{"id":36,"date":"2018-06-12T00:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-06-12T00:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/?post_type=podcast&p=36"},"modified":"2020-07-10T18:20:54","modified_gmt":"2020-07-10T18:20:54","slug":"dolls-the-baby-dolls-of-brown-v-board-of-education-part-1","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/podcast\/dolls-the-baby-dolls-of-brown-v-board-of-education-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Dolls: The Baby Dolls of Brown v. Board of Education (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brown v. Board of Education<\/em> ended the doctrine of \u201cseparate but equal\u201d in public schools, and it laid the legal foundation to challenge segregation in every arena. So what\u2019s a baby doll doing in the middle of it?<\/p>\n

This episode is a part one in a series examining the impact of dolls in American history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brown v. Board of Education ended the doctrine of \u201cseparate but equal\u201d in public schools, and it laid the legal foundation to challenge segregation in every arena. So what\u2019s a baby doll doing in the middle of it? This episode is a part one in a series examining the impact of dolls in American history.","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/06\/Death-and-Numbers-Dolls-Series-Ep-1.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"11.9M","filesize_raw":"12478592","date_recorded":"01-06-2018","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[32,31,26,28,29,33,30,35,27,34],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-36","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-board","6":"tag-brown","7":"tag-brown-v-board-of-education","8":"tag-doll-tests","9":"tag-dolls","10":"tag-education","11":"tag-history","12":"tag-integration","13":"tag-kenneth-clark","14":"tag-segregation","15":"series-death-and-numbers","16":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":584,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-25 17:31:53","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-25 17:31:53","post_content":"\n

Caroline Pinkston is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work brings education into conversation with childhood studies and cultural memory. She holds a B.A. in American Studies and English from Northwestern University (2008), an M.S. in English Education from Lehman College (2010), and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas (2014). A former high school English teacher, she has taught and worked in public, private, and nonprofit settings in New York City and Austin, Texas.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Caroline Pinkston","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"caroline-pinkston","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-25 17:31:53","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-25 17:31:53","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/?post_type=speaker&p=584","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":"","transcript":"

Tom Rosenbloom is a historian with the National Park Service in Topeka, Kansas.
\nHe helps to run the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, which commemorates
\nthe foundational 1954 Supreme Court ruling that ended legalized segregation
\nin U.S. public schools. A few years ago, if you had asked Mr. Rosenblum what
\nartifact he would most like to have in his Brown v. Board Museum, he would have given you a slightly
\nstrange answer. A baby doll. Why? Well, here’s how the museum’s
\nwebsite explains it. Children’s toys rarely feature in decisions issued by the U.S.
\nSupreme Court of the United States. Yet a humble set of baby dolls to black
\nto white played a pivotal role in what many have termed the most important legal ruling
\nof the 20th century. Brown v. Board of Education ended the doctrine of separate
\nbut equal in public schools. And it laid the legal foundation to challenge segregation in
\nevery arena. This decision was a watershed moment in the civil rights movement,
\na moment that set the stage for everything that came after. So what’s a baby doll doing
\nin the middle of it? To answer that question, you need to meet Kenneth and Mamie Clark,
\ntwo American psychologists who are interested in how segregation and racism affected children.
\nIn the 1940s, the clerks ran a series of experiments involving black and white baby dolls
\nin order to examine the effects of segregation on children of color. These experiments
\nare popularly known today as the Clark Doll Tests, and the results of those experiments
\nended up being an important part of the Brown ruling. The doll tests are famous,
\nso famous that you might take their importance for granted, but if you look closely, you’ll find that the doll
\ntests tell us a lot about the assumptions underlying Brown v. Board and the politics of children’s culture
\nthen and now. That’s what we’ll be exploring today in this episode of Deaf and Nos,
\na podcast created by the Humanities Media Project in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas
\nat Austin. I’m Caroline Pinkston.
\nThe doll tests were born from Mamie Clark’s research for her master’s thesis at Howard University.
\nWhen Mamie completed her thesis in 1939, the clerks received a grant to continue her work.
