Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T14:12:49.209Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Who Speaks for Harlem? Kenneth B. Clark, Albert Murray and the Controversies of Black Urban Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2012

DANIEL MATLIN
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article seeks to rebalance historical assessment of the debate between “pathologists” and “anti-pathologists” which dominated discussions of black urban life in the United States during the 1960s, and which continues to shape ideas about race and the urban environment today. The heated disagreement between the social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark (1914–2005) and the critic and novelist Albert Murray (1916–) presents an opportunity to consider not only the pitfalls and unintended consequences of pathologist representations of black urban life, which have received much attention from scholars in recent years, but also the problematic aspects of anti-pathologist discourse, which have largely been overlooked. The dispute between Clark and Murray also illuminates the intense competition among some African American intellectuals to claim the personal authenticity and disciplinary authority to define and represent black urban life – and to adjudicate the authenticity and authority of others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , November 2012 , pp. 875 - 894
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Lemann, Nicholas, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Vintage Books), 6Google Scholar. See also Berlin, Ira, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Viking, 2010), 152–200Google Scholar.

2 Sugrue, Thomas J., The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Abu-Lughod, Janet L., Race, Space, and Riots: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Clark, Kenneth B., Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965), 21–22Google Scholar. For the 1940 figures see Lemann, 6.

4 Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. (HARYOU), Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for Change (New York: Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc., 1964)Google Scholar.

5 Further examples include Malcolm X with the assistance of Haley, Alex, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Brown, Claude, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Macmillan, 1965)Google Scholar; Jones, LeRoi, Home: Social Essays (New York: W. Morrow & Co., 1966)Google Scholar; Cleaver, Eldridge, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968)Google Scholar; Grier, William H. and Cobbs, Price M., Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968)Google Scholar; Brown, H. Rap, Die, Nigger, Die! (New York: Dial Press, 1969)Google Scholar. On the rise of “first-person ghetto narrative” in American writing during the 1960s see Rotella, Carlo, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 269–92, 273CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Keppel, Ben, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 279Google Scholar n. 29.

7 Sundquist, Eric J., Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 391CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Dark Ghetto was the first book about African Americans from a major American publishing house in the 1960s to use the word “ghetto” in its title, with the partial exception of Clark, Dennis, The Ghetto Game: Racial Conflicts in the City (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1962)Google Scholar. Sheed & Ward is a small Catholic publishing house founded in 1926. From 1966 many other titles followed suit. See, for example, Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliot M., From Plantation to Ghetto: An Interpretive History of American Negroes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966)Google Scholar; Osofsky, Gilbert, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)Google Scholar.

8 Clark, Dark Ghetto, 11, original emphasis.

9 King wrote that “the ghetto” was “created by those who had power both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness.” See King, Martin Luther Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 36Google Scholar. For two contrasting views of King's authorship/plagiarism, see Keith D. Miller, “Composing Martin Luther King, Jr.,” PMLA, 105, 1 (Jan. 1990), 70–82; King, Richard H., Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 111–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Vintage Books, 1992; first published 1967), 2; Clark, Dark Ghetto, 11.

11 Clark, Dark Ghetto, 63–64.

12 Klein, Woody, ed., Toward Humanity and Justice: The Writings of Kenneth B. Clark, Scholar of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Decision (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004)Google Scholar. See also Severo, Richard, “Kenneth Clark, Who Helped End Segregation, Dies,” New York Times, 2 May 2005, 1Google Scholar. On Clark's role as an expert witness see Keppel, 97–132; Jackson, John P. Jr., Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation (New York: New York University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

13 Clark, Kenneth B., Prejudice and Your Child (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Allport, Gordon W., The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1955)Google Scholar; Kardiner, Abram and Ovesey, Lionel, The Mark of Oppression: Explorations in the Personality of the American Negro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951)Google Scholar. See also Markowitz, Gerald and Rosner, David, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center (New York: Routledge, 2000; first published 1996)Google Scholar; Scott, Daryl Michael, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 71–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Johnson, Lyndon B., “Commencement Address at Howard University: ‘To Fulfil These Rights,’” 4 June 1965, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, Volume II (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 635–40Google Scholar.

15 Anna M. Kross, “Wanted: Bootstraps,” New York Times Book Review, 20 June 1965, 22; Frank M. Cordasco, “Wanted: A World Fit to Live in,” Saturday Review, 5 June 1965, 21; “Light on the Ghetto,” Newsweek, 31 May 1965, 78–81; Robert Coles, “A Compelling Summons,” The Reporter, 21 Oct. 1965, 62.

16 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (1965), in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, eds., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy: A Trans-action Social Science and Public Policy Report (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 43.

17 Daniel Geary, “Tangled Ideologies: Reconsidering the Reception of the Moynihan Report,” paper delivered at the annual convention of the Organization of American Historians, Houston, TX, 18 March 2011, 14 (copy in author's possession).

18 Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Lane, Ann J., The Debate over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

19 O'Connor, Alice, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U. S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Moynihan, 43.

21 Ryan and Farmer quoted in Geary, 5, 7.

22 Clark, Dark Ghetto, 88; Moynihan, 75.

23 Ibid; HARYOU, Youth in the Ghetto, 156. See also Clark, Dark Ghetto, 106.

24 Quoted in “The Negro Family: Visceral Reaction,” Newsweek, 6 Dec. 1965, 40.

25 The interview first appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1967. Ralph Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline” (1967), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), 748.

