On the Corner

African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis

Daniel Matlin

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780674725287
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674727052
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In July 1964, after a decade of intense media focus on civil rights protest in the Jim Crow South, a riot in Harlem abruptly shifted attention to the urban crisis embroiling America's northern cities. On the Corner revisits the volatile moment when African American intellectuals were thrust into the spotlight as indigenous interpreters of black urban life to white America, and examines how three figures--Kenneth B. Clark, Amiri Baraka, and Romare Bearden--wrestled with the opportunities and dilemmas their heightened public statures entailed. Daniel Matlin locates in the 1960s a new dynamic that has continued to shape African American intellectual practice to the present day, as black urban communities became the chief objects of black intellectuals' perceived social obligations.

Black scholars and artists offered sharply contrasting representations of black urban life and vied to establish their authority as indigenous interpreters. As a psychologist, Clark placed his faith in the ability of the social sciences to diagnose the damage caused by racism and poverty. Baraka sought to channel black fury and violence into essays, poems, and plays. Meanwhile, Bearden wished his collages to contest portrayals of black urban life as dominated by misery, anger, and dysfunction.

In time, each of these figures concluded that their role as interpreters for white America placed dangerous constraints on black intellectual practice. The condition of entry into the public sphere for African American intellectuals in the post-civil rights era has been confinement to what Clark called "the topic that is reserved for blacks."

Chapter 1

Ghettos of the Mind

Kenneth B. Clark and the Psychology of the Urban Crisis

In June 1967, Life magazine called its readers’ attention to a “new priesthood, unique to this country and this time, of American action-intellectuals.” A “brotherhood of scholars” was now at the helm of national policymaking, “shaping our defenses, guiding our foreign policy, redesigning our cities, reorganizing our schools, deciding what our dollar is worth.” Among the photographs of a dozen white men who “stalk the corridors of American power”—Walt Rostow, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Conant, and others—appeared one portrait of an African American. Kenneth Bancroft Clark was indeed a scholar closely entwined with postwar America’s liberal establishment. A tenured professor of psychology at the City College of New York, Clark served as an expert witness before courts and congressional committees and at White House conferences, befriended politicians and their advisers, and secured federal and municipal grants to fund his research and activism. After making his “enduring contribution” to the campaign against southern segregation, Life noted, Clark had turned to the issues of civil rights and poverty in New York City. Remembered today principally for his testimony to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Clark is for historians a “symbol of integrationism,” the civil rights movement’s “reigning academic,” and “the epitome of the establishment social scientist” during an era of liberal reform.¹

This prevailing view of Clark as the house scholar of the integrationist liberal establishment in fact obscures as much as it reveals. Clark was an unconventional, idiosyncratic thinker whose ideas pushed against the limits of postwar American liberalism, making his establishment credentials something of a paradox. Those credentials were underlined, as many students of Clark’s career have noted, by his election in 1969 to serve as the first black president of the American Psychological Association (APA), “the highest honor that his discipline could bestow.” It is surprising, then, that the controversy that engulfed Clark’s presidency appears nowhere in the scholarly record. Not even the APA’s own volume of essays commemorating Clark makes mention of the presidential address he delivered in Washington, D.C., on September 4, 1971, which elicited front-page coverage in the national press, a wave of condemnation from his fellow psychologists, and an angry retort from the vice president of the United States.²

Before the assembled ranks of the nation’s psychologists, Clark made an astonishing claim. “All power-controlling leaders,” he argued, should be required to “accept and use the earliest perfected form of psychotechnological, biochemical intervention which would assure their positive use of power and block the possibility of their using power destructively.” Little wonder that Spiro Agnew took offense. Far from languishing in Clark’s archive at the Library of Congress, or even in the pages of American Psychologist where it first appeared, the text of this address was included as an epilogue to his book Pathos of Power, published in 1974. The lack of scholarly attention to Clark’s disturbing proposal for the “medication” of political leaders is indicative of historians’ focus on an earlier, triumphant moment in his career, when his testimony concerning the psychological harm inflicted by segregation helped to destroy the legal standing of Jim Crow. Perhaps, too, it reflects the apparent contradiction between Clark’s immoderate, heretical proposal and his establishment profile. Whatever the explanation, a reappraisal of Clark’s thought is overdue.³

