In 1996,
exactly fifty years after its founding, a history of Northside Center
was published by The University Press of Virginia. Children,
Race, and Power, Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center, by Gerald
Markowitz and David Rosner, tells the fascinating story of how Northside
began, survived, and exerted its influence, during a formative time
in our country's history.
This excerpt,
which opens its second chapter, tells of how Northside came into being:
At the
end of the [Second World] war, two young psychologists with doctorate
degrees from Columbia University, one an assistant professor at the
City College of New York and the other a psychological consultant
doing psychological testing at the Riverdale Children's Association,
decided to try to do something about the lack of services for troubled
youth in Harlem. Kenneth Bancroft Clark and
Mamie Phipps Clark approached nearly every
social service agency in New York City with a modest proposal. They
urged the established agencies to expand their programs to provide
social work, psychological evaluation, and remediation for youth in
Harlem, since there were virtually no mental-health services in the
community. Each agency they explored the proposal with rejected it....The
Clarks "realized that we weren't going to get a [child guidance
clinic] opened that way. So we decided to open it ourselves."
Thus began
the idea for the Northside Center for Child Development, first called
the Northside Testing and Consultation Center. It started in a basement
apartment of the Dunbar Housing Project on 135th Street. Two years later,
in 1948, Northside moved to 110th Street, just across from Central Park,
on the sixth floor of what was then the New Lincoln School. And in 1974,
Northside moved to the quarters it now occupies in Schomburg
Plaza.