26 Valentine, Charles A., Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-proposals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 20Google Scholar.

27 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952)Google Scholar. Murray's first published novel was Train Whistle Guitar (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974). On Murray's life and career see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “King of Cats,” in idem,Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Vintage, 1998), 21–46, quotation at xxiii.

28 Warren, Robert Penn, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York: Random House, 1965), 313–25Google Scholar.

29 Albert Murray, “Social Science Fiction in Harlem,” New Leader, 17 Jan. 1966, 23. Murray does not feature in Warren's book.

30 Scott, Contempt and Pity, 137–202; O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 19. Further critiques of pathologism include Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice; Cross, William E. Jr., Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Kelley, Robin D. G., Yo’ Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

31 Clark, Dark Ghetto, 1–10, quotations at 1, 3, 9.

32 Ibid., xxiii, original emphasis.

33 Ibid., xx.

34 Ibid., xv.

35 Ibid., 11, 32–33.

36 Rudolph Fisher, “The City of Refuge” (1925), in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1997; first published 1925), 57–74; James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” in ibid., 301–11; Alain Locke, ed., Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, special issue of Survey Graphic, 6, 6 (March 1925). See also Jongh, James de, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 James Baldwin, “From the American Scene: The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948,” Commentary, 5 (Feb. 1948), 165–70; “No Place Like Home,” Time, 31 July 1964, 12; Clark, Dark Ghetto, 25.

38 Murray, “Social Science Fiction in Harlem,” 21–23. For “multigeneration U. S. Negroes,” see Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1970), 76. On the strained historical relations between African Americans and West Indian immigrants see Reuel Rogers, “‘Black Like Who?’ Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, African Americans, and the Politics of Group Identity,” in Nancy Foner, ed., Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 163–92.

39 Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline,” 726.

40 Murray, The Omni-Americans, 40–41, 180, 74–75. Murray remains rare in discerning that black power theorists frequently reproduced pathologist claims about black urban life. See Matlin, Daniel, On the Corner: Black Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Murray, The Omni-Americans, 40–41, 121, 149. On the Northside Center see Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power.

42 Valentine, Culture and Poverty; Billingsley, Andrew, Black Families in White America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968)Google Scholar; Ladner, Joyce, Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971)Google Scholar; Stack, Carol B., All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974)Google Scholar. See also Scott, Contempt and Pity, 166–70. Similar arguments were applied retrospectively in historical accounts of American slavery. See, for example, Gutman, Herbert George, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976)Google Scholar.

43 Murray, The Omni-Americans, 40–41, 43, 7; Scott, 156–57, 159; Banfield, Edward C., The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970)Google Scholar.

44 Murray, The Omni-Americans, 41–42; Clark, Dark Ghetto, 74, 15, xv.

45 Murray, The Omni-Americans, 7, 76, 59. “Accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative” echoes Johnny Mercer's lyrics to “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” a hit for Bing Crosby in 1945. See also Murray, Albert, The Hero and the Blues (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Rourke, Constance, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1931)Google Scholar.

46 Murray, The Omni-Americans, 6–7.

47 Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline,” 730.

48 Ibid.

49 Norman Mailer, “The White Negro” (1957), in Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg, ed., Protest (London: Panther, 1960), 291.

50 Albert Murray, untitled manuscript, n.d., in envelope marked “Remarks on Some of the Limitations of Protest Writers (from Hemingway ms),” box 1, Albert Murray Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, pp. 4–5.

51 Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987; first published 1971), 52, 123–24, 328–30Google Scholar. Few other historians have subjected anti-pathologist imagery to critical examination. Richard King makes the helpful and balanced observation that “if social scientists lose the character and texture of life as they develop their abstract models of society, the literary/cultural approach of Ellison and Murray fails to do justice to the institutional and structural constraints on individual and group expression.” See King, Richard H., Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Washington, DC and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 302–3Google Scholar.

52 Kenneth B. Clark to Myron Kolatch, 27 Jan. 1966, folder 2, box 26, Kenneth B. Clark Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter “Clark Papers”).

53 Kenneth B. Clark, “Draft, Address Delivered at City College Ethnic Conference,” n.d., folder 2, box 167, Clark Papers, pp. 2–4.

54 Fredrickson, 284.

55 On Clark's donation see the invitation to a book signing, n.d., folder 1, box 187, Clark Papers.

56 Warren J. Carson, untitled review of Roberta S. Maguire, ed., Conversations with Albert Murray (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), African American Review, 34, 3 (Autumn 2000), 547.

57 See www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/AmericanLiterature/AfricanAmerican/?view=usa&ci=9780195115697, accessed 22 June 2011.

58 Murray, The Omni-Americans, 69; Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 118Google Scholar.

59 Katz, Michael B., “The Existential Problem of Urban Studies,” Dissent (Fall 2010), 65–68Google Scholar.

60 Kelley, Yo’ Mama's Dysfunktional!, 2, 4, 73.

61 Quoted in Jonathan Scott Holloway, “The Black Intellectual and the Crisis Canon in the Twentieth Century,” Black Scholar, 31, 1 (Spring 2001), 239; Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1937)Google Scholar.

62 Scott, Contempt and Pity, 168; Ellison, Ralph, “The Charlie Christian Story” (1958), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, 270Google Scholar.