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‘Jim Crow’ is shorthand in the USA for the legal and social structures and processes that white Southerners constructed after the end of the Civil War to reverse the gains in the civil rights of Black Americans that Union victory should have guaranteed. Slavery could not be reinstated but all kinds of other legal, political, economic and social obstacles were erected to prevent African Americans from attaining social, economic or political equality with white Americans. One of these obstacles was that children were educated in segregated schools. The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution makes it unconstitutional for Americans to be treated unequally before the law. White Southerners got around this by arguing that Black and white children were getting an education that was separate but equal. This was a blatant lie. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, in 1950, US$179 was spent on public (state) schools for each white child and less than a quarter of that sum, US$43, for each Black child. There were sixty-one schools for Black children, ‘more than half of them ramshackle or plain falling-down shanties that accommodated one or two teachers and their charges, and twelve schools for whites’ (Kluger 2004: 8). The total value of the Black schools, attended by over six and half thousand Black students, was less than US$200,000; the total value of the white schools, attended by less than two and half thousand students, was US$673,850, over three times as much as the Black schools (Kluger 2004: 8). White children had thirty publicly funded school buses to get them to school; there was not one school bus for Black students.

The NAACP chose school segregation as its major legal case to argue that segregation and unequal treatment of African Americans were unconstitutional. Schools were an excellent starting point for the campaign to use the law to force the ending of Jim Crow in the South because by 1950 there was not a dual ideology of childhood; all children were regarded as innocent, dependent and vulnerable. Who could regard it as right to prevent respectable children, eager to learn, from having an equal right to learn? Who in the North would not be shocked by the sight of white adults screaming at Black children and trying to prevent them from doing something as ordinary and worthwhile as going to school?

To pursue their case the NAACP wanted to demonstrate in court that segregation caused damage to the self-esteem of Black students. They asked Kenneth Clark to give expert evidence to the court using his ‘doll tests’ in the 1951 case of Briggs v. Elliott, one of five suits that collectively were known as Brown v. Board of Education (Patterson 2002: 25).

Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark had developed a series of psychological tests using pink and brown dolls to investigate the impact on African American children’s racial identity and self-esteem of their awareness of racism. The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund’s attorney, Thurgood Marshall, wanted to prove that segregation caused injury to Black children (Kluger 2004: 316). The NAACP’s case rested on the theory that school segregation did psychic damage to Black children and this was essentially what the Clarks had found in their ‘doll studies’.

The Clarks had been publishing their work on the impact of racism on the self-identity of Black children since 1939. The doll tests involved showing Black children aged 4 to 7 two brown and two white dolls and asking them to ‘give me the white doll’, ‘give me the colored doll’ and ‘give me the Negro doll’, and then asking which doll was nice, which they would like to play with, which doll looked bad and which doll had a nice colour. The Clarks found that wherever they did these tests the children showed ‘an unmistakeable preference for the white doll and a rejection of the brown doll’ (Kluger 2004: 317). Another series of tests, using outline drawings of different objects and of a boy and a girl which the subject child was asked to colour in selecting a colour or colours from a choice of black, brown, white, yellow, pink and tan, found that Black children displayed a preference for white and yellow colours and random mixtures of colours when colouring in the outlines of the boy and girl. The Clarks interpreted their data to mean that Black children suffered from self-rejection (Kluger 2004: 318). In 1955 Kenneth Clark was commissioned to write a report on their findings for the White House Midcentury Conference on Youth. It cited other studies, including those done by Marian J. Radke and Helen G. Trager, who had run similar tests in Philadelphia. They used cut-out brown and white dolls; both Black and white children were asked to say which they preferred. The researchers found that 57 per cent of the Black children and 89 per cent of the white children preferred the white cut-out doll.

To prepare his evidence for the Briggs case Clark did the doll test on sixteen randomly selected children at a Black segregated school in Clarendon County. The children, all between 6 and 9 years old, were asked to choose the doll which most looked like them: seven of them chose the white doll. The findings were consistent with the other studies that the Clarks had conducted (Kluger 2004: 331).

The Clarks were not the only experts to give evidence in the case of Briggs v. Elliott. Although the three judges hearing the case were convinced that education in South Carolina was highly unequal, they found against the NAACP’s plea that schools should be desegregated, with one dissenting opinion, that of Judge J. Waites Waring. The NAACP had not expected a ruling in their favour; their intention in bringing Briggs and the other four cases was that by the time they appealed to the Supreme Court they could present ‘a record of pervasive and undeniable injustice’ (Kluger 2004: 368).