Biography

Harlem: The early years

New York's Harlem village was a thriving African-American community on the threshold of a Renaissance in 1919 when Kenneth Bancroft Clark arrived on a passenger boat from the Panama Canal Zone. Kenneth's mother, Miriam Hanson Clark, left her husband and home in Panama to bring her children, Kenneth, almost five, and two-year-old Beulah, to live in a country she believed would offer her children more opportunity. Within the decade, the black population of Harlem had increased by 100,000. The Clarks made their home in a series of tenement apartments in integrated neighborhoods, living side by side in the crowded city with Irish and Jewish immigrants.

"My family moved from house to house, and from neighborhood to neighborhood within the walls of the ghetto in a desperate attempt to escape its...