ASSIGNMENT3Provide answers to the following three questions.
Cut and paste the questions into a word document, and answer each of them using
ONLY material from the course (textbook, readings, videos, material linked at the
course website, lectures, ppts). No outside research is necessary – you should focus on
synthesizing and integrating your knowledge of the course material. Your answers
should be 500-600 words per question. This is a hard word limit, do not ask to exceed
it.
1) This course has critically examined how race/racism, sex/sexism, and colonization/
colonialism have shaped P/psychology over its history, including its portrayal of
racialized, gendered, and colonized peoples. We have also explored how creative
resistance to these forces by some psychologists has generated new psychological
knowledge, or as Eve Tuck (2009) would say, desire-centred rather than
damage-centred research. For this question, choose sexism OR colonization as your
example (pick one), and describe how psychologists have produced damage-centred
or deficit model research based on sex OR colonized status, how these portrayals have
been challenged and by whom, and what new psychological knowledge has resulted
from this challenge. (500-600 words)
2) One of the specific learning objectives in this course was to enable you to identify
and appreciate how P/psychology is affected by and embedded in cultural and
political contexts. Using two concrete examples, demonstrate specifically how
cultural and political factors have influenced the development of any aspect of
P/psychology (its research questions, findings, theories, tools, practices, and/or
institutions) over the course of the 20th century. (500-600 words)
3) Throughout the course you have been encouraged to consider what factors
influence whose stories get told in psychology’s history, and whose typically get left
out. The stories that have traditionally been told in history of psychology textbooks
tend to celebrate the achievements of relatively privileged white, European or
European-descent men. But, as Haitian anthropologist and historian Michel Rolph
Trouillot has pointed out, any historical narrative is a bundle of silences. Choose two
psychologists you have encountered in this course (in the text, lectures, videos, or
links at the e-class site) who help fill some of the silences created by a reliance on this
dominant narrative and 1) outline their accomplishments; 2) consider what factors
may have led to their marginalization (both in psychology, and in historical accounts),
and 3) explain why it is important and valuable to include them in accounts of
psychology’s history. That is, how does/might their inclusion change the narrative?
(500-600 words)
Black Intellectuals’ Critique of Early Mental Testing: A Little-Known Saga of the 1920s
Author(s): William B. Thomas
Source: American Journal of Education , May, 1982, Vol. 90, No. 3 (May, 1982), pp. 258292
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1085111
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III
Black Intellectuals’ Critique
of Early Mental Testing: A
Little-Known Saga of the
1920s
WILLIAM B. THOMAS
University of Pittsburgh
The numerous studies supporting ideologies about the innat
inferiority of blacks and certain ethnic groups generated a b
rejoinders among black intellectuals of the 1920s. Respondin
denigrating inferences mental test researchers were drawing
data, a group of black social scientists challenged these here
views and argued that inferior performance by blacks on in
tests was a function of environment, that is, poor educationa
nities, disadvantaged home conditions, and unfamiliarity wit
items. In challenging the causal validity of the tests, they poin
racial bias of the researchers and testers as variables affectin
performance of blacks. Although these relatively few black
tered cultural barriers to their developing a sophisticated at
racist ideology, they followed the tradition of earlier black in
marshalling the talents among themselves and soliciting the
support of sympathetic white scholars to contravene racist h
and conclusions about blacks. Their critiques and their parad
stitutionalization of these tests in their schools and colleges
are an ironic twist which raises questions in the sociology of k
The role of black scholars in the mental testing controver
1920s has been largely overlooked.1 There is convincing ev
a small cadre of blacks, teaching in southern black colleges
deed as active as white scholars in the controversy. Howev
were isolated from the mainstream of American research and schol-
arship, their data were ignored in the formative years of mental testing. This may have been due in part to difficulties which blacks may
? 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0036-6773/82/9003-0002$0 1.00
258 American Journal of Education
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Thomas
have encountered in publishing research which did not conform to
standards of quantification. It may also be attributable to the fact that
their assumptions and conclusions did not conform to the popular
racist assertions which were gaining academic credence in the 1920s.
