Dolls: The Baby Dolls of Brown v. Board of Education (Part 1)

Tom Rosenbloom is a historian with the National Park Service in Topeka, Kansas.
He helps to run the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, which commemorates
the foundational 1954 Supreme Court ruling that ended legalized segregation
in U.S. public schools. A few years ago, if you had asked Mr. Rosenblum what
artifact he would most like to have in his Brown v. Board Museum, he would have given you a slightly
strange answer. A baby doll. Why? Well, here’s how the museum’s
website explains it. Children’s toys rarely feature in decisions issued by the U.S.
Supreme Court of the United States. Yet a humble set of baby dolls to black
to white played a pivotal role in what many have termed the most important legal ruling
of the 20th century. Brown v. Board of Education ended the doctrine of separate
but equal in public schools. And it laid the legal foundation to challenge segregation in
every arena. This decision was a watershed moment in the civil rights movement,
a moment that set the stage for everything that came after. So what’s a baby doll doing
in the middle of it? To answer that question, you need to meet Kenneth and Mamie Clark,
two American psychologists who are interested in how segregation and racism affected children.
In the 1940s, the clerks ran a series of experiments involving black and white baby dolls
in order to examine the effects of segregation on children of color. These experiments
are popularly known today as the Clark Doll Tests, and the results of those experiments
ended up being an important part of the Brown ruling. The doll tests are famous,
so famous that you might take their importance for granted, but if you look closely, you’ll find that the doll
tests tell us a lot about the assumptions underlying Brown v. Board and the politics of children’s culture
then and now. That’s what we’ll be exploring today in this episode of Deaf and Nos,
a podcast created by the Humanities Media Project in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas
at Austin. I’m Caroline Pinkston.
The doll tests were born from Mamie Clark’s research for her master’s thesis at Howard University.
When Mamie completed her thesis in 1939, the clerks received a grant to continue her work.
It was during this time that the bulk of adult has took place. The clerks did research all over
the country in the north and the south, in big cities and rural communities, in places where segregation
was the norm and places where it wasn’t. And wherever they went, they put African-American
children through a series of experiments to learn about their awareness of racial prejudice and
their own sense of identity and self-esteem. There were actually a lot of different tests
involved in this research. Researchers would show the children pictures of other kids, black
and white, and ask them to point to the picture that they liked the best or the one that looked most like them.
There was also a coloring test where kids were asked to color in certain shapes and objects like an apple or
leaf or a mouse. And then they would be asked to color in a picture of a little boy or girl with
instructions like color, this little boy, the color you like little boys to be.
But only one part of these tests has remained famous today. And those are the doll tests.
So what were they? Researchers would hand a child
to baby dolls identical in every way, except that one was black and one was white.
And they would give the children the following prompts. Give me the doll. You like to play
with or like best. Give me the doll. That is a nice doll.
Give me the doll that looks bad. Give me the doll that is a nice color.
Give me the doll that looks like a white child. Give me the doll that looks like a colored child.
Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child. These prompts were designed to do
two things. Some were designed to show that the children had preferences about the dolls that they
liked. One doll better or they had positive or negative associations with the dolls. And some
prompts were designed to show that the children knew how to relate the dolls to race, that they knew
that the dolls represented white and black children, not just random colors.
Most black children indicated that they preferred to play with the white doll, and most identified
the white doll as nice and the black doll as bad. This evidence alone
would have been a big deal, but there was one last question that formed the real heart of the experiment.
Dr. Kenneth Clark said that this prompt was the most disturbing, the one that really made
him, even as a scientist, upset. That prompt came last and it was this.
Give me the doll that looks like you. Why was
this so disturbing? Here’s how Dr. Clarke describes it. Many of the children were emotionally
upset at having to identify with a doll that they had rejected. Some of them would walk
out of the room or refuse to answer that question. And this we interpreted as indicating
that color in a racist society was a very disturbing and traumatic component of an individual’s
sense of his own self-esteem or worth. The clerk started publishing the results
of the research. Somewhere along the way, those publications came to the attention of Thurgood
Marshall, lead attorney for the NAACP, and he recruited the clerks to get involved
with his work. Kenneth Clarke testified in several of the lower court cases that eventually
led to Brown v. Board and the NAACP submitted a statement and report from Clarke to
the Supreme Court. When the 1954 Brown v. Board decision was handed down,
the opinion of the court only mentioned the clerks by name briefly in footnote eleven to
be exact, but a footnote in one of the most important Supreme Court decisions ever
was enough to cement the place of these experiments in history. But the importance of the tests
was hardly taken for granted at the time. In fact, Thurgood Marshall was wandering into uncertain
territory when he recruited the clerks. You see, through Brown v. Board, the NAACP
was trying to overturn the doctrine of separate but equal, which said it was OK to have segregated
schools as long as they were equal in quality with equal funding, equal resources and so on.