Though it would be a mistake to read earlier phases of Clark’s career as leading inexorably to his embrace of psychotechnological regulation, neither did he spontaneously exchange a commonplace midcentury liberalism for madcap iconoclasm. To a degree underestimated by those who have written about him, Clark had strained against many of the conventional wisdoms of American psychology and liberal social reform throughout the postwar period. His drastic prescription of 1971 was in part the result of his own troubled encounters with liberal political leadership and its exercise of power. Amid the expansive optimism of the early 1960s, an era promising a “New Frontier” and a “Great Society,” Clark had believed that fundamental changes in American society could be achieved by a reform-minded, liberal administration. Over the course of the decade, he was painfully disabused of this hope. Of the sources of his disillusionment, none was more wrenching than the disintegration of his own most ambitious undertaking of the 1960s: to make white Americans understand the nature of life in black urban communities, and to orchestrate a transformation of the Harlem “ghetto.”⁴

To label Clark a “radical” would be to overstate his heterodoxy, for he shared many of the assumptions of the liberal politics and social science of the time. He accepted the existence of the capitalist market economy, and like other postwar liberals, his ideas for combating poverty privileged initiatives at neighborhood level rather than systemic interventions at the level of political economy. Yet if Clark cannot be considered a radical, there were nonetheless a number of radical elements within his thought that situate him at the outer bounds of postwar American liberalism, and which bring the paradox of his establishment credentials into sharp relief. Reexamining Clark’s writings and activism reveals a highly politicized notion of the therapeutic, in which rebellion against social injustice was held to be instrumental to the attainment of psychological health. Related to this belief was Clark’s forceful diagnosis of the operation of “power” within American society. While he may not have offered clear proposals for large-scale economic restructuring, the necessity of a fundamental societal transformation was implicit in his characterization of America’s “ghettos” as “social, educational, and—above all—economic colonies.” Clark’s particular vision of “community action” was one of the boldest and most far-reaching to emerge in the planning for Lyndon Johnson’s abortive “War on Poverty,” and resonated with the ideals of “participatory democracy” advanced by the young radicals of the New Left.⁵

These currents in Clark’s thought converged during the early 1960s in his design for the community organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, known as HARYOU, and in his widely publicized book Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965). Even more than his role in Brown v. Board of Education, it was his engagement with the urban crisis during the 1960s that established Clark as a leading expert on black America in the eyes of government and the media. His enduring integrationist ideals led him to be identified as a moderate at a time when radicalism and militancy were associated with black nationalism, and the boldest elements of his thought were often obscured by his professed hostility to black power. Yet it was the very boldness of his expectations that sowed the seeds of his disenchantment with the liberal political class to which he had been so firmly attached.

Clark embraced the role of indigenous interpreter wholeheartedly. At a moment when the riots threatened to diminish white support for further civil rights reforms, he resolved to expose the sources of frustration and alienation that underlay the violence, and to promote the urban crisis as the next frontier of the civil rights struggle. Interpreting black urban life to white audiences was, for Clark, a means to the larger end of transforming conditions in black urban communities. He sought not only to evoke empathy, but to direct it toward support for his vision of a massive program of government intervention that would rescue Harlem and America’s other “dark ghettos.” In pressing his case for a huge injection of money and resources into those neighborhoods, Clark placed heavy emphasis on what he believed to be the damaging effects of racism and poverty on the social and psychological fabric of black urban communities. Yet he did not portray “ghetto” dwellers as helpless victims. Like Amiri Baraka and other black power radicals, of whom he was so critical, Clark combined a pathologist view of black urban life with a belief that the black urban poor were capable of transformative social action. Unlike the black power theorists, however, Clark placed his trust in a liberal administration in Washington to act as a vital partner to the black urban poor in their pursuit of social change. His blueprint for Harlem required government to bankroll not only vital public services, but also an infrastructure of democratic participation that would unleash the collective agency of the poor themselves.

The hostile interventions that derailed his design for HARYOU drove Clark to a mounting pessimism. As his hopes of societal transformation disintegrated, he came to believe that the failure of his mission as an indigenous interpreter had been predetermined by the destructive nature of political power. However, the disillusionment that provoked his extraordinary address in 1971 was aggravated by his increasingly negative view of the possibilities afforded by black intellectual life in America. Notwithstanding his ascent to the symbolic leadership of his profession, Clark’s assessment of his predicament as a black intellectual could scarcely have been more damning. For thirty years, he had directed his talent and energy to the pursuit of racial equality. Yet he was more and more vexed by his sense that America’s obdurate racism had placed such an obligation upon him, and had caused him to foreclose other intellectual opportunities along the way. Now he rued the dynamics of responsibility and expectation that had cast him in the role of indigenous interpreter. Privately, he remarked that his concentration on the pursuit of racial justice had narrowed his intellectual purview and hampered his attainment of a broad, theoretical perspective. This harsh self-appraisal plagued him in the months leading up to his presidential address and underscores the colossal force he ascribed to racism. America confined its black citizens to ghettos, Clark believed, and its black intellectuals to ghettos of the mind.

