4

Children and the Violence of Racism

The Lafargue Clinic, Comic Books, and the Case against School Segregation

In the spring of 1946 the New York Amsterdam News ran a series of articles examining the nature of mental health services for African Americans in New York City. Its findings were damning. The articles highlighted discrimination against blacks at the hospital and outpatient clinic of the state-funded Psychiatric Institute, at the Mental Hygiene Clinic at Belle-vue Hospital, and in the treatment of chronic alcoholics at city facilities. The final article in the series lambasted the disproportionate placement of black children in “retarded classes” by the Bureau of Children of Retarded Mental Development.1 The April 27 lead editorial announced the importance of the newspaper’s exposé: “The whole sordid story of the harsh race bars which doom Negro children to creeping insanity, until they are ‘crazy enough’ to be institutionalized, is being told in the news columns of the amsterdam news for the first time.”2 Three weeks later, Constance Curtis, the author of the other articles in the series, got a scoop: a mental hygiene clinic would soon open at Harlem Hospital, “making it the first such service offered by the City to citizens of the community of this area.” Curtis wrote,

In the year following the Lafargue Clinic’s opening in 1946, a small yet significant group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers coalesced in Harlem to address the problems detailed in the Amsterdam News. On May 6, 1947, the Lafargue Clinic hosted a symposium to inaugurate the Joint Committee on Mental Hygiene Services in Harlem. Appointing himself chairman of the committee, Fredric Wertham hoped to establish a dialogue among representatives from the Harlem Hospital clinic and the Northside Center for Child Development. One important participant was Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, cofounder of the Northside Center (also founded in March 1946), who would later become the most prominent race relations expert of the civil rights era.4 What seemed to be the founding moment of an important collaboration between Clark, the leading African American social psychologist in New York, and Wertham, arguably the most vocal advocate for democratizing the practice and provision of psychiatry in America, turned out to be the first and last formal meeting of the Joint Committee for Mental Hygiene Services in Harlem. Though the two men shared a concern over the mental health needs of black Americans, their commonality ended there. What precisely transpired at the symposium is unfortunately lost to history. But the meeting may have sown the seeds of discord that would have a lasting impact on Wertham’s status in the postwar social scientific movement to combat racism and its effects. While both men participated in the historic school desegregation movement culminating in the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, Clark would become the public face of American social science on matters of race, while Wertham receded into relative obscurity. And with him went the fortunes of the Lafargue Clinic.5

For a time, though, in the 1950s, the antiracist social psychiatry inaugurated in the Lafargue Clinic did play a pivotal role in two of the most important social debates of the day: juvenile delinquency and public school segregation. In both cases, Wertham’s initially most effective tool, clinically derived testimony from young people most affected by the problem, became his greatest liability in the hands of skeptics and critics. At issue was the basic question of scientific truth. Wertham’s central argument in both his testimony against segregation and his attack upon comic books was that both contributed to a hostile climate that interfered with the emotional and mental health of young people. Moreover, the argument was founded on evidence derived from the clinical methods of social psychiatry practiced at Lafargue.6

“I Don’t Like the Jungle”

During its entire existence, much of the Lafargue Clinic’s work was dedicated to identifying and countering sources of violence directed toward Harlem’s youth. In the hands of children and adolescents at Lafargue, Wertham discovered a recurring source of antiblack images and messages: crime comic books. Images of black men being bound and whipped, of white men and women “taming” African “natives,” and of black children being ridiculed and abused pervaded the little magazines that circulated so widely among the youth Wertham and his colleagues saw at the clinic. He wondered not only how these comic books were affecting the black children of Harlem, but also how they shaped white children’s perceptions of the legitimate treatment of the black people in their midst.

Soon Wertham was suggesting that crime comic books were manuals for the promotion of stereotypes that engendered low self-esteem among black children, as well as antiblack sentiment and action among whites. At the core of his concern was the conviction that crime comic books contributed to the already existing hostile atmosphere in American society for black people. It would take a Herculean effort not only to demonstrate their harm, but also to convince policy makers and the public that comic books contravened the healthy development of young people.

As early as 1948, Wertham had become engrossed in studying the effects of comic books on the minds and behavior of young people. In an article first published in the Saturday Review of Literature and later condensed and republished in Reader’s Digest, America’s widest circulating periodical at the time, Wertham recounted several cases of boys and girls brought to the Lafargue Clinic who had committed delinquent acts ranging from stealing and sexual assault to murder. Were these acts the result of the “natural aggression” in the human organism? Were they manifestations of the sex instinct? Were they the “release of natural tendencies?” In posing these questions, Wertham gestured toward the commonly stated explanations for juvenile delinquency by both expert and lay commentators under the sway of a bowdlerized psychoanalysis, one that naturalized childhood aggression as an instinctual fact. Wertham rejected the notion that aggression was intrinsic to human nature and offered instead a social answer to the questions he posed.

In each case he recounted, the common denominator was comic books. He observed a direct correlation between the specific antisocial activity of young people—including a group of boys ages three to nine who handcuffed a four-year-old neighbor and used her for bow-and-arrow target practice—and the glorification of such cruelty and violence in the pages of horror and crime comic books. Comic books did not have the power to induce delinquency in all children, he noted. But because their depiction of violence and depravity threatened the ethical development of young people, according to Wertham, they constituted a threat to the mental and emotional health of all children.7

Some six years later, Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a study of the effects of crime comic books that would come to define his public persona and for many his historical legacy, for better or worse. Seduction was written for a popular audience, using primarily nontechnical language and a lively, acerbic tone. Yet the book offered a coherent set of clinically based arguments about the perils of crime comics based on evidence drawn from the Lafargue Clinic and Queens General Hospital’s Mental Hygiene Clinic.

Wertham’s anti-comic book campaign required a good deal of persuasion, and he sometimes seemed to relish indulging in hyperbole to push his case. His first task was to counter the widely held belief of child psychology experts and many parents that comic book reading had no effects at all on the minds and behavior of children and adolescents. Next he had to demonstrate that the delinquency resulting from youngsters’ contacts with comics was symptomatic of a broad social problem rather than an indication of pathology endemic to the individual child. And his final task was to argue for a remedy for the pathogenic effects of comics. It was this last dimension of the project that made Wertham so controversial, as he wanted the state to enact laws to restrict the sale of crime comics to children under the age of sixteen.8

Seduction of the Innocent became the bible of the anti-comic crusade of the 1950s and had the effect of transforming the entire comic book industry.9 The book remains the subject of study and criticism by scholars and champions of popular culture. Most critics of Seduction of the Innocent have tended to characterize the book as a moralistic, polemical screed masquerading under the guise of science. Published material on Seduction tends to frame the interpretive issues involved in terms of the validity of Wertham’s argument and the vehemence of his attack on comic books. Seduction of the Innocent is best understood, though, within the broader context of Wertham’s social psychiatry in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, and most specifically in light of the psychiatric practice of the Lafargue Clinic.10

