Blind Law and Powerless Science: The American Jewish Congress, the NAACP, and the Scientific Case against Discrimination, 1945-1950

Jackson, Jr. John P.

doi:10.1086/384627

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Using black and white dolls and asking children about their preferences, they showed that segregation developed a sense of inferiority in black children. This result served as empirical evidence in Brown v. Board of Education (Jackson 2000).…”

Section: Discrimination Before Beckermentioning

confidence: 79%

“…10 At the beginning of the 1950s, this activism characterized the related subfield of race relations known as "intergroup tensions," through which psychologists and sociologists such as Gordon Allport, Robert MacIver, and Robert Merton, as well as Louis Wirth and Everett C. Hughes of the Chicago Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Racial Relations, contributed to a cross-disciplinary literature. The American Jewish Congress also played a significant part in the fight, as it created the Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI) and the Commission on Law and Social Action (CLSA), with which were associated scholars such as Kurt Lewin and Kenneth Clark (Jackson 2000). 11 Their involvement led to a number of successes in court until the fight reached a climax in 1954, 12.…”

Section: Discrimination Before Beckermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Wandering Through the Borderlands of the Social Sciences: Gary Becker’sEconomics of Discrimination

Fleury¹

2012

History of Political Economy

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The Economics of Discrimination (1957) was Gary Becker's first published work using microeconomic tools to investigate supposedly noneconomic phenomena. 1 Although the significance of the book is now widely acknowledged, there are still confusions and misconceptions regarding the nature of Becker's contribution to the social scientific literature on race relations in the 1950s and its reception and impact in the 1960s. For instance, the role of the book in the history of the relationship between economics and the other social sciences is unclear. Most accounts acknowledge that before Becker's essay, discrimination was understood to be outside the boundaries of economics (see, for instance, Chiswick 1995 and

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Section: Discrimination Before Beckermentioning

confidence: 79%

Section: Discrimination Before Beckermentioning

confidence: 99%

Wandering Through the Borderlands of the Social Sciences: Gary Becker’sEconomics of Discrimination

Fleury¹

2012

History of Political Economy

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“…Of the 517 who replied, 90% expressed the opinion that enforced segregation had detrimental psychological effects on segregated groups, even if equal facilities were provided” (p. 823). Deutscher and Chein also asked about the perceived damage to White children and stated that a full 83% of survey respondents indicated that segregation damaged White children as well (Jackson, 2000). But the damage to Whites fell out of the national and psychological conversation.…”

Section: “Becoming Smaller and Smaller”—on Shrinkagementioning

confidence: 99%

The Power of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision: Theorizing Threats to Sustainability.

Fine¹

2004

American Psychologist

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Interviews with African American and White American elders capture the immediate power of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision and the biography of its impact over time. This article reviews the lived experience of the decision and theorizes 3 threats to sustainability that ruthlessly undermined the decision over time: (a) the unacknowledged and enormous sacrifice endured by the African American community in the name of desegregation; b) the violent and relentless resistance to the decision by government officials, educators, and many White community members; and (c) the dramatic shrinkage of the vision of Brown from the dismantling of White supremacy to a technical matter of busing. Implications are drawn for the study of desegregation and for the study of sustainability of social justice more broadly.

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“…That section of the decision and its footnote number 11-used to support the Court's references to inferiority, motivation to learn, and retarded mental development-generated a firestorm of protest among legal scholars and many other critics who felt that the Court had based its decision on psychological rather than legal grounds. They not only pointed out the inappropriateness of appealing to psychology for legal judgments but also attacked the scientific soundness of the psychological evidence considered by the Court (for arguments on both sides, see Cook, 1979Cook, , 1984Gerard, 1983;Jackson, 2000aJackson, , 2000b. The Court asserted that the psychological evidence had been cited in the footnote only because it demonstrated the fallacy of the "cheap psychology ofPlessy" and that it was not the foundation of the decision (Kluger, 1975, p. 706).…”

Section: The Brown V Board Of Education Decisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The American Psychological Association's Response to Brown v. Board of Education: The Case of Kenneth B. Clark.

Benjamin¹,

Crouse²

2004

Racial Identity in Context: The Legacy of Kenneth B. Clark.

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If North American psychologists were asked to list the most important dates in the history of their field, certain events would likely be named: Gustav Fechner's mind-body insight on October 22, 1850; Wilhelm Wundt's establishment of his Leipzig laboratory in 1879; the publication of William James's Principles of Psychology in 1890; the founding of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1892; John Watson's behaviorist manifesto published in 1913; the first state psychology licensure law in Connecticut in 1941; and the Boulder Conference of 1949 that established the scientist-practitioner model of professional training in psychology.Not on this short list, and perhaps not even associated with the discipline by many psychologists, is a date certainly important in American psychology's history: May 17, 1954. This date marks the public validation of psychology as a science through the use of psychological data in a 1954 Supreme Court case that many have called the legal decision of the 20th century because it changed the fabric of American society. How was such a monumental event received by psychologists? More particularly, how did organized psychology, specifically APA, respond to this historic occasion in which psychologists and psychology had been so intimately involved? We offer some possible answers to these We express our appreciation to

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Blind Law and Powerless Science: The American Jewish Congress, the NAACP, and the Scientific Case against Discrimination, 1945-1950

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Wandering Through the Borderlands of the Social Sciences: Gary Becker’sEconomics of Discrimination

Wandering Through the Borderlands of the Social Sciences: Gary Becker’sEconomics of Discrimination

The Power of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision: Theorizing Threats to Sustainability.

The American Psychological Association's Response to Brown v. Board of Education: The Case of Kenneth B. Clark.

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