Book Summary:
Kenneth Clark was a middle-class academic social scientist who rose to prominence when his research on urban black poverty was cited by the Supreme Court justices in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark legal decision that desegregated American public schools. In his Harlem clinic, which was managed by his wife Mamie, Clark pioneered a psychotherapeutic approach to the problems besetting society's neglected underclass. Later, in the 1960s, fired by the radicalism of the time, Clark became much more political and critical of the societal failures that had created those problems. Markowitz and Rosner, historians at the City University of New York, trace the story of this champion of poor blacks.Both an intellectual biography of the Clarks and a history of the influence of their Northside Center in Harlem, Children, Race, and Power captures the vitality and confusion of progressive politics in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. If racism is America's biggest problem, then this absorbing study of the continuing struggle to protect the children who are most vulnerable top it in the nation's best known black community is, in many ways, a history of the struggle for the American future. Children, Race, and Power speaks strongly to those concerned about twentieth-century race relations. The authors examine the Clarks' vision and contrast it to how the Center actually functioned, revealing that even such an innovative institution as Northside could not offset the profound inequality of social and material resources in Harlem. This story of this battle against social and economic racism in New York City offers much insight to anyone wanting to know more about the intersection of politics and race. |