basic confusion in the individuals and their concepts about themselves conflicting in their self images,” he told the jury in the Briggs case. The sense of inferiority caused by segregation had real, lifelong consequences, he argued—consequences that started before children could even articulate any information about race.

The Clarks’ work and testimony were part of a much broader case that combined five cases and covered nearly every aspect of school segregation—and some historians  argue that the doll tests played a relatively insignificant part in the court’s decision. But echoes of the Clarks’ results ring through the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court justices.

“To separate [Black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren in the opinion. The Clarks’ work had helped strike down segregation in the United States.

Today, one of the Black dolls is on  display at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Kansas, and integration is the law of the land. But the racial biases the couple documented in the 1930s and 1940s still exist. In 2010, CNN  commissioned an updated version of the study using cartoon depictions of children and a color bar that showed a range of skin tones—and found results that were strikingly similar to those shown by the Clarks.

In the new test, child development researcher Margaret Beale Spencer tested 133 kids from schools with different racial and income mixes. This time, the studies looked at white children, too. And though Black children seemed to hold more positive views toward Black dolls, white children maintained an intense bias toward whiteness.

“We are still living in a society where dark things are devalued and white things are valued,” Spencer  told CNN. Jim Crow segregation may no longer exist in the United States, but racial bias is alive and well.

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A Revealing Experiment

Brown v. board and "the doll test", doctors kenneth and mamie clark and "the doll test".

In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known colloquially as “the doll tests” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children. Drs. Clark used four dolls, identical except for color, to test children’s racial perceptions. Their subjects, children between the ages of three to seven, were asked to identify both the race of the dolls and which color doll they prefer. A majority of the children preferred the white doll and assigned positive characteristics to it. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” created a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged their self-esteem. 

The doll test was only one part of Dr. Clark’s testimony in Brown vs. Board – it did not constitute the largest portion of his analysis and expert report. His conclusions during his testimony were based on a comprehensive analysis of the most cutting-edge psychology scholarship of the period.

A "Disturbing" Result

In an interview on the award-winning PBS documentary of the Civil Rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” Dr. Kenneth Clark recalled: “The Dolls Test was an attempt on the part of my wife and me to study the development of the sense of self-esteem in children. We worked with Negro children—I’ll call black children—to see the extent to which their color, their sense of their own race and status, influenced their judgment about themselves, self-esteem. We’ve now—this research, by the way, was done long before we had any notion that the NAACP or that the public officials would be concerned with our results. In fact, we did the study fourteen years before Brown , and the lawyers of the NAACP learned about it and came and asked us if we thought it was relevant to what they were planning to do in terms of the Brown decision  cases. And we told them it was up to them to make that decision and we did not do it for litigation. We did it to communicate to our colleagues in psychology the influence of race and color and status on the self-esteem of children.”

In a particularly memorable episode, while Dr. Clark was conducting experiments in rural Arkansas, he asked a black child which doll was most like him. The child responded by smiling and pointing to the brown doll: “That’s a nigger. I’m a nigger.” Dr. Clark described this experience “as disturbing, or more disturbing, than the children in Massachusetts who would refuse to answer the question or who would cry and run out of the room.”

"The Doll Test" in Brown v. Board of Education

The Brown team relied on the testimonies and research of social scientists throughout their legal strategy. Robert Carter, in particular, spearheaded this effort and worked to enlist the support of sociologists and psychologists who would be willing to provide expert social science testimony that dovetailed with the conclusions of “the doll tests.” Dr. Kenneth Clark provided testimony in the Briggs, Davis , and Delaware cases and co-authored a summary of the social science testimony delivered during the trials that were endorsed by 35 leading social scientists.

The Supreme Court cited Clark’s 1950 paper in its Brown decision and acknowledged it implicitly in the following passage: “To separate [African-American children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Dr. Kenneth Clark was dismayed that the court failed to cite two other conclusions he had reached: that racism was an inherently American institution and that school segregation inhibited the development of white children, too.