Wertham and his Lafargue colleagues recognized racism, however it was experienced, as traumatic for black children. Wertham’s arguments about the effects of racial stereotypes and racial violence in comic books were representative of his ethical concerns, as well as indicative of his clinical approach. The general effect of racist depictions in comics, he claimed, was that children came to accept a division between two groups: “regular men who have a right to live, and submen who deserve to be killed.” But the problem reached even further, into the depths of young people’s psyches. Racist images insinuated themselves into the dream and fantasy life of children: “A large part of the violence and sadism in comic books is practiced by individuals or on individuals who are depicted as inferior, subhuman beings. In this way children can indulge in fantasies of violence as something permissible.” While many young whites unconsciously assimilated degrading images of dark-skinned peoples in comics, “for others they constitute a serious traumatic experience,” explained Wertham.11

The core of Wertham’s arguments reflected a concern for the positive mental health of all children. Wertham suggested that few child psychologists and psychiatrists paid attention to the health effects of comic books promoting “race hatred.” He told of a twelve-year-old black girl with whom he had discussed comic books at the Lafargue Clinic. “I don’t like the jungle,” she informed him. “I don’t think they make the colored people right [in those comics]. The way they make them I never seen before—their hair and big nose and the English they use. They never have an English like we have. They put them so dark—for real I have never seen anybody before like that. White kids would think all colored people look like that, and really they aren’t.” In the very next sentence she alluded to fights that broke out at her school sparked by racial animosity. He concluded: “This influence, subtle and pervasive but easily demonstrable by clinical psychological methods, has not only directly affected the individual child, but also constitutes an important factor for the whole nation.”12 Wertham’s emphasis on the importance of the individual child’s case as illustrative of what clinical psychiatry could discern about the deep experience of racism—in ways that other methods such as lab-like experiments and surveys could not—put him at odds with the emergent quantitative paradigm in psychological science.13

Wertham never argued, though, that crime comics alone were the cause of juvenile delinquency. He contended instead that “crime comics are certainly not the only factor, nor in many cases are they even the most important one, but there can be no doubt that they are the most unnecessary and least excusable one. In many cases, in conjunction with other factors, they are the chief one.”14 His main point was that children and adolescents were vulnerable and consistently left unprotected, most especially in their leisure time. Wertham argued that parents and other adults failed to understand this vulnerability and the variety of forces and sources that preyed upon what he called “unprotectedness.”

Wertham’s broader argument in Seduction of the Innocent (and in his later works he would return to this point) was that the social and behavioral sciences, and thus the broader public, had grossly misunderstood the nature of juvenile delinquency. The paradox of this misunderstanding was that scientists emphasized the individual even in the midst of a social panic over a widespread phenomenon. While clearly a social phenomenon, with socially frightening effects, juvenile delinquency elicited a heightened attention to the individual nature of the phenomenon and the perpetrator. Wertham wrote that “juvenile delinquency is not a thing in itself. It can be studied only in relation to all kinds of other child behavior. And it is a mass phenomenon which cannot be fully comprehended with methods of individual psychology alone. Children do not become delinquents; they commit delinquencies. The delinquency of a child is not a disease; it is a symptom, individually and socially. You cannot understand or remedy a social phenomenon like delinquency by redefining it simply as an individual emotional disorder.”15 Wertham’s argument and the manner of presentation, and the venues in which he made his case, thrust him into the roles of social critic and public intellectual. Yet Wertham was a psychiatrist and in his own view a scientist, who had come to his conclusions about comic books and juvenile delinquency through the clinical method of psychiatric observation. Wertham’s social psychiatry mandated that the clinician and social worker take into account the total environment when explaining and treating behavior problems in children. Crime comic books were an identifiable, tangible part of the everyday lives of children, components of the environment that shaped how they viewed themselves and others, and guided their thoughts and actions.16

Seduction of the Innocent, along with Wertham’s appearances on radio and television programs lambasting comic books, forced the comics industry in late 1954 to adopt an editorial code “to rule out offensive material.” To avoid complete censorship, the Comic Magazine Association appointed a “czar” who would mark all “acceptable” comics with a seal of approval. Many comic book publishers believed that the resulting editorial code would appease critics such as Wertham and the politicians and parents who joined him in the anti-comics crusade. The comic book industry had been devastated, however, by Wertham’s blows against it. Only the biggest companies able to diversify their publications survived the torrent of anti-comics activism in the 1950s. Within “a few years of the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, twenty-four of twenty-nine crime comic publishers went out of business.”17

Wertham had argued in the mid-1940s that mental disorders among black Americans and other oppressed people required a social psychiatry. The social psychiatry that Wertham developed at the Lafargue Clinic regarded the individual patient as possessing a social identity with real-world experiences that had to be incorporated into the total picture of his or her mental health. Just as he had with racism, Wertham argued that violent forms of juvenile delinquency, especially those precipitated by the influence of comic books, could not be understood individually but instead needed to be approached in social terms. The importance of Seduction of the Innocent and Wertham’s broader campaign against mass-media violence thus emerged from the same combination of politically inflected moral outrage and medical concern that undergirded the establishment of the Lafargue Clinic.

The Lafargue Clinic and the Effects of School Segregation

The period in which Wertham mounted his campaign against crime comic books coincided with the Lafargue Clinic’s integral involvement in one of the most important phases of the struggle for racial equality in American history. Wertham and his colleagues would come to play a pivotal, though unheralded, role in the campaign to end public school segregation in America. In the fall of 1951, the Lafargue Clinic came to the attention of the Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDEF) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. At this time the NAACP-LDEF was immersed in a decades-long campaign to dismantle public school segregation. By the early 1950s, the LDEF had begun to look to social science, seeking scientific evidence of the effects of Jim Crow education on black children.

In the mid-1940s, the NAACP-LDEF launched a direct attack on segregation per se. One of the NAACP-LDEF’s central strategies was to demonstrate that segregation was inherently unequal, because no matter how much parity existed between a white school and a black school, the underlying principle of segregation imposed a stigma of inferiority on black students. As the NAACP-LDEF mounted its legal campaign, members of the staff began to look for experts who could provide evidence that black students in segregated schools not only experienced marked educational inequality, but that they had been psychologically harmed because of state-sanctioned Jim Crow schools.18

The NAACP-LDEF’s incorporation of social science evidence reflected the antiracist turn in the human sciences since the 1930s, as well as the rising popular stature of social and behavioral science. By the start of World War II, the sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology became prominent domains of research into the reasons why people held prejudices against minority groups such as African Americans and Jews. There was no more influential World War II–era social scientific work on prejudice and discrimination than Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. Its publication in 1944 ushered in a period of unprecedented alliance between social scientific research and practical efforts to ameliorate the race problem in American society. A massive text consisting of nearly fifty chapters pertaining to the economic, social, political, cultural, and mental life of the black Americans, An American Dilemma consolidated a vast swathe of facts about the origins, development, and current state of relations between blacks and whites. Myrdal and his team of researchers sought to provide both policymakers and ordinary citizens with a foundation for re-engineering American society.