The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how those black scholars launched a concerted intellectual assault upon racist conclusions
which white psychologists extrapolated from mental test data. It will
highlight the black critique of the mental testing movement by focusing upon the 1920s as a decade when the nature-nurture debate was
at its zenith. Finally, this essay raises questions in the sociology of
knowledge as it pertains to the paradox of a vigorous critique by
blacks of mental test usage against their racial group and the subsequent institutionalization of this instrument as a valid educational
tool to sort and select blacks enrolled in southern schools.
Background
From antiquity to contemporary times, those who shape public
thinking have sought ways to attain what they perceived to be a just
and orderly society. For some, this was best realized through the static
process of calling for individuals to adjust to their environment,
rather than through adjusting the environment to enhance individual
achievement. For example, Plato, as a political philosopher who was
of noble birth himself, believed that this adaptation process could be
accomplished by relegating each person in the population to one of
three classes. Whether he was speaking normatively or descriptively
of his society, he nonetheless asserted that: “God has framed you
differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in composition of these he has mingled gold; others he has made of silver, to be
auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he
has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be
preserved in the children. God proclaims as a first principle to the
rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing that they should so
WILLIAM B. THOMAS, associate professor in foundations of education at the University of Pittsburgh, teaches sociology of education. A
former Fulbright-Hays teaching fellow in Denmark and Belgium, he
has published his research in the American Sociologist, Urban Education,
Kappan, and Phylon. He is a contributing author in the recently published Education and the Rise of the New South and edited the book Shall
Not Perish.
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
anxiously guard…as of the purity of the race” (Republic 4.3.415).
Significantly, Plato’s view that God framed each person differently
undergirds a major portion of the quasi-empirical arguments of the
social sciences between 1830 and 1914, an era of industrialization and
social upheaval. This was a period of immense social turbulence,
stemming from changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, civil
war, and a shift from a plantation to a free market economy in the
South. Additionally, the nation experienced the push-pull effects of
massive immigration of both the rural population in the United States
and southern and eastern Europeans to urban centers.
Amidst these shifting relationships, theorists sought to identify
principles of social order which could help a heterogeneous mixture
of people adjust to existing conditions. Such adaptations, justified by
“science,” the only reliable source of knowledge in the thinking of
some, might attenuate the possibilities of social revolution. Developing new theories seemed essential in accounting for the fact that in a
nation following democratic, equalitarian rhetoric, there was the consistent pattern of wealth and higher status for some few and poverty
and marginal status for many others. In a pragmatic vein, it seemed
necessary in this era to underpin a major portion of any theory which
might be developed with the physical and natural sciences that were
being applied so well to the industrialization process.
The waning emphasis on divine intervention as an explanation for
social differentiation and social theorists’ endeavors to interpret rationally and empirically the paradox of inequality coincided with the
popularization of evolutionary interpretations of Charles Darwin and
Herbert Spencer. The popularized ideology of this quasi-scientific
thrust was social Darwinism (see Hofstadter 1955). Seemingly sci-
entific social explanations emerged propitiously at a time when the
racist assumptions which had underpinned slavery in America were
being challenged by social reformers and politicians seeking to
ameliorate the condition of blacks. Questions pertaining to the place
in the social order of blacks, who had already been relegated by law to
subhuman status, posed disconcerting questions to decision makers in
the political arena, particularly to the extent to which they were
caught between the ideals of democratic rhetoric and the harsh realities of racial segregation and social stratification. Science and politics became strange bedfellows. The development of scientific tools to
quantify degrees of individual and group differences greatly enhanced the interest in and prospects for making political decisions
about blacks on the basis of “scientific evidence” which might rationalize existing prejudices.
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Thomas
The Rise of Racist Mental Testing
It was in this sociopolitical climate that American mental testing
emerged as a variation of social Darwinism. As psychology pushed for
status as a science, the development of mental tests brought to psychology the realization that one’s individual abilities could be differentiated from those of other individuals belonging to the same milieu.
This was a fundamental principle upon which American test de-
signers developed all manner of tests to measure mental abilities of
individuals and groups of individuals.
The entry of the United States into World War I created the opportunity for American psychologists to apply the principles of individual differences in a utilitarian situation. They systematically tested
approximately 1,750,000 recruits during the war. These test data
were later compiled and analyzed under the leadership of Robert
Yerkes (1921). After the war, however, the indiscreet use of these data
precipitated a rash of controversies around research and generalizations pertaining to the intelligence and educability of racial and
ethnic groups, as well as occupational and geographical groupings.
