News Release

Book talk with author Tim Spofford - March 22, 2023

Photograph showing Minnijean Brown, one of the Little Rock Nine, sitting in the Clark family living room with Kenneth and Mamie Clark and two children where she lived after leaving Little Rock Central High School in February 1958.

Brooks, Charlotte, photographer. Minnijean Brown at the home of her host family, Mr. & Mrs. Kenneth Clark, of Hasting-On-Hudson, New York. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2009632169/>.

News Release Date: February 24, 2023

Contact: Brian Schwieger, 501-374-1957

Little Rock Central High School NHS welcomes author Tim Spofford for a public presentation on the life and legacy of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark, the Harlem psychologists who developed the legendary doll test that played a key role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954), the US Supreme Court case that desegregated public schools in America. 

On Wednesday, March 22, Spofford will discuss the Clarks and his new biography of this influential couple, What The Children Told Us: The Untold Story of the Famous "Doll Test" and the Black Psychologists Who Change The World; the free program will be held in the National Historic Site visitor center at 1:00 p.m. CDT.

In 1940, the Clarks used a grant to study African American pupils’ dawning sense of racial identity in the nominally integrated North - Springfield, Massachusetts - and in the strictly segregated South - Mamie’s hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas. They used four similar baby dolls in the testing: two brown dolls with hair painted black and two white dolls with hair painted yellow.  

Two-thirds of the 250+ African American pupils tested preferred a white doll to a brown doll; some pupils even denied their race. “I look brown because I got a suntan,” said Edward D., nearly age 8, who preferred a white doll: “I’m a white boy.” To the Clarks, these African American children had internalized the low opinion of their race in a segregated nation.  

After her expulsion from Little Rock Central High School in 1958, one of the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown, lived with the Clark family and attended New Lincoln School in New York City. The Clarks started a psychiatric clinic for Harlem children that operates to this day, Northside Center for Child Development. Mamie helped found Head Start, and Kenneth helped found HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited), another War on Poverty agency. He was president of the prestigious American Psychological Association, bestselling author of the 1960s classic, Dark Ghetto, and the most prominent African American scholar of the civil rights era.

Today, the Clark dolls are on exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. and at Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park in Topeka, Kansas. The Clark experiment is still conducted today by students and scholars around the world. 

About the author:
Tim Spofford has a doctorate in English and worked for years in classrooms and newsrooms. In addition to writing for the New York Times, Newsday, Mother Jones magazine, Columbia Journalism Review and other publications, Spofford is the author of Lynch Street, a documentary account of the Jackson State College (Mississippi) killings in May 1970.