An American Dilemma was the culmination of efforts by countless social scientists in the previous decades to demonstrate that racial hierarchy and race conflict derived from historical rather than natural, or so-called organic, sources. Social scientists had identified economic, social, and psychological factors in race relations that produced and maintained racial enmity irrespective of any supposed natural or biological basis. Myrdal fused the findings of social science with a moral argument. In effect he declared: Here, America, are the facts of the problem and it is now up to you as individuals and as members of government and civil society to align your social order with the fundamentally liberal American creed of equality for all. It would be difficult to overstate the influence An American Dilemma had on postwar American race relations policy, as well as social scientific research related to race.19

As the psychological roots of prejudice and discrimination became a legitimate topic of research, and a subject of widespread popular concern, a number of social scientists also turned their attention specifically to the effects of racial discrimination and segregation on American minority groups—and prominent among these scholars were members of those minority groups.20 By the late 1940s, Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, the young psychologists who had founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, emerged as two of the most important contributors to the growing scientific literature on racism’s impact on the minds of African Americans. Beginning just before the outbreak of World War II, the Clarks published a series of articles demonstrating black children’s emotional and psychic responses to living in an antiblack world. As social psychologists, the Clarks were concerned with the question of how children viewed themselves in relation to the wider society: What was their self-image, and how was it shaped by the social environment?21

The Clarks’ primary method of studying children’s psyches involved the use of projective tests, presenting subjects with images or objects to elicit their unconscious and conscious associations. Though best known for their use of toy dolls in their studies of black children, the Clarks’ first projective tests involved a coloring test, administered to some 160 children, ages five to seven. The tests were designed to reveal how black children identified themselves and what they had learned of racial categorization and the relative values of whiteness and blackness. The Clarks observed the children’s use of colored pencils to depict everyday objects such as leaves and oranges, then asked them to depict themselves, using such prompts as, “Color this little boy (or girl) the color that you are.” As one historian notes, “What the Clarks found was that the children consistently portrayed themselves as distinctly lighter than the actual color of their own skin. Further, the gap between realistic and unrealistic coloring was largest among children whose skin was darkest.” “It is clear that the Negro child, by the age of five is aware of the fact that to be colored in contemporary American society is a mark of inferior status,” the Clarks concluded. This awareness, they added, “introduces a fundamental conflict at the very foundations of the ego structure.”22 Although the Clarks had not conducted their research expressly for the purpose of providing evidence for social and legal policy, their findings would lend support to the claim of NAACP lawyers that segregation not only marked “the Negro child” as inferior but that it also infiltrated children’s own self-concept.

Robert L. Carter, a Columbia University–trained black lawyer for the NAACP-LDEF, was the chief proponent of incorporating social scientific findings such as the Clarks’ into the legal campaign to challenge segregated schools in the United States. As early as 1945, Carter made use of An American Dilemma in desegregation briefs filed on behalf of Mexican American and African American litigants in California and throughout the South. Carter presented general social scientific evidence of the effect of segregation, irrespective of the particular conditions of a putatively “separate but equal” institutional setting. As one NAACP-LDEF lawyer noted, other “lawyers had already been calling on social scientists for aid in public-law cases,” with earlier cases involving “problems affecting great portions of our populations.”23 But Carter’s application of social science was specifically tailored to the effects of segregation on personal achievement and professional advancement.24 In his brief for Westminster v. Menendez (1945), for example, Carter used sociological evidence to show that “a consequence of the policy of segregation has been to deprive the individual Negro citizen of the skills necessary to a civilized existence, the Negro community of the leadership and professional services it so urgently needs, and the nation as a whole of the full potential embodied in the intellectual and physical resources of its citizens.” The appeals court that heard the Westminster case ruled that segregation of Mexican American children violated the Fourteenth Amendment on narrow legal grounds, making no reference to Carter’s social science–laden brief. But in the coming years, Carter would build on his first foray into social scientific jurisprudence to marshal a phalanx of experts to underscore the damaging effects of segregation on African American children.

The central problem that social science could address was whether segregated schools harmed “the Negro student’s” educational achievement, stunted his aspirations, and generally blocked his emotional, educational, mental development—thus damaging the individual student.25 By September 1951, when Jack Greenberg, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Columbia Law School graduate who had joined the LDEF in 1949, contacted Fredric Wertham, Carter had convinced several of his fellow lawyers at the LDEF, most importantly its director Thurgood Marshall, that testimony from social scientists like the Clarks might play a pivotal role in a set of cases challenging segregated schools.

After successful challenges to segregation in professional and graduate education in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents (1950), the LDEF set its sights on confronting “separate but equal” as established in the landmark 1896 ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson, with the aim of forcing the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on segregation in American public schools. Between 1949 and 1951, five cases emerged that brought the question of “separate but equal” to the fore and became the staging ground for the incorporation of social scientific testimony that would eventually be heard in arguments before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. In addition to Brown, the cases were Briggs v. Elliot (South Carolina), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia), Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia), and Belton/Bulah v. Gebhart (Delaware). Bolling was the only one of the cases in which social science experts did not testify.26

Assigned the task of finding social scientists who would participate in the cases before state courts, Carter sought advice from one of the indisputable experts in the study of race. Since his time as a Columbia Law School student, Carter had been aware of social psychologist Otto Klineberg’s important studies published in the 1930s that demonstrated that differences among races were not genetically inherited. Klineberg also served as a major adviser to Gunnar Myrdal as he prepared An American Dilemma, drafting a long memorandum titled Characteristics of the American Negro, which consisted of a survey of psychological research on African Americans and was later published independently. Carter and Thurgood Marshall hoped that Klineberg would not only be their star witness, but that he would also organize his colleagues for the cases. Klineberg declined the invitation to lead the consolidation of social scientific evidence and experts but directed Carter to his former student at Columbia, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark.27

Carter found in Clark someone who was both scientifically prepared and temperamentally suited for the task. And the timing was perfect. At their first meeting in his office at the Northside Center in Harlem, in February 1951, Clark handed Carter a copy of a manuscript titled “The Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development,” which he had written the previous year as a report for the White House Midcentury Conference on Youth. In his report, Clark synthesized the current scientific views on how prejudice and discrimination gave rise to pathological personalities in both victims and perpetrators. The section that struck Carter as most useful was a summary of “the effects of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation on the personality of Negro children in the United States.”28 A few days after reading the White House Conference report, Carter returned to Clark’s office. “He was enormously enthusiastic,” recalled Clark. “‘It’s just what we’re looking for. It’s almost as if it were written for us,’” he remembered Carter saying. Carter asked Clark to testify in South Carolina’s Briggs case and to call upon his most prestigious colleagues to join him.

Clark was calm in the midst of Carter’s excitement, immediately grasping the difficulties of conveying the meaning of scientific material in a court of law. Nevertheless, Clark agreed to participate; he had always envisioned his science as part of a broad contribution to understanding and addressing social problems, particularly those centering on race. And as an active member of the growing community of liberal-minded social psychologists, particularly the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), Clark was well positioned to enlist other social scientists to testify in the upcoming cases.29 Not all the lawyers at the Legal Defense Fund were as enthusiastic as Carter about putting social scientists on the witness stand, but Thurgood Marshall supported Carter’s efforts and gave Clark his seal of approval to begin his recruitment of experts.

