ABSTRACT
At the end of the war, two young psychologists with doctorate degrees from Columbia University, one an assistant professor at the City College of New York and the other a psychological consultant doing psychological testing at the Riverdale Children’s Association, decided to try to do something about the lack of services for troubled youth in Harlem. Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark approached nearly every social service agency in New York City with a modest proposal. They urged the established agencies to expand their programs to provide social work, psychological evaluation, and remediation for youth in Harlem, since there were virtually no mental-health services in the community. 1 Each agency they explored the proposal with rejected it, as Kenneth Clark later charged, with “indifference, insensitivity, [and] lack of understanding of what we were trying to say.” 2 Representatives of social-service organizations, such as the Urban League, the YMCA, the YWCA, and the Community Service Society, and ministers of a few local churches told the Clarks that their proposed initiative was unnecessary because, after all, these organizations were already taking care of it. The Clarks “realized that we weren’t going to get [a child guidance clinic] opened that way. So we decided to open it ourselves.” 3