Consistent with a wave of nativism sweeping the country, data from
these tests were used for purposes of assuring “the protection and
improvement of the moral, mental, and physical quality” of the
American people (Yerkes, foreword to Brigham 1923, p. v). The way
these data were being interpreted tended to “validate” racist viewpoints held specifically about the mental and moral inferiority of black
Americans and certain immigrant groups. Carl C. Brigham was one
researcher drawing denigrating inferences from test data. He had
returned to the United States at the invitation of Robert Yerkes, who,
along with Henry H. Goddard, was launching a campaign to warn the
nation of the “menace of race deterioration” and “the evident re-
lations of immigration to national progress and welfare” (see Brigha
1923, pp. 208-10).
Brigham’s involvement with Col. Yerkes motivated his post-Worl
War I “reexamination, analysis, and discussion of the army’s d
concerning the relations of intelligence to nativity and length of re
idence in the United States” (Brigham 1923, pp. 194-209). Althou
Brigham would later recant his postulates regarding the inher
mental inferiority of certain immigrant groups (see Brigham 1930
he believed, during this post-World War I period of America’
xenophobia, that data from psychological testing in the milita
verified that American intelligence was declining, and would proce
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture became more and
more extensive.
American universities housed much of the mental testing research
which flourished through the 1920s. Psychologist Lewis M. Terman
was a leader of research using tests during this and the preceding
decade, and thus, it is useful to review his interpretations of the
meaning of the testing results he observed. Writing in 1916 of the
level of intelligence commonly found in Spanish-Indians, Mexicans,
and blacks, Terman stated that “their dullness seems to be racial, or at
least inherent in the family stocks from which they came. The fact that
one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes [sic] suggests quite forcibly that the
whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be
taken up anew and by experimental methods” (1916, pp. 91-92).
Terman predicted that “when this is done there will be discovered
enormously significant differences in general intelligence, differences
which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture” (1916,
pp. 91-92) and which are independent of the quality of the school,
home environment, and the student’s disposition (Terman 1923, pp.
1-31).
In reference to these groups of blacks, Indians, and Mexicans,
Terman recommended that they should be segregated in special
classes and given instruction which is “concrete and practical.” He
went on to suggest that “they cannot master abstractions, but they can
often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves.
There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they
should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of
view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding” (1916, p. 92).
Terman enjoyed a growing national reputation as a psychologist,
and his graduate research under the internationally renowned G.
Stanley Hall at Clark University legitimized his reputation. On the
one hand, Terman’s conclusions that certain groups should be isolated, if not sterilized, were part of a successful movement in the
1920s to bring psychology into politics and the classroom, giving it a
utilitarian function in response to massive immigration and the education of the seemingly “unassimilable” (Dillingham 1911). Yet, on the
other hand, Terman seemed interested in “conserving and developing the vast amount of superior talent…, the large numbers of
highly gifted children [who] are not recognized by their teachers”
(Terman 1922, p. 659). He noted that “a good fraction of our in-
tellectual talent is wasted. There are thousands of individuals whom a
better education or a wiser guidance would have enabled to make a
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Thomas
far better contribution to civilization than they were making” (Ter-
man 1922, p. 659).
The Problem
In addition to these practical issues of educational and vocational
classification, psychologists used mental tests to supply data for addressing the age-old problem of the influence of nature and nurture
upon human destinies. In view of controversies stemming from this
issue, the National Society for the Study of Education commissioned
Terman to chair a committee to report on this subject.
Following a national search for the results of a scientific investigation on the nature-nurture issue, no contributions from the black
intellectual community appeared in the 1928 Yearbook (see Terman
1928). This causes significant questions to be raised regarding the role
which black scholars played in the 1920s nature-nurture controversy
surrounding intelligence testing and racial differences. Were they
content, for example, to remain mute on the issue of mental testing,
thereby giving tacit approval to apparent racist assumptions and as-
sertions being made about members of their racial group? If they
entered the debates over the seemingly scientific postulates being
formulated in major university circles, what was the nature of their
counterarguments? Furthermore, what strategies and alliances did
they develop to avert the new scientism of differential race psychology?
