“A NORTHERN PROBLEM”

In July 1964, black urban America burst onto the covers of magazines and the front pages of newspapers. For much of the preceding decade, images of respectably attired civil rights activists demonstrating peacefully in the South had held the attention of the American media and public. But with the outbreak of six days of rioting in Harlem on 18 July 1964, many Americans were alerted for the first time to the scale of a demographic revolution which had transformed black America. Since 1940, almost five million African Americans had left the South for the cities of the North, often driven from the land by mechanization and drawn by hopes of high-wage industrial jobs.Footnote ¹ The opportunities presented by the war economy had proved to be short-lived, however. By the 1950s, migrants were confronted with the deindustrializing cities of the emerging Rust Belt, where African Americans were confined to dilapidated, overcrowded neighbourhoods scarred by neglect and ill-conceived “urban renewal.” While the postwar national economy boomed, African Americans bore the brunt of structural readjustment as industries retreated from urban centres and automated manufacturing plants sprang up in burgeoning white suburbs. Cut off from the new economy by residential segregation, inferior education and the racist practices of unions and employers, urban African Americans were saddled with rising unemployment, decrepit social services, and corrupt, fiscally hamstrung city administrations. Out of these daily frustrations, and the provocation of habitual police brutality, came the urban insurrections of the mid- and late 1960s which commenced in Harlem and reverberated over successive summers in Watts, Newark, Detroit and hundreds of other cities across the North of the United States.Footnote ²

“The problem of the American Negro,” the social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark wrote in Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965), had become “predominantly a Northern problem.” In 1940, half of all African Americans had lived in the rural South and another quarter in southern towns. By the mid-1960s, however, virtually half of America's black population lived in northern cities.Footnote ³ As white Americans revised their image of black America and sought to understand why violence had erupted after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Clark was one of a host of black intellectuals who found an audience eager for insider accounts of black urban life. A sociological and psychological portrait of the Harlem community, Dark Ghetto had its origins in a major research project Clark had directed between 1962 and 1964 with funds from the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and the City of New York. Armed with the project's findings, which had been released as a 620-page report, Clark secured a contract with Harper & Row for a more personal and literary account.Footnote ⁴Dark Ghetto was among the first of a spate of books by black male authors, in genres ranging from social science to memoir and fiction, which were contracted by major New York publishing houses and fed public curiosity about black urban life against the backdrop of “long, hot summers” of violence and the rise of black power militancy.Footnote ⁵ Partially serialized in the New York Post, Clark's book sold almost 38,000 copies in hardback and a further 136,000 following reissue as a paperback in 1967.Footnote ⁶

Dark Ghetto sealed what Eric Sundquist has called “the effective transference of the concept of the ghetto from Jews to African Americans.”Footnote ⁷ Clark located the ghetto's origins in the Jewish quarter of sixteenth-century Venice and contended that

As Martin Luther King Jr. shifted his attention to urban deprivation in the North, it was these words which he borrowed (without attribution) in his own final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967).Footnote ⁹ Two of King's critics in the emerging black power movement, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, also regarded Clark as an authority. Their manifesto Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967) begins with an epigraph from Clark's book which defines America's “dark ghettos” as “social, political, educational and – above all – economic colonies” whose inhabitants were “subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.”Footnote ¹⁰

For Clark, the ghetto's “invisible walls” marked out not only a physical terrain of exclusion and poverty, but also a psychological terrain of internalized stigma and self-doubt. “Human beings,” he wrote, “who are forced to live under ghetto conditions and whose daily experience tells them that almost nowhere in society are they respected … will, as a matter of course, begin to doubt their own worth.” Such doubts “become the seeds of a pernicious self- and group-hatred.”Footnote ¹¹ Clark's emphasis on the psychological damage wrought by confinement within the ghetto was consistent with the expert testimony he had provided to the US Supreme Court more than a decade earlier, that segregated schooling produced feelings of inferiority in black children. Indeed, Clark is remembered today principally as the “Scholar of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Decision.”Footnote ¹² Yet it was only in the 1960s, as the author of Dark Ghetto and a media pundit of first resort on matters of race, poverty and urban disorder, that Clark became a widely known public figure.

