The Clark Doll Experiment

In 1951, the school board in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll nine-year-old Linda Brown in her neighborhood school and required her to attend an all-Black school over a mile away. Her father, Oliver Brown, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (a civil rights organization) sued the school board, claiming that segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  

 In the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the lawyers for Linda Brown argued against the principle of “separate but equal,” which was established in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. These lawyers wanted to prove to the Supreme Court that racial segregation had a negative impact on Black children’s education and learning, even if the quality of school facilities was equal. To prove this, the lawyers relied on social science research that described the negative effects of racial segregation on children. ¹

• 1“A Revealing Experiment: Brown v. Board and ‘The Doll Test,’” NAACP Legal Defense Fund, accessed August 19, 2024.

The most notable study was an experiment involving dolls, published in 1937 by two psychologists trained at Columbia University, Kenneth Clark and his wife, Mamie Clark. ¹ The experiment involved Black children between three and seven years old, who were presented with dolls that were identical in every way except skin color: one doll was meant to represent a white child, and the other was meant to represent a Black/brown child. Then the children were asked to respond to the following requests by choosing one of the dolls:

1. Give me the doll that you want to play with. 
2. Give me the doll that is a nice doll. 
3. Give me the doll that looks bad. 
4. Give me the doll that is a nice color. 
5. Give me the doll that looks like a white child. 
6. Give me the doll that looks like a colored child. 
7. Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child. 
8. Give me the doll that looks like you.

  In a 1985 interview, Dr. Kenneth Clark described the study’s findings: 

A majority of these children disturbingly rejected the black or brown doll, and [ascribed] positive characteristics to the white doll—not all, but the majority did. Then the most disturbing question, and one that really made me, even as a scientist, upset, was we then asked as the final question, “Now show me the doll that's most like you.” And it was disturbing because many of the children were emotionally upset at having to identify with the doll that they had rejected. Some of them would walk out 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 and worth. … These children saw themselves as inferior …

Segregation is a way in which a society tells a group of human beings that they are inferior to other groups of human beings. … When a whole society is organized to … reinforce the inferior status of these individuals, it lowers their self-esteem. It makes them feel that they’re not as worthy as the non-segregated groups of human beings, and this continues pretty much through the rest of their lives. ²

The Clark doll experiment influenced the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board. In a unanimous 9–0 decision, the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in education unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the court’s opinion and implicitly acknowledged the findings of the Clark study. Warren announced: 

To separate [African American children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone …

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal … [and violate] the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. ³

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• 1The Clarks were also the first Black man and woman to earn a PhD in psychology from Columbia University, in 1940 and 1943, respectively.
• 2Interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark gathered as part of Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), Blackside, Inc., November 4, 1985, transcript, Washington University in St. Louis Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection, Eyes on the Prize Interviews.
• 3“Brown v. Board of Education (1954),” National Archives, accessed August, 19, 2024.