ABSTRACT
In 1951 a young African-American social psychologist at the City College of New York, Kenneth B. Clark, was asked by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDEF) to chair a committee of social scientists who would write a legal brief in support of the NAACP-LDEF’s lawsuit against the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education. The social science statement they prepared, The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation, played an instrumental role in the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision on May 17, 1954, favoring the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483), which (eventually) led to the desegregation of public schools in the United States (Jackson, 1998). The content of the statement consisted of a review of the social science literature which supported the conclusions that (a) there were no differences between the races in ability to learn; (b) legally segregated education caused psychological damage to African-American children; and (c) desegregation could be implemented relatively smoothly, even in the South.