The mid-1960s marked both the highpoint and the breaking point of the liberal “pathologist” discourse which Clark had helped to shape. As his interventions over school segregation and urban deprivation signal, Clark's activist scholarship reflected the self-assurance of postwar American social science, with its faith in the rational application of social-scientific knowledge to problems of social policy. Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, alongside other liberal scholars such as Gordon Allport, Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, believed that if the American public were made fully aware of the psychological “damage” and social “pathology” which racism engendered among African Americans, federal and local government would be pressured into ameliorating social inequalities.Footnote ¹³Dark Ghetto appeared in May 1965 at the moment of peak influence for liberal pathologism, just weeks before President Lyndon Johnson advertised his Great Society programmes as remedies for the “lacerating hurt” inflicted on African Americans by “ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.”Footnote ¹⁴ Clark's book was welcomed by reviewers in the New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Newsweek, and many other publications. The Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles pronounced that Clark had done “as much as any American of either race” to “expose this nation's terrible wounds.”Footnote ¹⁵

Only a few months later, however, pathologists found themselves on the defensive. In August 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” was leaked to the press and immediately triggered fierce debate. Moynihan argued that, notwithstanding recent advances towards legal equality, African Americans were “not equal” to other groups “in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life.” The “fundamental problem” holding them back, he stated, was “that of family structure,” for “the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.”Footnote ¹⁶ Initial responses to the report varied, and not until the late 1960s would criticism reach its height.Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, attacks were quickly mounted from within the civil rights movement. Six years earlier, the reception of Stanley Elkins's Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life had indicated the potential for pathologist claims to cause offense. Elkins's argument that slaves had been cowed and infantilized by oppression was vigorously debated by historians.Footnote ¹⁸ But the “Moynihan Report,” as it became known, was discussed and contested far beyond the academy, not least because its pathologist diagnosis was focussed on contemporary African Americans. Opposition intensified when conservative commentators invoked the report to argue that “illegitimacy,” rather than racism, poverty or police brutality, was the root cause of urban rioting.Footnote ¹⁹ Moynihan himself had faulted “[t]hree centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment” for the fragility of the black family, yet in calling that fragility the “fundamental problem” he had invited charges that he was blaming the victim.Footnote ²⁰ In The Nation, the Boston social worker and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activist William Ryan accused Moynihan of fostering “a new form of subtle racism.” James Farmer, CORE's national leader, called the report “a massive academic cop-out for the white conscience.”Footnote ²¹

Clark's Dark Ghetto had treated black “family instability” as one of a number of factors, alongside inferior education, housing and employment opportunities, which impeded black social mobility. Though the Moynihan Report outstripped Dark Ghetto in its exclusive preoccupation with the deficiencies of the black family, the “emasculation of the Negro male” which Clark had diagnosed as the effect of male underemployment and female dominance was substantially mirrored in Moynihan's characterization of the “matriarchal” black family.Footnote ²² Moreover, Moynihan's description of black family life as a “tangle of pathology” was lifted from Clark's Harlem report.Footnote ²³ Clark felt compelled to defend Moynihan against “foolish” charges of racism. “If Pat's a racist, I am,” he told journalists. “He highlights the total pattern of segregation and discrimination. Is a doctor responsible for the disease simply because he diagnoses it?”Footnote ²⁴

While Moynihan drew the most fire, the controversy surrounding his report stoked a broader critique of pathologism. In an interview in 1965, the novelist Ralph Ellison charged Clark and the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier with reducing black life to a “catalogue of negative definitions.”Footnote ²⁵ A younger generation of African American social scientists would increasingly disown what they called the “pejorative tradition” of Frazier, Moynihan and Clark, which allegedly viewed black communities merely as corrupted versions of white communities rather than grasping their own values and kinship forms.Footnote ²⁶

However, it was Albert Murray, Ellison's close friend and a fellow alumnus of Tuskegee Institute, who was to become Clark's chief antagonist. Born in 1916, two years after Clark, and raised in Mobile County, Alabama, Murray had spent the 1950s in the US Air Force before retiring from the military in 1962 at the rank of major. At that point he moved to Harlem, set up base in an apartment on Lenox Avenue and launched himself into more literary campaigns. As an essayist and aspiring novelist, Murray would never enjoy the accolades heaped on Ellison, whose National Book Award-winning Invisible Man (1952) ensured its author's enduring renown. Nevertheless, through the 1960s Murray steadily built a reputation as an astute literary and social critic, and from 1974 he published a clutch of well-received novels. In time, he would be anointed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. as the “foremost cultural explicant of black modernism.”Footnote ²⁷

