A Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: KENNETH BANCROFT CLARK

By Gale and Cengage

Perfect for research assignments in psychology, science, and history, this concise study guide is a one-stop source for in-depth coverage of major psychological theories and the people who developed them. Consistently formatted entries typically cover the following: biographical sketch and personal data, theory outline, analysis of psychologist's place in history, summary of critical response to the theory, the theory in action, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535831598

Book preview

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BIOGRAPHY

Harlem: The early years

New York's Harlem village was a thriving African-American community on the threshold of a Renaissance in 1919 when Kenneth Bancroft Clark arrived on a passenger boat from the Panama Canal Zone. Kenneth's mother, Miriam Hanson Clark, left her husband and home in Panama to bring her children, Kenneth, almost five, and two-year-old Beulah, to live in a country she believed would offer her children more opportunity. Within the decade, the black population of Harlem had increased by 100,000. The Clarks made their home in a series of tenement apartments in integrated neighborhoods, living side by side in the crowded city with Irish and Jewish immigrants.

My family moved from house to house, and from neighborhood to neighborhood within the walls of the ghetto in a desperate attempt to escape its creeping blight, Clark later wrote, recalling his early years in Harlem. Soon after the Clarks emigrated from Panama, Congress began to pass laws setting immigration quotas favoring Anglo-Saxons. A revived Ku Klux Klan had spread into the North, and by 1924 had nearly five million members.

Clark's mother was a skilled seamstress and soon found work in the garment district in New York City to support her children. She became an early shop steward with the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, and maintained high hopes for her children. Kenneth's father, Arthur Bancroft Clark, a native of the West Indies, did not share her optimism. He remained in Panama to keep his employment with the United Fruit Company.

Black pride and black literary voices were strong influences in the Harlem of Clark's boyhood. It was a time of tremendous creativity and growth of social and political movements. Harlem nurtured black intellectuals such as Arthur Schomburg, curator of the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, a center of intellectual and cultural activity in Harlem, and home to his extensive collection of black literature and historical documents. Black poets and writers including Countee Cullen, who taught at Kenneth Clark's junior high school; Langston Hughes, Harlem's Poet Laureate; and Zora Neale Hurston were among the prominent cultural lights of Harlem during Kenneth Clark's childhood years.

Another lively presence in the 1920s was Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born charismatic black leader. Garvey gathered tremendous support for his black nationalist movement in Harlem and by the time the Clarks arrived, Garvey claimed a huge following of African Americans who responded to his call for black pride and economic independence. In 1920, Garvey led a parade of 50,000 people from throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Central America, and Africa through the streets of Harlem with their banners, uniforms, and colorfully decorated cars. Harlem was a vibrant and vital community in the 1920s, and a place that remained close to Clark's heart throughout his life.

I first learned about people, about love, about cruelty, about sacrifice, about cowardice, about courage, about bombast in Harlem, Clark later wrote in his 1965 book, Dark Ghetto. He introduced the book as a summation of my personal experiences and observations as a prisoner within the ghetto long before I was aware that I was really a prisoner.

PRINCIPAL PUBLICATIONS

Prejudice and Your Child. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955; 1957.

The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King talk with Kenneth B. Clark. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

With Jeannette Hopkins. A Relevant War Against Poverty. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

A Possible Reality: A Design for the Attainment of High Academic Achievement for Inner-City Students. New York: Emerson Hall, 1972.

The Educationally Deprived: The Potential for Change. Metropolitan Applied Research Center, 1972.

Pathos of Power. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

How to Protect Children Against Prejudice. Child Study Association of America, New York: 1983.

Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.

Intelligence, the University, and Society. United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa; Washington DC: 1992.

Young Kenneth attended desegregated elementary and junior high schools in Harlem and excelled as a student. When it came time for high school, though, the school counselors who were long accustomed to tracking black youth into vocational education programs were surprised when Miriam Clark arrived at the doorstep with her strong objections to vocational school. She intervened with the counselors to ensure that her bright young son would have a place in the academically focused George Washington High School.

It was his education that helped lead Kenneth Clark out of the prison of the ghetto, and it was his chosen profession as a social psychologist that led him back to Harlem as an involved observer using, as he wrote, the real community, the market place, the arena of politics and power as his laboratory to confront and seek to understand the dynamics of social action and social change.

The Depression of 1929 hit Harlem hard. The numbers of unemployed applying for relief quadrupled within two years. Clark showed an interest in the problems of economics during his high school years, and he might have sustained that interest, but one of his teachers refused to give Kenneth an economics award he had earned for outstanding performance in the class. Despite the sting of discrimination, Clark excelled in his studies and graduated from George Washington High School in 1931. That same year he became a naturalized U.S.