ABSTRACT
On a late April morning in 1954, a few minutes before 9 o’clock, Stella Chess, a young psychiatrist, who was white, arrived from her home on Manhattan’s West Side, at the brick building on the southern edge of Harlem and the northern boundary of Central Park. The Northside Center for Child Development was now leasing space from the building’s principal occupant, the New Lincoln School. In the playroom on the sixth-floor headquarters of the center she found a mess scattered over the floor—blocks, dolls, paper and pencils, finger paints, old shirts used as smocks. It was neither the first nor the last time that her first duty of the day was to clean up. Although expected to tidy up the evening before, therapists often worked too late with the children or were too exhausted to take the extra twenty minutes or so putting things away in the cabinets that lined the walls. Then she moved to Mamie Clark’s office, where she shared a desk with Kenneth Clark, who would come in the afternoon after his classes at City College.