When the white southern author Robert Penn Warren canvassed the opinions of black intellectuals, politicians, ministers and activists for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), the problems of black urban communities in the North received considerably less attention than the impending death of Jim Crow in the South. By the time the book appeared in print, in the wake of urban rioting, Warren's lines of inquiry seemed somewhat dated. Had he begun the project a year or two later, Warren's interview with Clark would likely have focussed on conditions and grievances in Harlem, rather than on the motives of John Brown.Footnote ²⁸ Warren's cast of interviewees might also have been different. By 1966, Murray had entered the fray with a blistering attack on “social science fiction” which identified Clark as a chief purveyor of “dirty stories about Negroes.”Footnote ²⁹ At stake in the ensuing war of words between Murray and Clark was the question of who was qualified to speak for and about Harlem.

Their dispute encompassed a cluster of issues then debated with urgency among African American intellectuals, including racial authenticity, the relative merits of particular disciplines and genres, and the validity and political utility of pathologism. The controversy surrounding the use of pathologist imagery by authors such as Moynihan and Clark has attracted considerable attention from historians in recent years. Yet the fractious debate between Clark and Murray presents an opportunity to reflect on some of the limitations and omissions of this scholarship and to outline a more balanced understanding of the discord between pathologists and their opponents.

The methodological and ethical critique of pathologism framed by Murray and Ellison laid much of the conceptual groundwork for recent, historically contextualized accounts of damage imagery and its shortcomings. A number of scholars have charted liberal pathologists’ failure to predict the cultural and political impact of their imagery and to achieve their progressive aims. Daryl Michael Scott explains how representations of black life which were intended to invoke empathy and generate public support for social reforms all too often encouraged contempt and fatalism about the black poor and support for a punitive politics of law and order. Alice O'Connor, too, has shown how an emphasis on black social and psychological dysfunction proved to be “powerfully stigmatizing” and “reinforced the imagery of a basically unassimilable black lower class.”Footnote ³⁰

But while pathologism's failures have been extensively rehearsed, the kinds of imagery and argument deployed by anti-pathologists in the 1960s and subsequently have largely escaped historical scrutiny. Here, the debate between Clark and Murray is particularly instructive. For if Murray's attacks on Clark exposed many of pathologism's limitations, Clark's criticisms of Murray identify the traps and distortions to which anti-pathologists were themselves prone. Clark's critique, no less than Murray's, holds value for thinking about the precarious, unruly politics of representation and the challenges inherent in crafting images of oppressed groups. Clark's own portrayal of black urban life manifests the dangers of foregrounding suffering and pain. Yet, as Clark discerned, Murray's writings divulge the equally problematic consequences of an emphasis on pleasure. Their public exchange of accusations and recriminations goes to the heart of the struggle among African American intellectuals in the 1960s to claim authority to speak for Harlem and to control its image.

“THE CRY OF A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST”

Dark Ghetto begins with a prologue, “The Cry of the Ghetto,” assembled from the words of anonymous residents of Harlem. Its first quotation immediately establishes the inner turmoil and self-doubt Clark wished to expose.

testified a thirty-year-old male.Footnote ³¹ Giving voice to these residents was one way in which Clark hoped to convey “the truth of the ghetto” which quantifiable, computable “facts” could never reveal.Footnote ³²

Yet Dark Ghetto was also Clark's own personal testimony. It was, he stated, not merely a social-scientific report but the “anguished cry of its author,” the “cry of a social psychologist, controlled in part by the language and concepts of social science.”Footnote ³³ Laying out both his insider credentials and his motivation for writing the book, Clark explained:

Clark proceeded through a detailed litany of the material deprivation, educational neglect, unemployment, disease, diminished life expectancy, addiction and family breakdown which he considered the “objective dimensions” of life in Harlem. Above all, however, he sought to capture what he believed were the “subjective dimensions” of black urban experience, namely the emotional consequences of life lived under such conditions:

Indeed, Clark's book marks the culmination of a dramatic transformation of Harlem's symbolic significance. Celebrated during its 1920s “Renaissance” as a “City of Refuge,” a “Culture Capital,” and a “Mecca of the New Negro,” Harlem had been revered as the exception to the ramshackle, unsanitary conditions which typified black districts in America's industrial cities. With its smart avenues and stately brownstone townhouses, hastily vacated by prosperous white occupants when black newcomers began to arrive at the turn of the twentieth century, Harlem had become the preeminent locus of African Americans’ dreams of a “promised land” in the North and a powerful symbol of “race progress.”Footnote ³⁶ However, ravaged by the Depression and bypassed by postwar prosperity, the neighbourhood gradually assumed a new symbolism. James Baldwin wrote in 1948 of “The Harlem Ghetto.” In the mid-1960s, when Harlem inaugurated the sequence of urban riots, such imagery became pervasive. Harlem was, according to Time magazine, “the archetypal Negro ghetto.” For Clark, it was the “symbol of Negro ghettos everywhere.”Footnote ³⁷

Yet neither Clark's bleak portrayal of Harlem nor the wider imagery of the black “ghetto” was universally accepted. In his essay “Social Science Fiction in Harlem,” published early in 1966 in the New Leader, a liberal magazine, Murray scorned both Clark's insider credentials as a black American and his portrait of “the wretchedness of U. S. Negroes.” Clark had been born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1914 to Jamaican parents, and some of Murray's barbs typified the prejudice which had often been directed at West Indian immigrants by those whom Murray called “multigeneration U. S. Negroes.” Overlooking the fact that Clark had arrived in Harlem as a small boy and had spent much of his life in the neighbourhood, Murray, who had lived in Harlem for only a few years, dismissed Clark as a “brownskin Panamanian.” Clark, Murray claimed, had turned himself into a “mass-media certified Negro Negrologist,” a “very special kind of entertainer who uses charts, graphs, and monographs as his stage props” while regaling credulous white audiences with sensationalized accounts of black “degradation.” Moreover, Murray argued that “the term ghetto does not apply to Harlem.” Unlike historic Jewish communities in Europe, he stated, the “so-called Negro community is, culturally speaking, essentially the same as the so-called White community,” with the “same calendar, religious observances, language, food” and the “same educational, economic and political objectives as whites.”Footnote ³⁸ In an interview the previous year, Ralph Ellison had admonished those black novelists whom he saw as beholden to pathologist “sociological theories” that “Harlem is a ‘Negro ghetto.’” If a black author “accepts the clichés” about black family breakdown, matriarchy, and the psychological castration of black males, Ellison warned, “he'll never see the people of whom he wishes to write.”Footnote ³⁹

The fiercest, most sustained criticism of Dark Ghetto appeared, however, in Murray's book of social and cultural criticism, The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (1970). Here, Murray charged Clark with grossly distorting the realities of life in Harlem by making social and psychological dysfunction appear ubiquitous while ignoring such positive black attributes as resilience, self-belief, self-reliance, humour, elegance, wit, creativity and a capacity for enjoyment. Dark Ghetto, according to Murray, “represents Negroes as substandard human beings who subsist in a sick community. Its image of Harlem is, in effect, that of an urban pit writhing with derelicts.” Clark, Murray wrote, “insists that slavery and oppression have reduced Negroes to such a tangle of pathology that all black American behavior is in effect only a pathetic manifestation of black cowardice, self-hatred, escapism, and self-destructiveness.” Dismayed by the positive reception Dark Ghetto had received in many quarters, Murray was especially critical of those supposedly “prideful black nationalist spokesmen” who, by failing to question Clark's negative portrayal of black communities, had shown how little pride they really had. Murray also elaborated his view that Harlem was “no ghetto at all.” Scarcely isolated from the wider world, its residents were bona fide New Yorkers and Americans. Most, he claimed, worked downtown, were “as intimately involved with Macy's” as their incomes allowed, and took pride in the role that black entertainers, lawyers and politicians played in the life of the city and nation at large. “Segregation is bad enough,” Murray conceded, “but it just ain't what it used to be.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The Omni-Americans also deepened Murray's attack on Clark's legitimacy as a Harlemite and racial insider. Overlooking Clark's childhood in Harlem, his long-standing role alongside his wife in running the Northside Center for Child Development on 110th Street, and the two-year research project from which Dark Ghetto emerged, Murray claimed that the book “reveals very little if any meaningful, first-hand contact with any black community in the United States.” Indeed, Murray placed Clark outside the boundaries of an authentic black sensibility. By describing black communities only in terms of their deviation from white norms, Murray claimed, Dark Ghetto showed “how a book by a black writer may represent a point of view toward black experience which is essentially white.” Black novelists whose works reflected pathologist ideas, such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, were also deemed to be lacking an authentically black perspective. The Harlem-born Baldwin, according to the Alabama-born Murray, had spurned “U. S. Negro tradition” and assumed the outlook of a “New York Jewish intellectual of immigrant parents” when he called Harlem a “black ghetto.”Footnote ⁴¹