Questions such as these have not been well addressed in the literature on the history of intelligence testing, leaving to this date the same
impression left by the 1928 Yearbook-that black scholars were not
actively interested in this issue at that time. It is the purpose of this
paper to show, first, that such active interest in the controversy did
occur among black intellectuals and, second, what the substantive
nature of such activities were.
Black Intellectuals’ Early Critique and the Rise of Interracial
Cooperation in Scholarship
The need for a critical response challenging certain conclusions from
“science” was particularly pressing for blacks. Mental testing re-
searchers had now come to the very heart of the matter underlying
the spirited interest those in and outside of psychology had in mental
testing: (a) whether identifiable mental differences between racial
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
groups were indeed irreversibly fixed and independent of the in-
fluences of social and economic inequality; and (b) what ramifications
might answers to this question have for federal, state, and local
policies, especially those pertaining to people of marginal status in the
social order.
To be sure, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there
had been established a precedent of black intellectuals’ systematic
efforts to debunk notions of inherent inferiority of their racial group.
Illustratively, black American and scientific pioneer Benjamin Ban-
neker wrote as a free Negro a defense of the mental capacities of
blacks to Thomas Jefferson in 1792, while George Lawrence, also a
free Negro, posited in his 1813 treatise that “vacuous must be the
reasons of that man… who dared to assert that genius is confined to
complexion.” James McClune Smith, a medical doctor responding to
racist remarks by Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, pointed to the
increasing numbers of blacks attending schools with whites, successfully pursuing their studies at schools such as Dartmouth and Oberlin
Western Theological Seminary; and Martin Delany, also a medical
doctor and the co-founder of Frederick Douglass’s North Star, sought
to ward off racist assertions in his somewhat nationalistic essay, The
Conditions, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the
United States (1852) in which he discussed the black man’s “dashing
strides in national achievement, successful adventure, and un-
surpassed enterprise” (see Aptheker 1971, pp. 22-26, 57-59, 238-43,
326-27; Foner 1972).
In addition, the American Negro Academy was one of the earlier
successful attempts to organize black scholars in a concerted effort at
racial uplift through scholarly methods. From 1897 to 1924 the
Academy’s Occasional Papers publication series waged an intellectual
battle in its stated agenda “to defend the Negro against vicious assaults.” As stated in the inaugural address of its founder and first
president Alexander Crummell, the Academy would “bring forth,
stimulate, and uplift all the latent genius garnered up in the by-places
and sequestered corners of this neglected race” (Crummell 1969). The
Academy’s first paper was written by Kelly Miller, a mathematician
who later became dean at Howard University. Miller challenged as
racist Frederick L. Hoffman’s 1896 essay, Race Traits and Tendencies of
the American Negro. Hoffman had prophesied that blacks were
doomed to imminent extinction due to their biological, moral, and
spiritual inferiority.
Black colleges played a major role in housing and supporting the
rise of similar activities and critiques among black intellectuals. One
such endeavor was the Atlanta University Conference for Study of
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Thomas
Negro Problems, begun in 1896 under the direction of Harvardeducated W. E. B. DuBois, then professor of sociology at Atlanta
University. While devoted to the full complement of social, economic,
and political problems plaguing American blacks, its twentieth annual
conference in 1915 addressed issues pertaining specifically to the
biological and social theories of racial inferiority (Bigham 1916).
Despite these kinds of viable intellectual forums for challenging
problems incident to racism, black scholars not only faced a myriad of
barriers limiting their effective assault upon racist traditions, but
these impediments were long extant and existed well into the 1940s.
For example, assumptions about the inherent mental and social in-
feriority of blacks as a race precluded equal access to educational
opportunities for them in the small, principally southern communities
in which they lived. Many blacks were compelled to seek employment
upon leaving school as either graduates or dropouts, and with the
circumscribed employment opportunities for graduates, they had to
settle for teaching in poorly funded schools and colleges (Greene
1930, pp. 1-30). These events affected not only the total number of
potential black scholars but also the careers of the relatively few who
completed their academic training.
In southern black colleges, for example, black scholars were often
subjected to a number of invidious practices: (1) they were relegated,
through no choice of their own, to a defensive race propaganda post-
ure against racist ideologies (Franklin 1968, p. 69); (2) they taught
where research and scholarship often played second fiddle to teach-
ing (Jones 1974, pp. 128-29); (3) some were victims of autocratic,
capricious leadership in colleges with inadequate research tools and
no research funds (Bunche 1936, pp. 351-59; Fraser 1937, pp.
