Tim Spofford - What the Children Told Us: The Untold Story of the Famous Doll Test and the Black Psychologists Who Changed the World

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Books . Change . Lives .

Copyright 2022 by Tim Spofford

Cover and internal design 2022 by Sourcebooks

Cover design by Rawshock Design

Cover images Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1947, The Gordon Parks Foundation

Internal design by Danielle McNaughton/Sourcebooks

Image appearing on page xiii The Gordon Parks Foundation

Image appearing on The Gordon Parks Foundation

All other photos Kate Clark Harris

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Spofford, Tim, author.

Title: What the children told us : the untold story of the famous doll test and the Black psychologists who changed the world / Tim Spofford.

Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Hidden Figures, WHAT THE CHILDREN TOLD US tells the story of the towering intellectual and emotional partnership between the two Black psychologists who pioneered the groundbreaking doll test, paving the way for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case and decades of impactful civil rights activism-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021055924 (print) | LCCN 2021055925 (ebook) | (hardcover) | (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Clark, Mamie Phipps. | Clark, Kenneth Bancroft, 1914-2005. | Psychologists--United States--Biography. | African American psychologists--Biography. | African Americans--Civil rights. | Child psychology.

Classification: LCC BF109.A1 S66 2022 (print) | LCC BF109.A1 (ebook) | DDC 150.92/2 [B]--dc23/eng/20220224

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055924

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055925

For three wonderful women:
Kate Harris, the late Russia Hughes, and as always, for Barbara

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

ATTRIBUTED TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Ones reputation, whether true or false, cannot be hammered, hammered, hammered, into ones head without doing something to ones character.

PSYCHOLOGIST GORDON ALLPORT

Young Dr. Kenneth Clark walked into a Harlem Woolworth store to look at dollsnot for the new baby that he and his wife, Mamie, were expecting but for a psychology experiment they were planning together. It was 1940, near the end of the Great Depression, and Dr. Clark spotted on the shelves just what he needed: four baby dolls in diapers, two of them brown-skinned with hair painted black and two of them white with hair painted yellow. Cast from identical molds, the four dolls were otherwise the same.

A short, thin, brown-skinned man with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Dr. Clark, in his midtwenties, had just finished his PhD at Columbia University. But because of his race, no white college would hire him. So with a baby on the way, he and Mamie got grants to start a new enterprise: a psychology experiment that one day would touch the hearts of millions and change the way we think about racial identity. The Clarks would use the four dolls to study how Black children regarded themselves and others on the subject of race. The Rosenwald Fund provided the cash to test Black pupils in both the nominally integrated North and the strictly segregated South. Julius Rosenwald, the retailer whod built the Sears empire and new Black schools across the South, funded the grants. His goal was to encourage Black people to cultivate their talents and realize the aspirations of their race.

The Clarks experiment with dolls was an offshoot of Mamies masters degree thesis at Howard University, where shed been an A student, popular, and regarded as a hot catch by the fellows on her historically Black campus. Mamies ambitious thesis had used drawings instead of dolls and was not chiefly concerned with race. By this point, however, she was way too busy to do the testing. Shed just started her doctoral studies at Columbia and, at age twenty-three, was caring for her first baby. Rising at six every morning, Mamie breastfed and burped their first child, little Kate, before laying her in the crib to sleep until the babys 9:00 a.m. bath. Not till about midnight did the feeding, burping, and diapering cease. The routine had to be exhausting for Mamiebalancing all that nursing, wiping, and washing with her schoolwork.

So Kenneth packed his clothes and dolls, left their apartment in Harlem, and traveled alone 150 miles north to Springfield, Massachusetts, to kick-start the testing on a chilly Thursday. A New England mill town of 150,000, Springfield was a thriving but gritty little city of narrow streets and rumbling factories, chief among them the national armory, home of the Springfield rifle, and the Indian motorcycle plant nearby that put the nations police on two wheels. With scores of other plants churning out auto parts, machine tools, board games, and glossy magazines, Springfield was better off than most cities in the Depression. Workers with lunchboxes filled the streets each morning on their way to punch in for the first shift, most of them Irish, Greek, Italian, and French-Canadian men struggling to feed their families.

Blacks, too, were attracted by the factory jobs, though their forebears had been here long before the white ethnics arrived. A hotbed of abolitionism in the nineteenth century, Springfield had served as a station on the Underground Railroad, and Primus Mason, a Black farmer and real estate investor, was among the agents helping fugitive slaves make it to freedom. Abolitionist John Brown had lived among the towns Black population and organized his League of Gileadites to stop slave catchers from snatching the fugitives in town and dragging them back to Dixie in chains.

Much had changed here by the time Kenneth arrived. Many Blacks worked alongside whites in the factories, and their kids played together on the same streets. Springfields public schools were racially integrated by state law; still, slurs and rocks often flew between Black and white pupils heading home from school. Parents of both races warned their kids to steer clear of the bad ones on the other side of the color line, just as they had in Hot Springs, Arkansas, when Mamie was growing up. And this was the whole point of choosing Springfield for the Clarks experiment: beneath the cellophane-thin veneer of Northern integration, Springfield was not unlike Mamies hometown of Hot Springs, where Kenneth would begin the Southern, rigidly segregated portion of his testing. Like Hot Springs, Springfield had never scraped the rural mud from its boots. The stench of hog farms still wafted through its neighborhoods, and it was home to thirty-two hundred Black people, about 2 percent of the population. Kenneths goal was to test every Black child, two through eight years old, about 120 in all, starting at the Barrows School and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Nursery in Springfields city hall.