The Cry of the Ghetto

On the afternoon of May 24, 1963, Clark arrived at Robert F. Kennedy’s Manhattan apartment on Central Park South. Less than three weeks earlier, the spectacle of police dogs and fire hoses unleashed against peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, had spurred a reluctant White House to a more assertive stance in support of the campaign for civil rights. The brutality in Birmingham also sparked protests in northern cities, which made clear that patience with the strategy of nonviolence was waning among many African Americans in the nation’s largest urban centers. In Chicago, black youths pelted police with bricks and bottles and assaulted Mayor Richard J. Daley’s nephew. At a Harlem rally in sympathy with the Birmingham protesters, a section of the crowd chanted their support for Malcolm X. As President John F. Kennedy ordered the preparation of a civil rights bill, his brother, the attorney general, sought to gain a deeper understanding of the causes of black disaffection. Having begun to register the volatile mood among African Americans in the urban North, Robert Kennedy turned to James Baldwin, who gathered a delegation of prominent black intellectuals and entertainers to meet the attorney general and air their views.⁶

The meeting would be widely reported as a disaster. Kennedy, it appears, had hoped that those present—who included Baldwin, Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, the attorney Clarence Jones, and the singers Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte—would credit the administration with taking a firm stand on civil rights and would offer constructive proposals as to what more could be done to assist urban African Americans. But when Kennedy opened his remarks with effusive claims about the administration’s civil rights achievements, a torrent of criticism ensued. “It became one of the most violent, emotional verbal assaults and attacks that I had ever witnessed,” Clark would recall a few years later. For almost three hours, Kennedy was harangued by his angry guests. Horne advised him that anyone who tried to recount the administration’s “proud” achievements in a Harlem barber shop or pool hall would probably “get shot.” Kennedy, according to Clark, kept “retreating and saying no, and occasionally coming back and implying that we were ungrateful; that we were insatiable.” Three days after the encounter, the New York Times stated that a “source close to Kennedy” had acknowledged that the meeting “with Negro intellectuals had been unfortunate.”⁷

Despite the lack of consensus or even cordiality, Clark did not regard the meeting as an unmitigated failure. Within a few months, in fact, he spoke of the meeting as evidence that white Americans, for all their misconceptions, could be persuaded to reevaluate their deeply held beliefs. Robert Kennedy, Clark told the editors of the glossy Pageant magazine that fall, “by virtue of being a privileged and quite isolated wealthy white American, found certain things difficult just to comprehend.” The “emotional tone” of his guests had alarmed Kennedy, Clark believed, and the attorney general had at first struggled to appreciate “the difference between himself and James Baldwin, who grew up in Harlem and who, from the time he was a kid, was required to deal with certain kinds of realities that the Kennedy brothers could not dream of.” Yet Clark seemed to think that the president’s address to the nation on civil rights on June 11 had marked a new beginning and shown firmer resolve, and that the anger conveyed to his brother at the New York meeting had ultimately served a purpose:

I think he [Robert Kennedy] learned a little.… I think he learned that the Negro’s mood of impatience is not surface; that it’s deep enough for these people to assume the very real risks of communicating it pretty directly to him in the way they did. And I think that a lot of the actions of his brother and of his since then seem to show that—while he didn’t appear to understand at the time—he really understood much more later than he did at the time.

What Clark had apparently concluded from the tempestuous meeting and its aftermath was that African Americans who could articulate the grievances and frustrations of black urban communities could effect a positive change in white opinion. “To me,” he remarked in the Pageant interview, “it’s a miracle that—as Baldwin said—a dialogue did emerge. That’s one of the things that’s fascinating about America—if you take enough risks, and aren’t too afraid of the sparks, the cleavages are not that great that some contact cannot be made.”⁸

When Clark laid his portrait of black urban life before the American public in Dark Ghetto, he did so not only as a professional social scientist, but also, self-consciously, as someone who had known the Harlem “ghetto” as home. He could “never be fully detached as a scholar or participant,” he wrote in the book’s introduction, for more than forty years of his life had been lived within the neighborhood:

I started school in the Harlem public schools. I first learned about people, about love, about cruelty, about sacrifice, about cowardice, about courage, about bombast in Harlem. F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Ghettos of the Mind
• 2. Be Even Blacker
• 3. Harlem without Walls
• Epilogue
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index