167-77); and (4) they were principally isolated either from those universities and centers where American scholarship flourished or by social mores excluding them from public libraries, research facilities,
and intellectual interaction with fellow southern scholars (Gallagher
1935, p. 349). It may also be that they encountered great difficulty
publishing research which either did not conform to the prevailing
ideology of the time or was of little interest to editorial boards of
nationally renowned journals.
Given these historical social barriers to scholarship, and in light of
seemingly increasing popularity of racist assertions about the mental
capacities of blacks by some prominent social scientists (see, e.g.,
Popenoe 1918; Goddard 1919; East 1923), blacks launched a counteroffensive. Initially, they looked to white scholars for intellectual
support of their arguments against racist claims. Later, Horace Mann
Bond (1924, pp. 61-64), marshalling the talents of every black in-
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
tellectual in the war against racism, asserted: “The intellectual must
equip himself as an active agent against the insidious propaganda
which seeks to demonstrate that the Negro is intellectually and physically incapable of assuming the rights which devolve upon him as a
member of modern society. Through ignorance of the facts, we have
chosen to be silent rather than to expose our naivete. That time has
passed. No longer is there justification for the silence of the educated
Negro.”
When their responses to the mental testing controversy are systematically cataloged, they fall into three areas. First, but not surprisingly,
the majority of their writings assailed the contention that observed
racial differences were caused by factors independent of environment. These environmentalist critiques, then, indicated that some
black scholars accepted the data base supplied by mental tests, but
offered alternative explanations for these data (e.g., differences in
educational opportunity within southern and northern schools). In
modern terms, these can be considered attacks on the causal validity
of nature-nurture empirical studies. The second category of black
responses questioned what is now referred to as the statistical conclu-
sion validity of the data base. These scholars pointed out method-
ological errors and conscious abuses in the use of the instru-
ment which made the data and the statistical conclusions resulting
from them suspect. Finally, black researchers conducted their own
empirical investigations, providing an alternative data base which
supported their environmentalist posture. Following a discussion of
how blacks elicited the cooperation of whites, the remainder of this
paper, therefore, will illustrate the manner in which black scholars
responded in each of these three ways.
Eliciting the Support of White Scholars
In the controversy over the mental inferiority of blacks during the
early decades of the twentieth century, the relatively few existing
black intellectuals relied to an extent on the supportive authority of
liberal white scholars. This was by no means a fortuitous, casual
gathering of blacks and whites sharing common views about racial
characteristics and relationships growing out of such. Instead, there is
convincing evidence that in issues threatening the moral, social, economic, and political fiber of this democratic society, blacks and whites,
southerners and northerners, formally coalesced in their representa-
tive arenas and forums to challenge, to a degree, such issues. The
extent of their actions, however, was no doubt dependent either on
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Thomas
the degree to which they personally or intellectually believed it was
possible to effect change, or on the characteristics of the change they
sought to bring about.
These intellectuals were themselves experiencing the stresses and
strains of ideological compromises between the nineteenth-century
ideas of Darwin and Spencer and those of an environmentalist perspective. Those educated, for example, in the tradition of Spencerian
ideology may have been influenced to perceive change as an evolu-
tionary process. Consequently, their views about changes in traditional race relationships may have been compromised by their personal and intellectual Weltanschauung, their arguments fluctuating
between a nature and nurture posture. Illustrative of such ambivalence are the ideas of Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas,
an arch critic of the unilinear, hereditarian view of racial differences.
This staunch supporter of racial fairness in conducting research on
various racial groups asserted in his 1911 edition of The Mind of Primi-
tive Man that “it may be well to state here once more with some
emphasis that it would be erroneous to assume that there are no
differences in the mental make-up of the Negro race and of other
races, and that their activities should run in the same lines. On the
contrary, if there is any meaning in correlation of anatomical struc-
ture and physiological function, we must expect that differences
exist” (see Bigham 1916, pp. 97-108, esp. p. 106). Fortunately for the
proponents of environmentalism like himself, this line of thinking was
deleted from the revised edition in 1938.
