Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center

Kenneth Clark was a middle-class academic social scientist who rose to prominence when his research on urban black poverty was cited by the Supreme Court justices in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark legal decision that desegregated American public schools. In his Harlem clinic, which was managed by his wife Mamie, Clark pioneered a psychotherapeutic approach to the problems besetting society's neglected underclass. Later, in the 1960s, fired by the radicalism of the time, Clark became much more political and critical of the societal failures that had created those problems. Markowitz and Rosner, historians at the City University of New York, trace the story of this champion of poor blacks.