Beneath its hyperbole and personal gibes, The Omni-Americans contained a perceptive critique of Dark Ghetto and the wider pathologist literature. Clark's book did indeed create the impression of a community mired in misery, dysfunction and self-destruction, and said relatively little about the positive social and cultural resources through which urban African Americans survived a harsh environment. Conceived by Murray and Ellison as an attack on the social sciences and their authority to represent black life, the critique of pathologism would, from the late 1960s, begin to feed back into the social sciences themselves. Feminists and other radical scholars would increasingly condemn pathologists such as Clark for failing to recognize the functionality and adaptability of African American family structures and for exaggerating black self-hatred and self-destruction.Footnote ⁴²

Murray was also alert to the potential for damage imagery to backfire on its liberal proponents. Anticipating the arguments of scholars such as Scott and O'Connor, Murray warned that Clark's portrait of Harlem would only strengthen white Americans’ “notions of black inferiority.” By depicting black urban life as a morass of psychopathology and social deviancy, Clark risked reinforcing “the stereotypes that Negroes have always been extremely sensitive about.” Indeed, pathologist social science was, according to Murray, the unwitting progenitor of contemporary racism, reinventing the “folklore of white supremacy” as the “fakelore of black pathology.” Would white parents send their children to public schools alongside “pathological” black adolescents, as integrationists such as Clark seemed naively to expect? Rather than convincing the American public of the need for ameliorative social interventions, Murray predicted, “one-sided featuring of black pathology might frighten white Americans into an easier tolerance of anti-Negro police tactics.” Indeed, as Scott has demonstrated, newspapers were quickly drawn to conservative explanations of the urban riots as products of a pathology bred in the home and susceptible only to black self-help and vigorous policing. Following the Watts riot of August 1965, California's governor, Edmund Brown, attributed the violence to “hoodlums.” His successor, Ronald Reagan, espoused an even more vehement law-and-order approach to urban unrest. Scholars such as Edward Banfield gave intellectual weight to such platforms, urging repressive responses to what they described as the pathological criminality of the urban lower class. Recognizing that damage imagery had been harnessed to conservative ends, many liberals disassociated themselves from pathologism from the late 1960s onwards.Footnote ⁴³

Some of Murray's criticisms, however, were little more than polemical distortions of Clark's views. Clark did not harbour an “almost worshipful” attitude towards “white well being.” Dark Ghetto was strident in its condemnation of white racism and candid about white “divorce, abortions, adultery, and the various forms of jaded and fashionable middle- and upper-class sexual explorations.” Neither did Clark characterize Harlem's residents as “derelicts” incapable of action or self-assertion, or reduce all black behaviour to cowardice and self-destruction. Dark Ghetto in fact contained a highly sympathetic account of the Harlem riot of 1964, in which Clark detected a “reservoir of energy” that could be harnessed to effective social action. For all its gloom, Dark Ghetto was not devoid of hope or of affection for the community in which Clark himself had learned of “love,” “sacrifice” and “courage” as well as “cruelty,” “cowardice” and “bombast.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, as sensitive as Murray was to the pitfalls of pathologism, he was less mindful of the problematic resonances and potentially conservative implications of his own representations of black urban life.