Fredric Wertham was not on the list of scientists Clark identified as “real top-notchers” who should be asked to testify—despite his being a professional neighbor in the Harlem community and having shared a podium with Clark at the first and only meeting of the Joint Committee on Mental Hygiene Services in Harlem. Instead, Clark supplied the NAACP-LDEF with a list of men and women who had conducted experimental psychology and sociological analysis within the framework of the emerging field of intergroup relations. Intergroup relations was not simply a new name for race relations. An interdisciplinary field, it conjoined the new psychodynamic orientation in the behavioral sciences to experimental and proto-ethnographic research aimed at reducing or eliminating prejudice and discrimination.30 Clark invited figures such as Klineberg, Robert Redfield, Jerome Bruner, Alfred McClung Lee, Isidor Chein, M. Brewster Smith, Theodore Newcomb, and his own wife, Mamie Phipps Clark.31

The selection of experts tilted toward experimental social psychologists whose research employed quantitative methods found in the so-called hard sciences. While critics from within and without the social sciences would later famously challenge the research performed by the Clarks and their colleagues on the effects of segregation, their core methods and evidence reflected the quantitative paradigm that undergirded postwar social psychology’s claims to legitimacy.32

Delaware

The school cases in Delaware captured the quotidian hindrances of Jim Crow, as well as the profundity of black children’s early, yet lasting, encounters with antiblack racism. Sarah Bulah of Hockessin, just outside Wilmington, petitioned the state to have the school bus that passed by her house bringing white children to school also transport her six-year-old daughter Shirley to an all-Negro schoolhouse two miles away. Mrs. Bulah’s aim was not to challenge school segregation; rather, she simply wanted a bus to take her daughter to school. After many unanswered letters, the state superintendent finally wrote back to Mrs. Bulah, declining her request, “since the State Constitution requires separate educational facilities for colored and white children, your children may not ride a bus serving a white school.” Initially hoping to force the state to provide any form of transport, even if it were segregated, Sarah Bulah soon agreed to have her case become a direct challenge to school segregation.

Belton v. Gebhart from its inception explicitly attacked the issue of school segregation. Ethel Belton of Claymont resented the fact that her daughter Ethel Louise had to travel at least two hours per day to attend the only Negro high school in all of Delaware, located in downtown Wilmington, when all-white Claymont High School sat only a mile away from the Belton home. Ethel Belton and seven other black Claymont parents petitioned the State Board of Education to allow their children to attend Claymont High School. The entreaty was of course denied.33

In early 1951, the NAACP-LDEF filed the two conjoined cases, Bulah v. Gebhart and Belton v. Gebhart, in the U.S. District Court in Wilmington. In response to a request from Delaware’s attorney general, the cases were transferred to the State Chancery Court. Louis Redding, Delaware’s sole black lawyer in 1951, would be the lead counsel representing the plaintiffs in the cases. Jack Greenberg was to aid him, especially with the social science experts. Redding was surprised and delighted that the cases would be heard by the same judge who had ruled in Parker v. University of Delaware in favor of desegregating the University of Delaware the year before, Judge Collins J. Seitz. The fact that these cases were tried in a state court, rather than a federal court as the other desegregation cases had been, represented the first aspect of the trial that made it unique—but its outcome was what truly distinguished the Delaware cases within the campaign to overturn separate but equal.34

With the trial date set in Wilmington for the week of October 22, 1951, Greenberg worked with Clark over the summer and fall to organize and prepare the social scientists who would testify. They were particularly concerned that in the first of the school segregation trials soon consolidated into Brown, social scientific testimony had had little effect on the outcome of the trial. In South Carolina’s Briggs v. Elliott (May 1951), Kenneth Clark presented evidence from a projective test he conducted with black children in Clarendon County, in which he used two plastic dolls “equal in every respect,” except one represented a white child and the other a “Negro child.” The test consisted of asking sixteen black children individually a set of questions to determine their “sensitivity to racial discrimination and its effect on [their] personality and development.” The most telling finding of the doll tests was that eleven of sixteen children chose the brown doll when asked to select the doll that “is likely to act bad.” “The conclusion which I was forced to reach,” Clark informed the court in Charleston, “was that these children in Clarendon County have been definitely harmed in the development of their personalities; that the signs of instability in their personalities are clear, and I think that every psychologist would accept and interpret these as such.” Clark would go on to conduct the same now-famous doll test with forty-one black Delaware children, producing similar results.35

In both cases, the states’ attorneys sought to trivialize and render suspect Clark’s doll test, questioning its representativeness and overall scientific validity. “I was concerned about findings of fact,” South Carolina’s state’s attorney Robert Figg recalled, “and once we determined that his testimony was based on very few children, that there were no witnesses to the tests, and that this was his own test method and not a well-established one, I didn’t press the matter…. Nobody took it seriously.” But Clark’s testimony had now entered the court record, and Figg could not have known that once Briggs and the rest of the Brown companion cases reached the Supreme Court the social scientific “finding of fact” would play a prominent role in justifying the Court’s ruling.36

Even so, in the summer of 1951, the NAACP-LDEF was hardly assured that the testimony of social and behavioral science experts like Clark would prove effective at establishing segregation as inherently a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Attorney Greenberg believed something substantive was missing from the scientific evidence used previously by the NAACP-LDEF. He wanted to present to the court a qualitative assessment of the harm done to children by official segregation. Aware of the Lafargue Clinic’s psychiatric work in the Harlem community, Greenberg sought Wertham’s help. “We would like you to testify for us,” Greenberg told Wertham, “both on the basis of your broad general experience, and on the basis of investigation of the particular plaintiffs, some of whom we will make available to you.” With just over a month before the trial date, Wertham agreed, though he insisted that he examine both black and white students to determine whether school segregation was “injurious to the mental health of children” of both races.

Unlike Clark, Wertham did not travel to the plaintiffs’ community; instead a member of the Wilmington NAACP arranged to bring thirteen randomly selected boys and girls to the Lafargue Clinic. Eight of the students were black and five were white, and they ranged in age from nine to sixteen years old. “They obtained the white children,” notes one historian, “by explaining to their parents that the clinic was conducting experimental research in race relations. Segregation was not mentioned.” And so, on five occasions, beginning on October 4, all thirteen children boarded a train in Wilmington together and made the two-hour trip to New York’s Penn Station, where Greenberg met them and brought them by subway to Harlem. The clinic at this time was open only on Tuesdays and Fridays, and much of its October operating schedule had to be dedicated to examinations of the Delaware children.37

The Problem with Clinical Evidence

Wertham’s frame for the study of social and psychological problems differed from that of the scientists enlisted by the NAACP-LDEF. While he acknowledged the utility of experimental social psychological methods, he regarded them as supplementary to a broader examination of the individual’s psychic life. As a clinical psychiatrist, Wertham certainly employed nominally objective measures of psychological evaluation in his examinations, such as intelligence and projective tests that might be uniformly applied to any patient. But most importantly, his clinical psychiatry involved ascertaining the facts of an individual’s experience that had a determining influence on his or her basic psychic functioning. And within Wertham’s social psychiatric paradigm, awareness of objective, ascriptive factors such as race, class, and gender fused with subjective, interior forces to provide a picture of the whole individual.

