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The Gordon Parks Basis, which preserves the long-lasting photographer’s work and his legacy of advancing social justice via artwork, is internet hosting its annual gala in New York Metropolis on Might 23, 2023. One in every of its friends of honor is Kate Clark Harris, the daughter of Dr. Kenneth Clark and Dr. Mamie Clark, the primary African American man and girl to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia College within the early Forties.
The couple was additionally behind the well-known “Doll Exams” in 1947, which had been as soon as featured in EBONY. When younger Black youngsters had been instructed to select between a Black and a white doll, many selected the white one, which confirmed the unfavorable affect that segregation had on the youngsters’s shallowness. Gordon Parks shot the well-known photographs of the experiment, which might change into a cornerstone within the Brown vs. Board of Schooling Supreme Court docket determination to desegregate public colleges.
Clark Harris has carried on her mother and father’ legacy all through her profession as a psychiatric social employee and advocate for the city poor. She served as government director of New York Metropolis’s Northside Heart for Youngster Growth, a company her mom based in 1946 when she couldn’t discover work as a Black psychologist.
EBONY chatted with Harris to study extra about childhood along with her well-known mother and father, and what she remembers of the legendary photographer himself.
Mr. Parks so aptly captured the emotion of the younger boy in your mother and father’ well-known doll experiment.
What you see there’s the ache and confusion of that younger boy as he stared on the dolls. And there’s one other picture the place my father was standing [behind] the boy and you may see my father’s torture, that he was very pained over what was occurring. Mr. Parks was one other a part of the mission within the sense that he illustrated what my mother and father’ take a look at was proving, that was his genius. He was the photographer; my mother and father’ genius was the analysis. They usually each informed the story.
If you consider Gordon Parks, what involves thoughts in regards to the affect that he made on Black tradition and society?
I keep in mind him as a person and a buddy of my mother and father. He was terribly proficient and was very concerned in taking photos of us and our household, however again then, I did not consider it as something particular. He would come and arrange sure photos, and it was enjoyable. The one I keep in mind was with my mom, father, brother, and me. I feel I used to be on the ground.
What was it like rising up with the mother and father who created the doll experiment?
It was only a common residence. That and that is what I beloved about it, that my mother and father by no means made us really feel particular or totally different. It was my mom’s concept to start out the take a look at to begin to study the youngsters’s growth of ego and the way they give thought to themselves at a really early age. My father was involved about what these younger youngsters, some preschool-age, considered themselves. It began out with stick figures. Then it was coloring books after which got here the dolls. My father got here residence sooner or later with so many dolls, Black and white ones, and I actually thought that they had been mine. They did give me dolls. Not the identical, however different Black dolls.
What had been a few of the stuff you discovered out of your mother and pa?
My mom was fairly thinking about youngsters’s growth, and each my mother and father felt that every one human beings had been equal. So it was painful to see that younger youngsters didn’t really feel that that they had the identical humanity they usually had been handled in a sure means. It wasn’t essentially overt, however their colleges had been totally different from white youngsters’s colleges. And you may inform that had taken its toll.
How do you’re feeling youngsters are faring right now? Has that equality been established?
In some methods, we’re nonetheless struggling as a result of many youngsters are nonetheless uncovered to the grand inequality. Society has to develop up.
The Gordan Parks Basis’s Annual Gala is on Might 23, 2023, in New York Metropolis.
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