Of course, that was almost never the case, but the NAACP was out to prove that equalizing
wasn’t enough, that separate but equal would never be good enough because there was something inherently
harmful and unjust about segregation. To do that, they had
to prove that segregation hurt children. That sending kids to segregated schools was
damaging even if those schools had all the funding and resources in the world.
That meant they had to prove that a kid’s social environment could do real harm to his psyche.
And that’s where the Clarks came in and they succeeded. Here is the opinion of the court.
We come then to the question presented does segregation of children in public schools
solely on the basis of race? Even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors
may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities.
We believe that it does. The justices argued that segregation
instills a sense of inferiority into children of color, which made it difficult for those children to
learn, and they supported that claim by saying this finding is amply supported
by modern authority. That’s where Footnote Eleven came in. But what’s
easy to overlook today is that proving all of this in 1954 involve
diving into some pretty new fangled research about developmental psychology and the politics of culture.
For example, another expert witness in the court cases that led to Brown v. Board was Frederick Wertham,
a social scientist who was obsessed with proving that comic books were damaging to children.
Now, it is said also in connection with this question of who reads comic books and who is
affected by them. It is said that children from secure homes
are not affected. The chairman, as long
as the crime comic book industry exists in its present form. There are no secure homes
and your infantile paralysis in your own home alone
must take into account the needs of children.
When Wertham testified for the end wcp, he was mainly talking about research he was doing with
children at a clinic in Harlem. Not comic books. But it’s not actually that easy to separate
the two because both were related to a central idea that Wertham and the Clark shared.
And that was the idea that culture matters, that what someone reads or watches or the messages they
receive from their peers and their community can actually have an effect on the kind of person they grow up to
be. If the idea that comic books are corrupting society seems
a little dated. The other point of all this expert testimony that a racist society
is harmful to children of color seems like common sense today. But at the time, it
wasn’t clear that any of it would be taken seriously. Not everyone wanted Thurgood Marshall
to use the clerks research. According to historian Michael Beschloss, some lawyers
warned Marshall that the justices would be offended if they were subjected to tales about dolls
and wailing children. According to Beschloss, after the Brown decision was announced,
Marshall toasted the clerks at a celebratory dinner and demanded of his colleagues now
apologize. Over the next few decades, the clerk slowly gained more and
more attention for the role their task had played on the Brown decision. Today, the task is so well
known as shorthand for the effects of racism that in 2012 Anderson Cooper repeated
similar tests on CNN as part of a four part series on contemporary racial biases.
Remember you? What? What skin color do you want? Did you rule which we only said or not?
Which one? Why do you want that? Skin color codes?
Not sure. What do you think of that skin color? Well,
it’s kind of whitish owns.
Number two,
why? Why do you want that skin crawl? Because it looks like. Explain that kind.
His face looks a lot like that.
I don’t like the way looks. Well, what
looks good to me. Nasty for some. But I don’t know
it easy. So you think it looks nasty?
Well, not really. Quite some time. Sometimes. While
the doll tests are famous today, though, they also face a new kind of skepticism.
Not everyone agrees that the results of those original experiments are as simple or as clear
as they originally seemed. On the next episode of Death, the numbers will be returning to
some of those questions. Well, the legacy of the doll test continues to be debated,
though the dolls themselves disappeared. Apparently Kenneth Clark gave the dolls
to one of his students who then gave it to someone else to give to their kids. At which point the dolls were pretty
much lost. That was true at least until a few years ago, when Tom
Rosenblum, the historian with the Brown v. Board Museum in Topeka, got a surprising phone call.
On the other end was someone in possession of one of the original black dolls used in the test.
Today, it’s on display at the Brown v. Board Museum, rightfully claiming its place in history.
This has been Death A numbers, a podcast created and produced by the Humanities Media Project and the
College of Liberal Arts at U.T. Austin and Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services.
I’m Caroline Pinkston. Notes for the show, including links and photos can be found on our website
manatee’s media project doored. EXCERPT from Frederick Lathams Testimony on comic books for
the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives.
Our theme music is enthusiast by Tourre’s. Thank you for listening.