Clinical evidence posed a problem, though, at the basic level of fact. Because the psychiatrist was a subjective observer and interpreter of an individual’s inner mental life, the clinical method’s claim to truth depended upon trust—trust between psychiatrist and patient, and trust between the psychiatrist and whomever he was trying to convince of the mechanisms at work in the patient’s emotional and mental life. A significant test for clinical evidence arrived when Jack Greenberg called upon Wertham to discern what effect state-sanctioned school segregation had on the mental health of both black and white youth in Delaware and to argue generalizable claims regarding those effects. The crucial question was whether Wertham’s findings could be said to apply beyond the small cohort of students he and his Lafargue colleagues observed.38

By the fall of 1951, the Lafargue Clinic had established a solid base in the Harlem community, but its status in the field of mental health care in New York City was more ambiguous. While the clinic attained a considerable degree of prominence through being featured in the local and national media, it had yet to obtain significant government or philanthropic support. And though the clinic provided a model of offering inexpensive psychotherapy among an oppressed population, the wider community of psychiatric and social welfare professionals expressed little interest in adopting Wertham’s techniques. Administrators of mental health programs and institutions rarely said so explicitly, but they were clearly skeptical of the linkage Wertham posited between the social conditions of oppression and the manifestation of psychic strain among African Americans, and skeptical as well as of the socially based psychotherapeutic techniques he championed.39

Yet the community of Harlem had embraced the clinic, and many sought out its services. And the clinic attracted a new generation of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers committed to the anti-oppression social psychiatry of Dr. Wertham. Some of these young mental health care workers would later go on to play prominent roles in the expansion of public mental health services in New York City’s black and poor communities.40 And so, by the time Greenberg and the group of Delaware students arrived at the 135th Street IRT stop, the Lafargue Clinic had wide renown, a full staff of thirty professionals, and a full appointment book, but it still remained on the margins of mainstream psychiatric practice in New York City.41

Wertham incorporated the Delaware students’ examination into the routine clinical procedures already in place at Lafargue. Rather than creating a laboratory-like setup for experimentation, he employed the clinic’s regular intake and examination methods, which he believed lent themselves to patients’ spontaneous expression. “The methods employed consisted of the taking of individual case histories, individual interviews, group observation and group discussion, and standard tests such as drawing tests, mosaic tests and Rorschach tests,” Wertham later explained. The team that examined the children represented the fully developed Lafargue Clinic staff, including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, teachers, probation officers, and guidance counselors.42

The clinic staff’s approach to these specific students and the students’ response to the open atmosphere of the clinic’s therapeutic context were symbolic of the wider significance of Lafargue’s practice in the Harlem community. Over the course of the five visits, the clinic staff aimed to build “a relationship of complete trust” on the part of the students. According to one historian, “the black youngsters in particular were responsive to the Lafargue clinicians, in part because they had so long bottled up feelings that they had not been able to discuss comfortably with their parents, whose own sense of insecurity, the children guessed or sensed, would have left them embarrassed by the subject of segregation.” As with the Delaware students, the clinic offered a space in which African Americans and any others who sought treatment could express themselves freely, trusting that their feelings would be taken seriously and that they would receive professional care. No other contemporary psychiatric clinic in the country could make the same claim.43

Figure 9. Play therapy at the Lafargue Clinic, February 1948. Photo by Lisa Larsen. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Positive Mental Health and the Public Health Problem of Racism

Wertham claimed that the Lafargue Clinic examined the issue of segregation from an entirely new point of view: racism was not exclusively a social and political problem but represented a community health problem as well. Irrespective of individual attitudes or behavior, segregation, both in the South and the North, was embedded in the American societal structure. And segregation engendered obstacles to the development of the American public’s mental health. The questions he aimed to address with the help of his staff in the Delaware cases were, “Is school segregation injurious to children’s mental health, and for that reason is it a public health problem?” It was somewhat disingenuous for him to suggest his own originality in considering the problem of segregation in terms of injury to the child’s mental health, since the bulk of Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s testimony famously sought to address just that question. But his framing of discrimination and segregation as a public health problem was indeed original.44

Wertham employed the concept of “positive mental health” as the basis for his entire approach to clinical psychiatry. Most psychiatrists at midcentury “operated on the assumption that the absence of illness denoted health.”45 Though many psychiatrists were increasingly revising their conceptualization of mental health and illness in order to place the individual patient along a continuum of normality and pathology, psychiatry on the whole concerned itself with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of mental disease. Wertham’s focus on positive mental health aimed to reorient the primary focus of psychiatry from illness and disease, with a circumscribed emphasis on the individual, to the factors and conditions constituting the total environment in which a person developed. “It wasn’t enough to look at the child and say, “This little girl doesn’t have nightmares, she gets by in school, she doesn’t annoy anyone at home, she isn’t a juvenile delinquent,” Wertham argued. “That is not enough. I hold the scientific opinion that if a rosebush should produce twelve roses and if only one rose grows, it is not a healthy rosebush. It is up to us to find out what is interfering with its growth and with its health.”46

For Wertham, the positive mental health framework could be enacted best through aggressive public health measures that confronted the root causes of psychological disturbances. His favorite analogy for promoting public mental health came from tuberculosis prevention: “Thousands of people in large cities inhale tubercle bacilli into their lungs. And yet only a relatively small number of these infected multitudes come down with the disease tuberculosis. We do not say that we do not have to pay any attention to the tubercle bacillus because enormous numbers of people do not become overtly ill from it.” Wertham’s blending of positive mental health and public health was confusing at times, given his divergence from the disease model of mental health and illness—especially since he made clear that the problem of racism, like the tubercle bacillus, constituted a pathogenic source of disease. Despite the possible terminological slippage in his conceptualization, Wertham’s framework for assessing the effect of segregation on both black and white children would soon offer the Delaware court a novel scientific basis for deciding the fate of segregated public schools.47

“Very Subtle Things, Very Subtle Testimony”

Wertham had testified in court many times before, but in those instances his focus was the psychological makeup of one individual. Now he was called upon to present a set of general findings on the effects of school segregation on the basis of the Lafargue Clinic’s evaluation of the group of Delaware students. And this time, there was no individual on trial for a crime, no person to be judged either sane or insane. In Delaware it was the state that was on trial, and Wertham believed he held the evidence to prove that state-sanctioned school segregation was guilty of “interfering with the healthy development of children.”48

Unwilling to be responsible for defending statements made by other social scientists, Wertham insisted on being the first expert to testify at the trial in Wilmington. Jack Greenberg recalled that throughout their collaboration Wertham had been temperamental and imperious, and “everything had to be precisely as he wanted it.” It was true that Wertham had developed the standpoint that his was always the correct way of doing things. After so many years of being marginalized by the mainstream of psychiatry and failing to convince those who wielded power in institutions that could aid the Lafargue Clinic, he had concluded that the only way to advance his vision for social psychiatry was to take an uncompromising approach to conducting and presenting his work.