An "Incorrigible Integrationist"

Although Dr. Kenneth Clark is most famous for the “Doll Tests,” his personal achievements are equally as prestigious. He was the first African American to earn a PhD in psychology at Columbia; to hold a permanent professorship at the City College of New York; to join the New York State Board of Regents; and to serve as president of the American Psychological Association. His wife Mamie Clark was the first African-American woman and the second African-American, after Kenneth Clark, to receive a doctorate in psychology at Columbia.

In 1946, the Clarks founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, where they conducted experiments on racial biases in education. During the ’50s and ’60s, the Clarks focused on New York City schools.  Dr. Kenneth Clark was a noted authority on integration, and in particular, he and his wife were closely involved in the integration efforts of New York City and New York State. Dr. Kenneth Clark said of Harlem that “children not only feel inferior but are inferior in academic achievement.” He headed a Board of Education commission to ensure that the city’s schools would be integrated and to advocate for smaller classes, a more rigorous curriculum, and better facilities for the poorest schools.

The Clarks also created Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, or Haryou, in 1962 which was endorsed by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose administration earmarked $110 million to finance the program. Haryou recruited educational experts to better structure Harlem schools, provide resources and personnel for preschool programs and after-school remedial education, and reduce unemployment among blacks who had dropped out of school. Dr. Clark was a staunch advocate of the total integration of American society — his peers described him as an “incorrigible integrationist.”

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The Doll Test for Racial Self-Hate: Did It Ever Make Sense?

The landmark 1954 civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education is credited with shutting down “separate but equal” education for African-American kids and paving the way for school integration. Its other legacy? The tradition of questioning small children about black and white dolls in order to measure their sentiments about race.

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The “doll test,” introduced as social science evidence in the lower-court cases that were rolled into Brown, and cited by the Supreme Court in support of its conclusion that segregation harmed the psyches of black children, got a national spotlight and secured its place in civil rights history. Sixty years later, the tool to measure kids’ attitudes about what color has to do with being “pretty” or “good” (or “ugly” or “bad”) is still widely used shorthand for the argument that anti-black racism is internalized—and early .

Who came up with the doll test, and how did it make its way into that famous footnote in Brown— and not to mention six decades of conversations about race? And was it ever really good science? Here are 11 facts about the controversial, oft-repeated experiment.

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1. The doll test was created based on a black female psychologist’s Howard University master’s thesis.

In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth Bancroft Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark , designed it to study the effects of segregation on black children, in an experiment based on Mamie’s Howard University master’s thesis. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund came across a paper that Kenneth wrote on the findings and asked the Clarks to provide expert testimony in the state cases that provided the basis for Brown, in support of the LDF’s argument that segregation harmed black kids.

2. It was very simple.

The Clarks used diaper-clad dolls, identical except for color. They showed them to black children between the ages of 3 and 7. When asked which they preferred and which was “nice” and “pretty,” versus “ugly” and “bad,” the majority of the kids attributed positive characteristics to the white doll.

3. Not everyone on the NAACP team was on board with using it in the courtroom …

In In Brown’s Wake : Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark, Harvard law professor Martha Minow reports that, according to observers, LDF attorney Spottswood Robinson “thought it was crazy and insulting to persuade a court of law with examples of crying children and dolls,” and his colleague William Thaddeus Coleman was heard commenting, “Jesus Christ! Those damned dolls.”

4. … But Thurgood Marshall insisted.

Marshall, the architect of the LDF’s school-desegregation legal strategy, recalled in 1977 , “I went to the basic principle that if you had an automobile accident and you are ‘injured,’ you have to prove your injuries … so I said, ‘These Negro kids are damaged; we will have to prove it.’ Everybody said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I said, ‘How can you prove it?’ “

5. And ultimately, the Supreme Court went for it.

In the Brown decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren specifically cited Kenneth Clark’s summary of all the social science testimony—on topics including the doll test —presented at trial. In the portion of the opinion on the effect of segregation on black children, Warren wrote , “To separate from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”

6. But the doll test wasn’t actually pivotal to the decision.

The doll studies, while salient to many observers, in fact played a modest role in the evidentiary base for the litigation, according to Minow. This subject was only one part—and not the largest—of Clark’s testimony in Brown . And the decision mentioned the test findings only in a footnote .

