So Kenneth Clark headed to Clarendon County, South Carolina, to replicate his test with Black children there. 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. 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. (Credit: Cecil Beaton/Condé Nast via Getty Images) Mamie Phipps Clark shot for Vogue in 1968. These results upset the Clarks so much that they delayed publishing their conclusions.ĭr. Some of the children would cry and run out of the room when asked to identify which doll looked like them.

(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.Īll 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. Their experiment, which involved white- and brown-skinned dolls, was deceptively simple. 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.įor the Clarks, the results showed the devastating effects of life in a society that was intolerant of African-Americans. The Clarks’ work, and their testimony in the underlying cases that became Brown v. (Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Kate Clark Harris in memory of her parents Kenneth and Mamie Clark, in cooperation with the Northside Center for Child Development) The dolls used in Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s studies at their Northside Center for Child Development, founded in 1946.

Brown v board of education impact