Wertham treated his appearance in the Wilmington courtroom on October 22, 1951, as though he were offering a seminar on the psychological development of children. As he began to present this material, Wertham captivated the courtroom with the clarity, depth, and tone of his testimony.49 His testimony that day encapsulated the entire social psychiatric orientation instituted in the Lafargue Clinic since its opening in 1946. In order to prove his thesis that state-imposed school segregation constituted a threat to the mental health of Delaware children, he sought first to establish for the court a general scheme of potential obstacles to the child’s healthy development. He identified three categories of injurious factors: personal, infra-personal, and supra-personal. Personal factors were those emotional experiences derived from contact with one’s family members from the earliest moments of one’s conscious and unconscious life. Infra-personal factors referred to physical facts—matters of constitutional inheritance, organic defects, or physical handicap. Supra-personal factors, Wertham explained, “are identical with what we speak of as social factors. They have little to do with the personality of the individual child…and one can make a statement about a whole group of children” by studying supra-personal factors. While these factors taken together formed the nexus in which a child developed, it was possible to identify, isolate, and possibly eradicate specific sources of injury to the child. Segregation represented a salient example of a supra-personal, thus social, factor causing a disturbance in the child’s progression to healthy development.50

Figure 10. Fredric Wertham in his home at 44 Gramercy Park in New York City, 1954. Photo by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation.

Wertham found that segregation produced an “unsolvable emotional conflict” in the black Delaware children he had examined. The central component of this conflict was children’s inability to obtain a coherent explanation of segregation from either their parents or other authority figures. Comparing the topic of segregation to sex, Wertham noted that although sex was difficult for parents to discuss with children, there were many adults able to do so. “But this race problem is so difficult and creates such an insecurity even in mature people that either their children don’t care to ask their parents, or don’t want to ask, or if they ask would get the same evasive answers they would get to an inquiry of ‘where do babies come from?’ because their parents have to tell them fairy tales.” The child then failed to resolve the conflict through a “realistic rationalization”—a clear and reasonable explanation of segregation—provided by a parent or alternate authority figure.51

Having failed to obtain a realistic rationalization for segregation, the child attempted to overcome the “unsolvable” conflict by repression or overcompensation. But repression did not work as it might in other responses to rebuffs in one’s life, because the issue of segregation continued to reappear everyday as part of school life—in the distance the child had to travel to reach school, in the unequal facilities, in the different subjects taught and the materials used by the teacher. The child was not allowed to forget or evade the fact of segregation for very long. At times, black children might hope to overcome the stigma of segregation by “excelling in one field or another,” or by forging “a complete identification with the non-Negro group.” But sooner or later, the child who strove to overcome the condition of conflict bumped up against reality—at some point the fantasy that one could outrun racism dissolved.52 The child was thus thrown back upon himself, forced to struggle for a healthy sense of himself and his world without recourse to common psychological mechanisms used to fend off the threats of anxiety and disorientation.

It was at this point in his testimony that Wertham introduced the state, that fundamental repository of official power and authority. He argued that the state “interferes with the way in which children can use any defenses they have, because the State itself is doing something wrong.” He then read to the court a dialogue between himself and one of the Delaware students:

This exchange, Wertham testified, exemplified the fundamental conflict in the black child’s mind, because of the special role that authority played in the development of young people’s mental health. The emotional conflict engendered by segregation was especially acute because the state stood at the apex of authority. “If you have an emotional conflict about the very source of authority, namely the State, then this particular mental growth is endangered, interfered with, or even jeopardized,” Wertham declared. In one of the most evocative moments in his testimony, he explained that the children he examined interpreted segregation as punishment. These children believed they were being punished for something not explained to them, for something they had not done.53

The central problem for the NAACP-LDEF was to distinguish the singularity of state-sanctioned school segregation. What made it a unique cause of emotional damage to black children within the wider context of racism and stigma in American society? In other words, the burden of the case was to prove why segregated schools in particular impaired the healthy development of Delaware’s children, thus violating the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Wertham acknowledged that school segregation was not the only threat to “the Negro child’s emotional health.” In fact he admitted that it was just one part of a broader complex of a society that stigmatized black people. He insisted, however, that within the context of discrimination that a black child encountered in a segregated society—for instance in places of commerce such as restaurants, movie theaters, and drug stores—the public school superseded all other institutions in its importance as a contributing source of emotional conflict in the child.

Wertham listed the reasons why school segregation was of paramount importance: (1) it was absolutely clear-cut—you either go to one school or the other; (2) the state does it and does it by law (here he contrasted this circumstance with the fact that if one store owner denied a Negro service, another proprietor might let him in); (3) it is discrimination of long duration—“it is not just Monday or Tuesday, or once when you want to go to the store, but…always so, a part of your absolute daily life”; (4) “it is bound up with the whole educational process, which I consider part of the mental life of the child. It hits the child at two very important moments in his life…where a child steps forward from the…more or less sheltered family [and in adolescence where for] the first time the person must find a social group for himself.”54

Having established that school segregation injured the mental health of children, Wertham trained his sights on segregation as a problem of public health. He conceded a point that many contemporary and latter-day critics of the psychological-damage argument tended to overlook or deliberately disregard: the psychological harm of segregation was potential, and it was “wrong to ascribe an emotional disorder or the presence of ‘hostility’ to every child so affected.”55 Rather than affecting all children uniformly, segregation, like other supra-personal pathogenic factors, acted as a “foreign body” in the children’s psyches, as an interfering element in healthy growth. Each child might not succumb to the emotional disturbance that segregation might produce, but the potential harm to the child’s mental health remained constant.

Wertham found that white children were not immune to the potential harm of segregation. White children tended either to identify themselves with the plight of black children or to assume “the illusion of superiority” over “the Negro.” He illustrated this potential by referring to the words of the Delaware children themselves. One nine-year-old white girl had remained quiet during the group sessions held at Lafargue. Wertham asked her why she had not participated in the discussion. Far from being uninterested in school segregation, she declared that, no, “I care a lot about it myself.” When matters of racial discrimination came up, she could not help thinking of her black playmate, “the daughter of a woman employed in her family.” The girl told the Lafargue Clinic staff about how the boys in her class at school suggested that “colored children should be tied up.” “They shouldn’t be tied up always,” the boys would say, “but they should work…while we are playing.” With remarkable gravity, this young girl declared, “People don’t care. They don’t think about others, they just think about themselves, so they think they are better than the Negro.” Wertham’s recounting of the girl’s comments provided texture to the overarching argument that segregation constituted a “potential health hazard for all children.”56