\nIt was during this time that the bulk of adult has took place. The clerks did research all over
\nthe country in the north and the south, in big cities and rural communities, in places where segregation
\nwas the norm and places where it wasn’t. And wherever they went, they put African-American
\nchildren through a series of experiments to learn about their awareness of racial prejudice and
\ntheir own sense of identity and self-esteem. There were actually a lot of different tests
\ninvolved in this research. Researchers would show the children pictures of other kids, black
\nand white, and ask them to point to the picture that they liked the best or the one that looked most like them.
\nThere was also a coloring test where kids were asked to color in certain shapes and objects like an apple or
\nleaf or a mouse. And then they would be asked to color in a picture of a little boy or girl with
\ninstructions like color, this little boy, the color you like little boys to be.
\nBut only one part of these tests has remained famous today. And those are the doll tests.
\nSo what were they? Researchers would hand a child
\nto baby dolls identical in every way, except that one was black and one was white.
\nAnd they would give the children the following prompts. Give me the doll. You like to play
\nwith or like best. Give me the doll. That is a nice doll.
\nGive me the doll that looks bad. Give me the doll that is a nice color.
\nGive me the doll that looks like a white child. Give me the doll that looks like a colored child.
\nGive me the doll that looks like a Negro child. These prompts were designed to do
\ntwo things. Some were designed to show that the children had preferences about the dolls that they
\nliked. One doll better or they had positive or negative associations with the dolls. And some
\nprompts were designed to show that the children knew how to relate the dolls to race, that they knew
\nthat the dolls represented white and black children, not just random colors.
\nMost black children indicated that they preferred to play with the white doll, and most identified
\nthe white doll as nice and the black doll as bad. This evidence alone
\nwould have been a big deal, but there was one last question that formed the real heart of the experiment.
\nDr. Kenneth Clark said that this prompt was the most disturbing, the one that really made
\nhim, even as a scientist, upset. That prompt came last and it was this.
\nGive me the doll that looks like you. Why was
\nthis so disturbing? Here’s how Dr. Clarke describes it. Many of the children were emotionally
\nupset at having to identify with a doll that they had rejected. Some of them would walk
\nout of the room or refuse to answer that question. And this we interpreted as indicating
\nthat color in a racist society was a very disturbing and traumatic component of an individual’s
\nsense of his own self-esteem or worth. The clerk started publishing the results
\nof the research. Somewhere along the way, those publications came to the attention of Thurgood
\nMarshall, lead attorney for the NAACP, and he recruited the clerks to get involved
\nwith his work. Kenneth Clarke testified in several of the lower court cases that eventually
\nled to Brown v. Board and the NAACP submitted a statement and report from Clarke to
\nthe Supreme Court. When the 1954 Brown v. Board decision was handed down,
\nthe opinion of the court only mentioned the clerks by name briefly in footnote eleven to
\nbe exact, but a footnote in one of the most important Supreme Court decisions ever
\nwas enough to cement the place of these experiments in history. But the importance of the tests
\nwas hardly taken for granted at the time. In fact, Thurgood Marshall was wandering into uncertain
\nterritory when he recruited the clerks. You see, through Brown v. Board, the NAACP
\nwas trying to overturn the doctrine of separate but equal, which said it was OK to have segregated
\nschools as long as they were equal in quality with equal funding, equal resources and so on.
\nOf course, that was almost never the case, but the NAACP was out to prove that equalizing
\nwasn’t enough, that separate but equal would never be good enough because there was something inherently
\nharmful and unjust about segregation. To do that, they had
\nto prove that segregation hurt children. That sending kids to segregated schools was
\ndamaging even if those schools had all the funding and resources in the world.
\nThat meant they had to prove that a kid’s social environment could do real harm to his psyche.
\nAnd that’s where the Clarks came in and they succeeded. Here is the opinion of the court.
\nWe come then to the question presented does segregation of children in public schools
\nsolely on the basis of race? Even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors
\nmay be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities.
\nWe believe that it does. The justices argued that segregation
\ninstills a sense of inferiority into children of color, which made it difficult for those children to
\nlearn, and they supported that claim by saying this finding is amply supported
\nby modern authority. That’s where Footnote Eleven came in. But what’s
\neasy to overlook today is that proving all of this in 1954 involve
\ndiving into some pretty new fangled research about developmental psychology and the politics of culture.
