How Dolls Helped Win Brown v. Board of Education
March 27, 2018 in History
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 black and white 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’ studies, 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 to 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. Every child 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 …read more
Source: HISTORY
Recent Comments