Delaware Chancery Court judge Collins J. Seitz had allowed Wertham considerable time and latitude during the direct examination phase of his testimony; in the comparatively brief cross-examination Delaware attorney general Albert Young restricted his questioning to three primary areas. First he asked Wertham whether all that he had testified to was a matter of opinion, not an exact science; second, he returned to the question of what made de jure segregation any different from de facto; and third, he wanted to know whether ending segregation in Delaware would “cause or eliminate the effect of this emotional disturbance and this frustration that you say exists in Negro children.” To the first question Wertham was adamant that his opinion on the matter of segregation was “as exact as a doctor’s science when he says someone has measles.” Moreover, he asserted that it mattered little that he had examined only thirteen children of varying ages, because these children’s responses represented confirmation of general scientific conclusions he had reached through long years of clinical contact with a wide variety of children experiencing emotional disturbances—including those who attended schools segregated by law as in Baltimore and those segregated by custom as in New York. It was actually this response that prompted Attorney General Young to inquire about the distinction between de jure and de facto school segregation. Wertham’s response encapsulated the primary message of his entire testimony that day:

Wertham later suggested to one historian that his frank acknowledgment of school segregation in New York along with his rationale for distinguishing that type of segregation from Delaware’s disarmed Young, “melted the judge’s disbelief,” and “contributed to the exceedingly loose tether Seitz kept on his testimony.”58

Wertham deftly handled the attorney general’s final line of questioning. The basis of the state’s case was the argument declared by Young at the outset of the trial: “We cannot by judicial fiat impose upon a people against their will what they have accepted by heritage, tradition, and governmental sanctions…for so many years.” Young’s questions about the possible impact of desegregation derived from this argument, and they ended up eliciting from Wertham two significant interrelated ideas regarding the likely impact of desegregation on both black and white children. Wertham called upon the court to take the perspective of the children on the question of whether the duration of segregation as a fact of custom and community life mattered in his analysis: “We are dealing with the mind of a child and the emotions of a child of nine, who is late for a bus going to a segregated school, and the state decrees it, and the bus for white children passes and children stick out their tongues and say, ‘You nigger.’ What difference does it make if it is one year or one hundred years?” The second point Wertham made in reply to Young emphasized his faith in the law as an educational force in society. “I think laws are one of the best educational measures we have,” declared Wertham. At present the law of segregation ratified the beliefs of Delaware society’s “most bigoted citizens,” and the damaging educational effect was clear. He suggested that both adults and children learn from the law and that change in the law would at the very least eradicate the primary source of injury to the emotional health of Delaware children. With this Young concluded his cross-examination. The central point of Wertham’s testimony was a persuasive explanation of the power of the state and its singular importance as a determining force in the lives of Delaware children. Ultimately, the state’s laws could be a force harming or ensuring its citizens’ health.59

On April 1, 1952, Chancellor Seitz ruled that school segregation as practiced in Delaware violated the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Of the five companion cases argued collectively as Brown v. Board of Education, the Delaware cases were the only ones in which the state ruled in favor of the black plaintiffs. Seitz ruled that “State-imposed segregation in education itself results in Negro children, as a class, receiving educational opportunities which are substantially inferior to those available to white children similarly situated.” He stopped short of “dismissing the Plessy decision as precedent,” noting that he believed “the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine in education should be rejected, but its rejection should come from [the Supreme Court].” Finding the Delaware schools unequal, Seitz ordered the immediate admission of Shirley Bulah, Ethel Louise Belton, and the other plaintiffs in Claymont to the currently all-white schools in their communities.60

Wertham’s testimony proved crucial in shaping the opinion of Chancellor Seitz. Despite having his legal opinion constrained by Plessy, Seitz recognized as a finding of fact Wertham’s argument that segregated schools hindered the educational opportunities and posed a public mental health threat to Delaware’s black children. Referring to Wertham in his opinion, he wrote, “One of America’s foremost psychiatrists testified that state-imposed school segregation produces in Negro children an unsolvable conflict which seriously interferes with the mental health of such children.” Thurgood Marshall glowingly reported to Wertham that “the Chancellor in Delaware came to his conclusions concerning the effects of segregation largely upon the basis of your testimony and the work done in your clinic.” Wertham would later claim that his testimony in Delaware laid the scientific foundation for the Supreme Court decision overturning “separate but equal.” Wertham’s boast was to a significant degree quite accurate, as Chief Justice Earl Warren later cited Seitz’s finding of fact in his opinion for the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.61

Fredric Wertham and the Social Science Statement

Despite having delivered arguably the most potent scientific ammunition to the desegregation fight, Wertham failed to secure a place for himself among the circle of social scientists most closely associated with the NAACP-LDEF’s campaign. As the hearings in Wilmington concluded in October 1951, Robert Carter asked Kenneth Clark to begin work on a brief consolidating social scientific evidence on the effects of segregation and the projected ramifications of desegregation—a brief to be included in materials submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court, should it agree to hear the cases. Clark did not ask Wertham to participate in preparing the brief. The committee that produced the brief consisted entirely of members of the Committee on Intergroup Relations of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, an association of progressive psychologists established in the 1930s. In addition to Clark the brief committee consisted of a number of social psychologists and psychiatrists who had been or were slated to be NAACP-LDEF witnesses in the South Carolina, Kansas, Virginia, and Delaware cases. One of the committee members was Dr. Viola W. Bernard, the Columbia University psychiatrist who had advised the Field Foundation against funding the Lafargue Clinic in 1945, suggesting that the time was not right for the clinic and that Wertham, a white psychiatrist, was certainly not the appropriate person to run a Harlem-based clinic.

Perhaps the committee failed to include Wertham because he was not a member of Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Perhaps one New York psychiatrist, Dr. Bernard, was sufficient. Or more likely, Clark and Bernard were wary of Wertham. They probably recognized that Wertham’s “imperious nature,” as Jack Greenberg had characterized it, would prove an obstacle in preparing a statement reflecting the current state of psychological knowledge on segregation and desegregation.

The social science brief thus took shape without Wertham’s input. And it reflected the aim of providing the court with a dispassionate digest of the current state of scientific knowledge on the effects of segregation and prospective consequences of desegregation. Though each of the members of the brief committee contributed to the substance of the statement that emerged over the summer of 1952, its actual composition fell to Kenneth Clark and two New York psychologists, Isidor Chein, director of Research for the Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress, and Stuart W. Cook, chairman of New York University’s Department of Psychology. The final draft of the brief, titled “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A Social Science Statement,” consisted of eighteen typewritten pages with a total of thirty-five footnotes citing primarily experimental psychological studies and several sociological works. Clark submitted the statement to the NAACP-LDEF on September 22, 1952, and it was soon appended to the NAACP’s brief, which the Supreme Court solicited when it agreed to hear the school cases in the October 1952 term.

