Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center (review)

This book about Harlem’s Northside Center for Child Development provides a vivid account of the internal workings and the day-to-day life of the Center throughout its fifty-year history, 1946 to 1996. The authors analyze the many struggles, both internal and external, that the Center had to face. The most important challenge to psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, the founders of the Center, was developing a program that would address therapy as well as politics. They successfully developed and maintained relations with the black and Hispanic communities residing in Harlem. They were also involved in the educational politics of New York City to fight for de facto school desegregation and adequate funding for Harlem’s schools. Maintaining this dual program of individual therapy and community involvement alienated the first, mostly Jewish, Board of Directors, which favored a more individualistic, psychoanalytic approach. Other struggles faced by the Center were the drive to unionization in the 1970s, which was opposed by the Clarks; the endless battles to realize integration in New York City’s schools; and the more recent challenges related to Medicaid reimbursement patterns that emphasize psychiatric intervention. Markowitz and Rosner are sensitive to the importance of the relations between different racial and ethnic groups, as well as to the influence of city politics in educational policy and funding patterns. They give an empathic account of how the Center survived and succeeded against all odds.

The book succeeds tremendously well in providing an inside perspective on the life of the clinic, the staff members’ community involvement, the vagaries of educational politics in New York City, the relation of the Center to funding agencies, and professional rivalries in the unique setting of the Northside Center. The authors go beyond the sources traditionally used by historians of medicine: they rely on extensive oral histories, mostly collected by themselves, and on many previously unexplored archival records of the center and its main employees. As a consequence, this history makes many less-recognized voices heard. Markowitz and Rosner successfully relate issues of personal psychotherapy, remedial teaching, mental health care, and educational policy to broader political issues such as school integration and race relations in general. However, the book does not provide a more distanced evaluation of the actual influence and success of the Northside Center during the different phases of its existence. For example, the analysis of the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis relies mostly on the oral histories and does not incorporate other possible secondary sources. The same applies to the history of educational policies in New York City.

In documenting the inner life of the Northside Center for Child Development this book breaks important ground and will remain unsurpassed. It is less successful as an appraisal of the influence of Kenneth and Mamie Clarke, either on the development of the psychology of race relations or on educational policy in New York City.