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CHILDREN, RACE, AND POWER

KENNETH AND MAMIE CLARK'S NORTHSIDE CENTER

An arresting study of the tumultuous history of Harlem's Northside Center for Child Development, its indomitable founders, and the community it serves. Historians Markowitz (John Jay Coll.) and Rosner (Baruch Coll.) not only present a timely study of the center (currently celebrating its 50th anniversary), but offer valuable insights into postWW II race relations in New York City. Social scientists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, the center's founders, initially achieved recognition for their ``doll studies,'' in which African-American children repeatedly expressed a preference for white dolls. The results of these studies influenced the 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and were decisive in the establishment of the Northside Center. At this child guidance center, the Clarks envisioned a staff of black and white professionals successfully serving an integrated clientele. A black child's self-esteem and self-respect would be most likely to rise, the Clarks contended, in such an environment. The authors document how remarkably successful the Clarks were in securing funds from wealthy white benefactors—until the civil rights dream ended in the turbulent 1960s. Integration was never attained in Harlem institutions, particularly its schools, and the call for integration eventually turned into a battle for community control of schools. Increasingly, the races were pitted against one another, and the alliance between wealthy liberal patrons— particularly Jewish contributors—and African-American leaders got tangled in webs of mutual suspicion. Markowitz and Rosner pay tribute to the Clarks' persistence and dedication in keeping the Northside center going, continually meeting the needs of a community in crisis. Far more than an account of one Harlem clinic, this offers an intimate glimpse into contemporary struggles over race and power, and into the lives of the parents and children most impacted by these struggles.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-8139-1687-9

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Univ. of Virginia

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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