“The statement was a huge success,” according to one historian, offering the Court the “authority” of modern psychological knowledge on the damage done by segregation. In the Court’s opinion issued on May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren made ample use of the statement to explain the unanimous decision overturning Plessy and “separate but equal”: “To separate [black students] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone…. Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority.”62 Warren would later claim that the Brown decision was not founded on the social scientific evidence, insisting that segregation was inherently unequal, and thus a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He downplayed the famous eleventh footnote in the court’s decision, which cited the works of Clark, Myrdal, and other social scientists. Most subsequent scholars have reaffirmed Warren’s contention.63

But one scholar has effectively challenged the orthodoxy. Legal historian Paul L. Rosen shows that the Brown decision represented a ratification of sociological jurisprudence that incorporated empirical social science into its legal decision-making process. In other words, the social science evidence was not merely supplemental to the legal reasoning in ruling segregation to be a violation of the equal protection clause, but was integral to it. “The basic fact,” writes Rosen, “is that the Court’s pronounced interest in fact-finding represented a long trend in judicial interpretation; empirically defined facts gradually became more important or superseded facts drawn from judicial introspection.”64

The Supreme Court’s acknowledgment of the psychological harm done by segregation represented the crowning achievement of postwar antiracist social science. But Wertham’s signal contribution to the scientific campaign disappeared almost immediately from both academic and public conversation about Brown v. Board of Education and its significance. What seemed to be a personal slight to Wertham effected a peculiar silencing of an important contribution to scientific thought on the effects of racism. One can only conclude that this was deliberate.65

The contributions of Wertham and the Lafargue Clinic to the fundamental arguments of the scientific case against school segregation permeated the social science statement, but they appear without any attribution. Clark and his colleagues appear to have borrowed freely Wertham’s argument about the role of the state as a source of authority that produced emotional conflict and anxiety in children: “The child who, for example, is compelled to attend a segregated school may be able to cope with ordinary expressions of prejudice by regarding the prejudiced person as evil or misguided; but he cannot readily cope with symbols of authority, the full force of the authority of the State…in the same manner.”66 This erasure symbolized the general marginalization of Wertham’s contributions to antiracist social and medical science in the 1950s and left the Lafargue Clinic in very much the same marginal position in the field of mental health care in New York City that it had occupied before Brown.

While Wertham’s exclusion from the drafting committee might have been understandable, why the committee never asked him to sign the final statement remains a mystery. One historian notes that the criteria for selecting the signatories were professional standing and geography, as the list would need to comprise representatives from each region of the country. Yet, of the thirty-five men and women who signed the statement, fifteen were from New York City. Concern for geographical distribution was less important than suggested.67

It is safe to say that the social science brief committee excluded Wertham for personal, professional/methodological, and likely political reasons. He persistently advocated the preeminence of clinical evidence in matters of psychology and emphasized the connection between socioeconomic oppression, racism, and mental health. He believed that experimental studies involving lab-like tests of children and adults merely supplemented the total picture of human psychology. This stance surely alienated psychologists such as Clark who staked their claims to science on the validity and import of experiments using projective methods. It was not that Wertham wholly rejected the usefulness of experimental psychology. Rather, he suggested both at the Delaware trial and in his written work before and after Wilmington that the clinical setting and method established the conditions for the “spontaneous expression” of an individual’s thoughts and emotions. In the instance of the Lafargue Clinic’s examinations of the Delaware children, for example, it was the openness of the dialogues that revealed the most substantive aspects of segregation’s negative effects on the youngsters.

The problem for Wertham was that the virtues of the clinical method also proved to be defects in the context of efforts to make psychological knowledge approximate the physical sciences. Where experimental psychology established its claims to accuracy on representative sampling of test subjects and procedural uniformity in the accumulation of data, clinical psychiatry relied upon narrative information from the subject under examination and the ability of the individual psychiatrist to interpret both spoken and unspoken data. Referring to Wertham’s testimony during the Brown hearings, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter himself captured the limits of clinical psychiatric evidence: “If a man says three yards, and I have measured it, and it is three yards, there it is. But if a man tells you the inside of your brain and mine, and how we function, that is not a measurement, and there you are…. We are dealing here with very subtle things, very subtle testimony.”68

Countering Psychic Violence

Wertham’s work in the Delaware case demonstrating the negative public health aspects of state-imposed segregation was part of a broad effort to harness social psychiatry to the alleviation of major problems in American society. The Lafargue Clinic itself had emerged from the concern shared among Wertham, Richard Wright, and St. Philip’s Episcopal’s Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop that black New Yorkers’ encounters with racism in the hostile atmosphere of the city engendered psychic strains that led to violence. Wertham argued vigorously that racial segregation, both de jure and de facto, and crime comic books enacted forms of social and cultural violence upon the most vulnerable members of American society.

At one point in his Delaware testimony, he made this association explicit—much to the annoyance of Jack Greenberg, who wanted Wertham simply to stick to the case against school segregation. Prior to Wilmington, “[as] we discussed his testimony,” recalled Greenberg, “Wertham kept veering off into denouncing the malignant influence of comic books, and I kept trying to steer him back…thinking the comic book issue irrelevant and distracting.” In the middle of his testimony, though, Wertham pulled out a copy of a comic book to illustrate the social context in which children receive antiblack messages. It was a copy of Jumbo Comics in which a group of black people were placed in a cage suspended from a tree in the jungle. Wertham read the caption aloud: “Helpless natives left to starve or be prey to any prowling beast.” Greenberg was forced as a matter of procedure to introduce the comic book into evidence, and tried immediately to bring Wertham back to the matter at hand. He was soon successful, but Wertham first wanted simply to show that images of black people being degraded were connected to segregation. “The children read that, and they are there indoctrinated with the fact that you can do all kinds of things to colored races.” He still concluded that “segregation in schools assumes very much greater importance in these children’s minds than” the racism depicted in the comic books. Nevertheless, Wertham alerted the court to the continuity between state action and mass culture as the social sources of emotional and psychic strain upon children.69

Wertham’s central argument in both his testimony against segregation and his attack upon comic books was that both contributed to a hostile climate that interfered with the emotional and mental health of young people. Moreover, the argument was founded on evidence derived from the clinical methods of social psychiatry practiced at Lafargue. And Wertham’s stance on both issues derived from a belief fundamental to his public advocacy in the 1950s: phenomena that occurred in society, such as racism and juvenile delinquency, may have resulted from multiple factors, but it was both scientifically and politically legitimate to isolate and address discrete individual factors that took on preeminent, determining importance—state-sanctioned school segregation and crime comic books, respectively.70

In the spring of 1974, on the twentieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, Jack Greenberg, by then director of the NAACP-LDEF, wrote to ask Fredric Wertham if he would participate in a dinner commemoration of Brown. Wertham rejected the invitation, expressing a frank bitterness about the erasure of the Lafargue Clinic from the historical narrative of Brown:

Wertham’s letter clearly left an impression on Greenberg. When Wertham died in November 1981, the New York Times obituary described only his early career as a forensic psychiatrist and highlighted his role in the anti-comic furor of the 1950s, most especially his 1954 study Seduction of the Innocent. In a letter to the editor published ten days after the obituary, Greenberg noted that the Times had omitted any reference to Wertham’s “important role in the school segregation cases.” Full of quotations from Chancellor Seitz’s opinion recognizing the importance of Wertham’s testimony, the letter was one small bit of recompense for a hard-fought life.71