kenneth clark psychology doll experiment

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.”

Brown v. Board of Education

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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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How a Psychologist’s Work on Race Identity Helped Overturn School Segregation in 1950s America

Mamie Phipps Clark came up with the oft-cited “doll test” and provided expert testimony in Brown v. Board of Education

Leila McNeill

From a young age, Mamie Phipps Clark knew she was black. “I became acutely aware of that in childhood, because you had to have a certain kind of protective armor about you, all the time … You learned the things not to do…so as to protect yourself,” she would say later, when asked in an interview how she first became aware of racial segregation. Growing up attending an all-black school in Hot Spring, Arkansas left an indelible impression on Clark; even as a young child, she knew that when she grew up she wanted to help other children.

And help children she did. Clark would go on to study psychology and develop valuable research methodology that combined the study of child development and racial prejudice— helping her field incorporate the felt experience of childhood racism. Ultimately, her work in social psychology crossed over into the Civil Rights Movement: Her research and expert testimony became instrumental to ending school segregation across the country in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954.

Although she was born into the Jim Crow South, Clark’s childhood was not what one might consider typical. Compared to other black children in her city, she had a “very privileged childhood,” Clark recalled in a 1976 interview. Her father, Harold H. Phipps, was a well-respected physician, a rare occupation for a black person to hold in the early 20th century. Because of Phipps’ well-paying career, Clark’s mother, Kate Florence Phipps, was able to stay home with Clark and her younger brother, whereas many black mothers worked outside the home in labor or service jobs out of financial necessity. In a 1983 personal essay, Clark credits this “warm and protective” environment to later career success.

When Clark finished high school in 1934, the United States was slowly recovering from the Great Depression, and college was out of reach for many. For black Americans, the obstacles were even greater; Clark wrote in her personal essay that “a southern Negro aspiring to enter college had relatively few choices ... and was absolutely prohibited to be accepted in larger southern universities.” Still, the Phipps’ were determined to send their children to college, and with persistence and familial support, Clark received a merit scholarship to Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C.

When Clark started at Howard, she intended to study mathematics and physics in order to become a math teacher. But she later wrote that she found the mathematics professors “detached” and “impersonal,” particularly “toward the female students.”

While rethinking her educational ambitions, she met a psychology student named Kenneth Clark. Kenneth encouraged Clark to pursue psychology as a way to fulfill her wish to help children, advice Clark would later describe as “prophetic.” And her meeting Kenneth was prophetic in more ways than one. Clark did decide to pursue psychology, which ultimately turned into a 36-year career. But she also began a relationship with Kenneth, which would ultimately grow into a long-term professional collaboration and a 46-year marriage.

After graduating  magna cum laude  in psychology 1938, she spent the summer working as a secretary in the law office of Charles Hamilton Houston, a formidable NAACP lawyer whose office served as a planning ground for racial segregation cases. She later recalled that this experience was “enormously instructive and revealing in relation to my own identity as a ‘Negro.’” She also noted the “total absence of Negro females with advanced degrees in psychology at Howard University,” calling this a “‘silent’ challenge.” When Clark began graduate study at Howard in the fall, she entered with a new challenge to address these racial disparities in her work.

Her master’s thesis, “ The Development of Consciousness in Negro Pre-School Children ,” surveyed 150 black pre-school aged boys and girls from a DC nursery school to explore issues of race and child development—specifically the age at which black children become aware that they were black. For the study that formed the basis of her thesis, she and Kenneth recruited the children and presented them with a set of pictures: white boys, black boys, and benign images of animals and other objects. They asked the boys to pick which picture looked like them, and then asked the girls to pick which picture looked like their brother or other male relative.

The conclusion of the study showed a distinct racial awareness of self in boys aged three to four years. The results were, in Kenneth's words, "disturbing."

In 1939, she and Kenneth applied for the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship program, which was created to fund, support and advance the achievements of black people. Their proposal included two new methods for studying racial identity in children: a coloring test and a doll test. They were awarded the fellowship in 1940 with renewals in 1941 and 1942. The goal of the Clarks’ fellowship, specifically, was to demonstrate that awareness of racial difference negatively affected development in black children and that, subsequently, black people were not limited by innate biological difference but by social and economic barriers to success.

Psychologist Alexandra Rutherford of York University, who wrote a 2012 biographical essay on Clark titled “Developmental Psychologist, Starting from Strengths,” describes the decades preceding Clark, the 1920s-1930s, as psychology’s “era of scientific racism.” It was “literally the height of a period in psychology marked by the study of racial differences in intelligence, presumed to be innate and biologically based,” says Rutherford. There was, however, increasing pushback from psychologists in the latter 1930s from black psychologists, and even a group of progressive white psychologists formed the  Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues  in 1936.

