Monday, May 2, 2005 Page: B5
Kenneth B. Clark, the psychologist and educator whose 1950 report showing the deleterious effect of school segregation influenced the U.S. Supreme Court to hold school segregation to be unconstitutional, died on Sunday at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, Westchester County, said his daughter, Kate C. Harris. He was 90. Clark was a leader in the civil rights movement that developed after World War II. He was the first black to earn a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University, the first to become a tenured instructor in the city college system of New York and, in 1966, the first black elected to the New York state Board of Regents. He wrote several influential books and articles and used his considerable prestige in academic and professional circles and as a participant on many government bodies and congressional committees to advance the cause of integration. He battled white supremacists and black separatists alike, because he believed that a “racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, black and white alike.”
Dr. Clark was famous for his experiment where he showed an equal amount of white dolls and black dolls to both black little girls and white little and both chose to play with white dolls. I am not sure what that proves in a country that is predominately white…
Dr. Clark was my great grandmother’s (who we called “GG”) sister’s (Aunt Merrie) son. I don’t know what number cousin that is.
Here is an interview with him:
Dr. Kenneth Clark: James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X are, in different ways, symbols and spokesmen for the Negro crying out for his full rights as an American citizen. And now. If one dares to look for the common denominator of such seemingly different forms of Negro protest, one sees in each of these men a dramatic response to America’s attempt to deny to its Negro citizens the fulfillment of the American promise…
Pansy,
He’d be your 3rd cousin twice removed.
The # cousin goes by generation: your grandmother (or grandfather) and he were first cousins, your mother (or father) and his children are second cousins, and you and those children’s children are 3rd cousins. Since he is 2 generations above you, he is your 3rd cousin, twice removed.
I remember I was with Mom once doing something in one of the schools in Lawrenceville for some reason, and Mom pointed him out on a black history poster. So, I’ve basically known that this guy was related to us for awhile now, but I had no idea why he would have been on that poster aside from something that had to do with white dolls.