7. In fact, there are a lot of questions about what the findings actually meant.

According to Kenneth Clark’s analysis, the doll studies were relevant in that they showed how racial segregation interfered with students’ personality development. But H arvard law professor Lani Guinier has noted (pdf) that the Clarks’ conclusions failed to consider that black students with high degrees of contact with whites could very possibly have experienced even greater distress over their racial stigma than their counterparts in segregated communities. Plus, plenty of commentators have pointed out that the experiment included a small sample size and no control group.

8. Still, the doll test survived—and thrived. But it has since been used to measure attitudes about race unrelated to segregation.

The experiment has been re-created time after time. In 2006 a similar study showed African-American children still labeling a black doll “bad.” The Final Call labeled the results “ugly.” ABC did it in 2009 , and CNN’s Anderson Cooper played the role of the Clarks in 2010, administering a doll test for a national audience. No longer used in debates about integration, the results of the contemporary test are frequently cited to anchor comments about the effects on black kids of living in a racist society.

9. Contemporary psychologists say that black kids have gotten better and white kids have stayed the same.

Psychologist Margaret Beale Spencer re-created a questionnaire version of the doll test in 2010 for CNN and found that while there was a “white bias” in both black and white kids, the bias was much less in the black kids. In other words, says Dr. Welansa Asrat, a New York-based specialist in cross-cultural psychiatry, “The black kids’ self-perception has improved since the 1940s, while the white kids’ remained invested in the stereotypes.”

10. Today, psychology has better tools for measuring attitudes about race.

The modern method of assessing attitudes on race is the Implicit Association Test, or IAT , which tests unconscious bias. According to a recent study, 70 percent of whites have an anti-black bias, as do 50 percent of blacks, says Asrat.

11. The idea that integration is a solution to individual anti-black bias has largely been dropped.

“Society’s anti-black bias can be effectively counteracted with a pro-black bias,” Asrat explains. “In psychiatry, we talk about risk factors for particular disorders. However, there are also protective factors that can minimize or diminish the impact of the risk factors. Exposure to anti-black bias is a risk for internalized racism and low self-esteem. However, a pro-black identity can protect against that risk.”

Jenée Desmond-Harris, The Root’ s associate editor of features, covers the intersection of race with news, politics and culture. She wants to talk about the complicated ways in which ethnicity, color and identity arise in your personal life—and provide perspective on the ethics and etiquette surrounding race in a changing America. Follow her on Twitter.

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How an Experiment With Dolls Helped Lead to School Integration

By Michael Beschloss

• May 6, 2014

This 1947 photograph (by Gordon Parks , for Ebony Magazine) may look simply like a child being observed at play, but, in fact, it reveals an experiment that helped lead 60 years ago this month to the Supreme Court’s monumental decision in Brown v. Board of Education, demanding the racial integration of American public schools.

The social psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark sought to challenge the court’s existing opinion that “separate but equal” public schools were constitutional (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) by testing whether African-American children were psychologically and emotionally damaged by attending a segregated school.

As Kenneth Clark recalled in 1985 , he would produce white and black dolls and say, “Show me the doll that you like to play with … the doll that’s a nice doll … the doll that’s a bad doll.”

A majority of the African-American children from segregated schools rejected the black doll. By Dr. Clark’s account, when those boys and girls were then told, “Now show me the doll that’s most like you,” some became “emotionally upset at having to identify with the doll that they had rejected.” Some even stormed out of the room.

As Dr. Clark recalled, he and his wife concluded that “color in a racist society was a very disturbing and traumatic component of an individual’s sense of his own self-esteem and worth.”

As late as the early 1950s, social science findings did not often cross the radar screen of the nation’s highest court. But during preparations for the cases that made up Brown, the N.A.A.C.P. chief counsel (later Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall dismissed warnings by other civil rights lawyers that the justices would be offended if they were subjected to tales about dolls and wailing children.

In May 1954, he was proved right. When Brown was decided, the court cited the doll study as a factor in its deliberations. That night, at an exuberant dinner, Mr. Marshall raised a glass to Kenneth Clark and demanded of those once-skeptical colleagues, “Now, apologize!”