Inevitably, tensions arose between factions of blacks and these white
liberals, as in the case in which Boas was chastised by the conservative
black press for his reported radical views advocating intermarriage
(New York Age 1910). Such issues raised here are indicative of the
kinds of divergent conflicts these scholars encountered in their efforts
to influence change. Yet, this systematic pattern of blacks’ appealing
for the interracial cooperation of progressive whites remained constant throughout America’s struggle for racial justice.2 A mark of this
kind of commitment is anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s visiting
professorship to Howard University in the mid-1920s to teach and
conduct research on racial admixture in college students (Herskovits
1928). Similarly, two sociologists-Robert Park of the University of
Chicago and Edward B. Reuter of the University of Iowa-assumed
professorships at Fisk University in the 1940s following their retirement from their respective universities.
Liberal white intellectuals were frequent participants at national
conferences addressing the problems of black Americans. Their role
was to bring scholarly credibility to the conferences by presenting
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
their views and research which might undercut traditional research
having racist implications. For example, John Dewey was asked to
address the National Negro Conference in 1909, during which he
cautioned that “a society that does not furnish the environment and
education and the opportunity of all kinds which will bring out and
make effective the superior ability wherever it is born, is not merely
doing an injustice to that particular race and to those particular
individuals, but it is doing an injustice to itself, for it is depriving itself
of just that much of social capital” (Proceedings of the National Negro
Conference 1969, pp. 72-73).
At the same conference, Livingston Farrand of Columbia and Burt
G. Wilder of Cornell spoke out on the issue of the inferiority of blacks
to whites, noting that this argument was utterly without scientific
basis. Farrand asserted, “Blood will tell, but we do not know just what
it tells, nor which blood it is which speaks” (cited in Aptheker 1970, p.
925).
On yet another occasion, biologist Jacques Loeb (M.D., Ph.D., Leipzig) of the Department of Experimental Biology at the Rockefeller
Foundation Institute for Medical Research was invited to speak at the
NAACP Sixth Annual Conference in Baltimore, May 3-5, 1914. Responding to current theories about inherited physical traits and the
consequent scientific inferences drawn about the mental and moral
traits of blacks, Loeb viewed such correlations as unwarranted and
inconclusive (Loeb 1914). Loeb’s presentation preceded Atlanta University’s Twentieth Annual Conference for Study of Negro Problems
in May 1915. This conference published the works of internationally
renowned scholars addressing the question of inherent racial differences. The list included Felix von Luschan, professor of anthropology
at the University of Berlin, and Franklin P. Mall, anatomist from
Johns Hopkins University, both refuting the anthropological and
anatomical arguments for inherent racial differences. Interestingly,
Mall had been the academic mentor at Johns Hopkins to Robert B.
Bean, whose controversial research on the peculiarities of the Negro
brain (Bean 1909) Mall undercut through his cross-validation re-
search and analysis, reiterating his findings to this conference (see
Bigham 1916, pp. 32-57). Other participants included R. S. Wood-
worth, professor of psychology at Columbia University, and University of Chicago sociologist W. I. Thomas, who assailed arguments for
racial differences in mental traits (see Bigham 1916, pp. 57-83). Boas
and Clark University anthropologist Alexander F. Chamberlin underscored the cultural contributions of blacks to human civilization
(Bigham 1916, pp. 83-108).
One medium for disseminating antiracist rebuttals of white scho
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Thomas
was popular editorials found in such periodicals as Crisis and
Opportunity, organs of the NAACP and the Urban League, respectively. These journals also turned to white intellectuals for their
assessment of contemporary research about racial group characteristics and the innate mental inferiority of blacks. The distance between
these white intellectuals’ appearances as speakers at black conferences
and the appearance of their work in these popular journals was relatively short. Their speeches or excerpts from them were often printed
in Crisis and Opportunity so as to reach the masses who did not
attend the conferences.
In addition to his call to Boas to dispute in writing the an-
thropological claims of racial differences,3 DuBois, editor of Crisis
from 1910 to 1932, solicited the support of Jacques Loeb and Herbert
A. Miller to assail the racist claims (see Loeb 1914; Miller 1925).4
In a stronger attack against American racism than he had made a
few months earlier at the NAACP conference in Baltimore, Loeb said
that the oppressive conditions under which blacks had been compelled to live were a major factor affecting their lives (1914, pp.
