Dr. Quintard Taylor, Jr.
Scott and Dorothy Bullitt
Professor of American
History

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African American History
Vignette:

Kenneth Clark (1914-  )

KENNETH CLARK, born in 1914 in the
Panama Canal Zone, immigrated with his family to Harlem. Clark
attended George Washington College Preparatory High School at his
mother's insistence, in spite of advice from a junior high counselor
that he seek a vocational education. In 1931 Clark enrolled at
Howard, receiving a B.S. in 1935 and an M.A. in 1936. At Howard he
studied with Sterling Brown, Ralph Bunche, and Alain Locke, but he
was most profoundly influenced by the psychiatrist Francis Cecil
Sumner. Clark earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia in 1940 and
was a Julius Rosenwald fellow that same year. In 1942 he began a
thirty-three-year teaching career at the City College of New York
and in 1960 became the first African American to achieve tenure in
any New York City university. He participated in the effort to
desegregate public schools during the fifties. His research on the
impact of racial isolation on black children was cited by the
Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case,
which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. The Harlem
Youth Opportunities (HARYOU) program, which he founded in 1964, was
one of the first and more ambitious programs designed to tackle
urban poverty. He served as president of the American Psychological
Association in 1970-71.

Source: William Banks, Black Intellectuals: Race and
Responsibility in American Life (New York: W.W. Norton,
1996)

William
Banks
University
of California, Berkeley

To view full list of Vignettes of Significant
People and Places in African American History,
click the
Vignettes link on the
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