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Brown v. Board and “The Doll Test”

In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known colloquially as “the doll tests” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children.

Drs. Clark used four dolls, identical except for color, to test children’s racial perceptions. Their subjects, children between the ages of three to seven, were asked to identify both the race of the dolls and which color doll they prefer. A majority of the children preferred the white doll and assigned positive characteristics to it. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” created a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged their self-esteem.

The doll test was only one part of Dr. Clark’s testimony in Brown – it did not constitute the largest portion of his analysis and expert report. His conclusions during his testimony were based on a comprehensive analysis of the most cutting-edge psychology scholarship of the period.

A “Disturbing” Result In an interview on the award-winning PBS documentary of the Civil Rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” Dr. Kenneth Clark recalled: “The Dolls Test was an attempt on the part of my wife and me to study the development of the sense of self-esteem in children. We worked with Negro children—I’ll call black children—to see the extent to which their color, their sense of their own race and status, influenced their judgment about themselves, self-esteem. We’ve now—this research, by the way, was done long before we had any notion that the NAACP or that the public officials would be concerned with our results. In fact, we did the study fourteen years before Brown, and the lawyers of the NAACP learned about it and came and asked us if we thought it was relevant to what they were planning to do in terms of the Brown decision cases. And we told them it was up to them to make that decision and we did not do it for litigation. We did it to communicate to our colleagues in psychology the influence of race and color and status on the self-esteem of children.”

In a particularly memorable episode, while Dr. Clark was conducting experiments in rural Arkansas, he asked a black child which doll was most like him. The child responded by smiling and pointing to the brown doll: “That’s a nigger. I’m a nigger.” Dr. Clark described this experience “as disturbing, or more disturbing, than the children in Massachusetts who would refuse to answer the question of who would cry and run out of the room.”

“The Doll Test” in Brown v. Board of Education The Brown team relied on the testimonies and research of social scientists throughout their legal strategy. Robert Carter, in particular, spearheaded this effort and worked to enlist the support of sociologists and psychologists who would be willing to provide expert social science testimony that dovetailed with the conclusions of “the doll tests.” Dr. Kenneth Clark provided testimony in the Briggs, Davis, and Delaware cases and co-authored a summary of the social science testimony delivered during the trials that were endorsed by 35 leading social scientists.

The Supreme Court cited Clark’s 1950 paper in its Brown decision and acknowledged it implicitly in the following passage: “To separate [African-American children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Dr. Kenneth Clark was dismayed that the court failed to cite two other conclusions he had reached: that racism was an inherently American institution and that school segregation inhibited the development of white children, too.

An “Incorrigible Integrationist” Although Dr. Kenneth Clark is most famous for the “Doll Tests,” his personal achievements are equally as prestigious. He was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia; hold a permanent professorship at the City College of New York; join the New York State Board of Regents, and serve as president of the American Psychological Association. His wife Mamie Clark was the first African-American woman and the second African-American, after Kenneth Clark, to receive a doctorate in psychology at Columbia.

In 1946, the Clarks founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, where they conducted experiments on racial biases in education. During the ’50s and ’60s, the Clarks focused on New York City schools. Dr. Kenneth Clark was a noted authority on integration, and in particular, he and his wife were closely involved in the integration efforts of New York City and New York State. Dr. Kenneth Clark said of Harlem that “children not only feel inferior but are inferior in academic achievement.” He headed a Board of Education commission to ensure that the city’s schools would be integrated and to advocate for smaller classes, a more rigorous curriculum, and better facilities for the poorest schools.

The Clarks also created Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, or Haryou, in 1962 which was endorsed by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose administration earmarked $110 million to finance the program. Haryou recruited educational experts to better structure Harlem schools, provide resources and personnel for preschool programs and after-school remedial education, and reduce unemployment among blacks who had dropped out of school. Dr. Clark was a staunch advocate of the total integration of American society — his peers described him as an “incorrigible integrationist.”

Dr. Kenneth B. Clark

Mamie phipps clark, related posts, ntozake shange, james edward cheek, rudolph fisher, sherman james.