By the time Clark came on the scene with her graduate research, “psychologists were moving away from race difference research and hereditarianism to investigate what contributes to the development of race prejudice,” Rutherford says. “The Clarks were at the vanguard of this kind of work.”

However, just because scientific racism was losing its supremacy within the field did not mean that many practitioners no longer held those views. When Clark entered the doctoral program at Columbia University in 1940 as the only black student in the department, she intentionally chose to study under a professor Henry Garrett, a scientific racist and eugenicist. “She wanted the challenge,” says Rutherford. Garrett, unsurprisingly, did not encourage Clark to pursue a career in psychology, despite the fact that Clark not only continued her Rosenwald-funded research but also wrote a dissertation on separate research titled, “ Changes in Primary Mental Abilities with Age .”

Despite Garrett’s discouragement, in 1943, Clark graduated from Columbia with a PhD in psychology, making her the first black woman to do so.

But it was the work she did with Kenneth, namely the Doll Test, that has had the most lasting impact on the field of psychology and on the Civil Rights Movement. The Doll Test looked at 253 black children aged three to seven years old: 134 of the children attended segregated nursery schools in Arkansas and 119 who attended integrated schools in Massachusetts. They each were all shown four dolls: two with white skin and yellow hair, and two with brown skin and black hair. Each student was asked to identify the race of the doll and which one they preferred to play with.

The majority of the black students preferred the white doll with yellow hair, assigning positive traits to it. Meanwhile, most discarded the brown doll with black hair, assigning it negative traits. The Clarks concluded that black children formed a racial identity by the age of three and attached negative traits to their own identity, which were perpetuated by segregation and prejudice.

In leading up the 1954 ruling in the Supreme Court ruling of  Brown v Board of Education , Clark and Kenneth testified in many school segregation cases in the South. In one particular case, Clark was called to testify in the desegregation case of  Davis v County School Board of Prince Edward County Virginia  to rebut the testimony of none other than her former advisor, Henry Garrett. He testified in favor of segregation, arguing that black and white children were innately different. Clark argued against his testimony directly, and the court ruled in favor of integration. That was last time Clark and Garrett would meet.    

In regard to the  Brown  ruling itself, the NAACP lawyers asked Kenneth to pen a statement that described the social psychology research that supported school integration, which included the Clarks’ research and the Doll Test. Rutherford says that the work “was quite influential as part of the integrationist case in the  Brown v Board  decision. It was also the first time social science research was used in a Supreme Court Case.” Yet while history books often credit Kenneth with the Doll Test, even he acknowledged that “The record should show [The Doll Test] was Mamie’s primary project that I crashed. I sort of piggybacked on it.”

Despite all of Clark’s accomplishments and pioneering work with children, Clark could not find an academic job. A “black female with a PhD in psychology was an unwanted anomaly in New York City in the early 1940s,” she wrote in her personal essay. Eventually, Clark stopped doing original research and utilized her knowledge of child development and race in social services. There was no organization that provided mental health services to black children in New York City, so she decided to fill that need herself.

In 1946, the Clarks opened the  Northside Center for Child Development  in Harlem, the only organization in the city that provided mental health services to black children. They provided psychological testing, psychiatric services, and social services, and after the first year of operation, they also offered academic services. Northside became a bulwark of activism and advocacy for Harlem, working to provide personal mental health service and to help alleviate some of the social barriers to success. Clark ran Northside until her retirement in 1979, though the center continues even today.

Even though Clark left academic research, in 1973 she was awarded the American Association of University Women achievement award for “admirable service to field of mental health,” and ten years later the National Coalition of 100 Black Women awarded her the Candace Award for humanitarianism.

Clark died in 1983 of lung cancer. But from the Doll Test to Civil Rights to Northside, her devotion to children endures. Late historian Shafali Lal perhaps describes Clark best: “Mamie Clark’s comprehensive efforts to ameliorate the pain attached to skin color have had a lasting impact in the fields of child development and the psychology of race. Her vision of social, economic, and psychological advancement for African American children resonates far beyond the era of integration.” 

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Leila McNeill | | READ MORE

Leila McNeill is an American writer, editor, and historian of science. She is an Affiliate Fellow in the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma and the co-founder and co-editor in chief of Lady Science magazine. She has been a columnist for Smithsonian magazine and BBC Future, and she has been published by The Atlantic , The Baffler , JSTOR Daily , among others.

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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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