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.