“ACCENTUATING THE POSITIVE”

The Omni-Americans was not only a critique of pathologism. It was also a manifesto for what Murray called an “affirmative,” anti-pathologist perspective on black life. “The time for accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative is long overdue,” he announced. Murray's Harlem was, accordingly, a place of humour, sartorial sophistication, playful eloquence and almost constant music-making. Harlem “for all its liabilities generates an atmosphere that stimulates people-to-people good times which are second to none anywhere in the world.” The blues, Murray insisted, were not a lament. Rather, the music divulged a philosophy of “impromptu heroism” which mocked the temptation to self-pity. A characteristically “Negro” idiom, the blues also encapsulated what Murray, following Constance Rourke, regarded as the quintessentially American traits of resilience, optimism and improvisation.Footnote ⁴⁵

Particularly striking was Murray's call for black novelists to resist pathologism and

The words chosen by Murray to represent the collective voice of black America have an unexpected provenance. In 1965, Ralph Ellison had recounted an old “white Southern joke on Negroes” in which a white employer inquires why his most productive black worker never agrees to work overtime on Saturday nights. The worker replies, “If you could just be a Negro one Saturday night, you'd never want to be a white man again.”Footnote ⁴⁷

To Ellison's mind, this “rather facile joke” at least recognized “an internality to Negro American life, that it possesses its own attraction and its own mystery.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet while such recognition worked against the pathologist view of black life as reducible to its miseries and deviancies, it veered towards another, equally problematic, view of black experience. In his sympathetic exploration of “White Negro” primitivism in 1957, Norman Mailer had also deployed the trope of black Saturday night revelry. Explaining how the “white hipster,” faced with the spectre of nuclear annihilation, had “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro,” Mailer contended that

Together with the old “white Southern joke on Negroes,” Mailer's words illustrate how an emphasis on black pleasure – no less than on pathology and pain – could serve to reinforce long-standing racial stereotypes.

In an unpublished manuscript which likely dates from this period, Murray acknowledged the existence of conflicting sets of stereotypes of African Americans. Yet one variety seemed to him to be more pernicious in its consequences:

Murray underestimated the role that “happy-go-lucky” imagery had played, through minstrelsy and other channels, in rationalizing slavery and segregation. A year after the publication of The Omni-Americans, the historian George Fredrickson would provide a detailed exploration of that imagery and its uses. The “stereotype of the happy and contended bondsman,” Fredrickson observed, had been wielded by southern slave-owners in part “to counter the abolitionist image of the wretched slave.” Even when stereotypes of black gaiety had appeared in the arguments of some who opposed slavery and black expatriation, such imagery had perpetuated a view of African Americans as childlike and simple, which offended their humanity and injured their social status. The Reverend Increase Niles Tarbox of West Newton, Massachusetts wrote in 1864 of the “more joyous and holiday feeling” of the black race, and that year the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission remarked how blacks’ “cheerfulness and love of mirth overflow with the exuberance of childhood.” Children, however lovable, have seldom been accorded full political citizenship. In the twentieth century, such “romantic racialism” resurfaced in the “jazzed-up” form of white primitivism during the 1920s (and, Fredrickson might have added, the “White Negro” primitivism of the postwar era). Yet from the 1930s onwards, liberal intellectuals, black and white, had increasingly discarded romantic characterizations of the “happy Negro,” not least

It was this very charge which Clark levelled against The Omni-Americans. When “Social Science Fiction in Harlem” had appeared in 1966, Clark had struggled to formulate a coherent public response. He declined an invitation from Myron Kolatch, the editor of the New Leader, to respond in the magazine's pages, instead sending Kolatch a letter (“not for publication”) in which he criticized the decision to publish Murray's essay and implied, remarkably, that Murray's refusal to confront Harlem's harsh realities was itself testimony to the psychological damage caused by racism. “My summary judgment,” Clark wrote,

When The Omni-Americans was published, Clark managed a more nuanced response. Addressing an audience at the City College of New York, where he was a professor of psychology, Clark commented that a favourable newspaper review of Murray's book had reminded him of a passage he had read many years earlier, from which he now quoted: “a strange people, merry mid their misery, laughing through their tears like the sun shining through the rain. Yet what simple philosophers they … with natures of sunshine and song.” These words, Clark revealed, were an impression of the Irish penned by an English army officer during the nineteenth century. Yet they seemed to Clark to resonate deeply with Murray's affirmative view of life in Harlem and with the enthusiastic reception of Murray's book:

If Murray considered Clark an “entertainer” who peddled the images of blackness his white audiences desired, Clark thought much the same of Murray. “As a psychologist,” Clark believed that the romanticization of black or Irish experience functioned primarily “to solve the guilt of the oppressor,” and reflected little of the “reality of the predicament of the oppressed.”Footnote ⁵³