\nFor example, another expert witness in the court cases that led to Brown v. Board was Frederick Wertham,
\na social scientist who was obsessed with proving that comic books were damaging to children.
\nNow, it is said also in connection with this question of who reads comic books and who is
\naffected by them. It is said that children from secure homes
\nare not affected. The chairman, as long
\nas the crime comic book industry exists in its present form. There are no secure homes
\nand your infantile paralysis in your own home alone
\nmust take into account the needs of children.
\nWhen Wertham testified for the end wcp, he was mainly talking about research he was doing with
\nchildren at a clinic in Harlem. Not comic books. But it’s not actually that easy to separate
\nthe two because both were related to a central idea that Wertham and the Clark shared.
\nAnd that was the idea that culture matters, that what someone reads or watches or the messages they
\nreceive from their peers and their community can actually have an effect on the kind of person they grow up to
\nbe. If the idea that comic books are corrupting society seems
\na little dated. The other point of all this expert testimony that a racist society
\nis harmful to children of color seems like common sense today. But at the time, it
\nwasn’t clear that any of it would be taken seriously. Not everyone wanted Thurgood Marshall
\nto use the clerks research. According to historian Michael Beschloss, some lawyers
\nwarned Marshall that the justices would be offended if they were subjected to tales about dolls
\nand wailing children. According to Beschloss, after the Brown decision was announced,
\nMarshall toasted the clerks at a celebratory dinner and demanded of his colleagues now
\napologize. Over the next few decades, the clerk slowly gained more and
\nmore attention for the role their task had played on the Brown decision. Today, the task is so well
\nknown as shorthand for the effects of racism that in 2012 Anderson Cooper repeated
\nsimilar tests on CNN as part of a four part series on contemporary racial biases.
\nRemember you? What? What skin color do you want? Did you rule which we only said or not?
\nWhich one? Why do you want that? Skin color codes?
\nNot sure. What do you think of that skin color? Well,
\nit’s kind of whitish owns.
\nNumber two,
\nwhy? Why do you want that skin crawl? Because it looks like. Explain that kind.
\nHis face looks a lot like that.
\nI don’t like the way looks. Well, what
\nlooks good to me. Nasty for some. But I don’t know
\nit easy. So you think it looks nasty?
\nWell, not really. Quite some time. Sometimes. While
\nthe doll tests are famous today, though, they also face a new kind of skepticism.
\nNot everyone agrees that the results of those original experiments are as simple or as clear
\nas they originally seemed. On the next episode of Death, the numbers will be returning to
\nsome of those questions. Well, the legacy of the doll test continues to be debated,
\nthough the dolls themselves disappeared. Apparently Kenneth Clark gave the dolls
\nto one of his students who then gave it to someone else to give to their kids. At which point the dolls were pretty
\nmuch lost. That was true at least until a few years ago, when Tom
\nRosenblum, the historian with the Brown v. Board Museum in Topeka, got a surprising phone call.
\nOn the other end was someone in possession of one of the original black dolls used in the test.
\nToday, it’s on display at the Brown v. Board Museum, rightfully claiming its place in history.
\nThis has been Death A numbers, a podcast created and produced by the Humanities Media Project and the
\nCollege of Liberal Arts at U.T. Austin and Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services.
\nI’m Caroline Pinkston. Notes for the show, including links and photos can be found on our website
\nmanatee’s media project doored. EXCERPT from Frederick Lathams Testimony on comic books for
\nthe Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives.
\nOur theme music is enthusiast by Tourre’s. Thank you for listening.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/03\/DeathandNumbers.jpg","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/podcast-download\/36\/dolls-the-baby-dolls-of-brown-v-board-of-education-part-1.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/podcast-player\/36\/dolls-the-baby-dolls-of-brown-v-board-of-education-part-1.mp3","audio_player":"

Dolls: The Baby Dolls of Brown v. Board of Education (Part 1)<\/a><\/blockquote>