92-93). He focused particularly upon the irony that when one group
tries to oppress another, the remedies are always applied to the op-
pressed rather than to the oppressor. Hence, they raise questions
about what should be done about the Negro. Since, he noted, that
oppression is often economic, regions such as the South could not
prosper economically or morally until they ceased rationalizing the
oppression of blacks (Loeb 1914).
Similarly, Opportunity, edited by sociologist and University of
Chicago graduate (M.A.) Charles S. Johnson, relied upon Herbert
Miller and such other social researchers as John Munro, anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (1924), and Frank J. O’Brien
(1923), director of the Psychological Clinic in Louisville, to address
some of the issues of race and mental testing.5
Herbert Miller, a frequently sought-after spokesperson for racial
justice in America, earned his doctorate at Harvard in 1905 and
taught at, among other universities, Fisk in Tennessee. He suggested
that various mythical sanctions, built up over the centuries as a means
to justify one group’s right to rule over others, were found in myths of
“divine rights” and “natural selection.” He described Nordic
superiority as a defense complex which emerged with the first feeling
that the old assumptions were no longer valid, stating in the Opportunity article that “the vocabulary of science has been appropriated and
its methods prostituted to prove what men want to prove, namely,
their moral right to keep what they want. The most fruitful medium
for this method has been intelligence testing” (Miller 1923, p. 229).
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
Lodging disclaimers against intelligence tests, Miller strongly urged
that the use of these tests indicated a move toward a “holy war.” An
attack was being made upon those whose national origins were other
than American and whose skin was other than white.
For further evidence of the vacuous position of racist conclusions
about blacks’ innate inferiority, Johnson turned away from the
polemical treatment of the issues to empirical studies, citing research
findings of John Munro. He had conducted a 16-year longitudinal
study of 700 schoolchildren in Minnesota. His investigations found
that IQs fluctuated between five and twenty points; that low intelligence was aggravated by poor food and bad environment; and that
the starvation of intelligence can be eliminated by environmental
manipulation. This editorial’s contention was that the same conditions
affecting a white population were present to an appalling degree
among blacks and may have accounted for the “uniformly pessimistic
conclusions drawn by intelligence testers of Negro children” (“Again
the Intelligence Tests,” in Opportunity 7 [1929]: 109).
Summary
Given seemingly insurmountable barriers to blacks’ research and
scholarship and the pragmatic necessity to build a defense psychology
among relatively few black intellectuals to challenge traditional racist
policies and practices, white intellectuals were a vital ally in the press
for racial justice in American scholarship. A pertinent consideration is
how the network between the two racial groups of intellectuals
flourished. Blacks, shut off from graduate study in the South through
exclusion from white private and state universities, were compelled to
attend northern universities for their graduate studies. There they
developed a mentor-protegee relationship that had lingering effects
upon black scholars’ access to membership within the organizations of
their professions and to publications in the scholarly journals of these
organizations. Reciprocally, white social scientists, formerly impervi-
ous to problems of race relations as a discipline (see Rudwick 1974,
pp. 48-49) and following the prevailing nineteenth-century thinking
about the subject, sensed the threat to democratic ideals that was
posed by racist policies and practices in the nation as a whole. Furthermore, most, no doubt, were caught in the intellectual ferment of
the 1920s, when sociology and anthropology as social disciplines assumed new interests in questions about the nature of society with its
functional emphases on social interactions, processes, and culture.
With these new interests and an intellectual liaison with black scholars,
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Thomas
they jointly developed new, fertile grounds for their research and new
forums in which to articulate their findings.
Environment: An Alternative Hypothesis
The black critique was beginning to develop some sophistication by
the mid-1920s, losing much of its popular editorial characteristics.
The blacks had benefited from the sustained and supportive cooperation of white intellectuals; it was now imperative that they rely also
on their own ingenuity to challenge all explanations for racial differences which negated the invidious effects of prejudice, segregation,
and discrimination. They were beginning to challenge specific individuals whose research consistently showed blacks to be innately in-
ferior to whites.
That they sought environmental factors as an alternative explanation for mental differences indicates that their arguments, expressed
through qualitative logical analysis, were directed specifically at the
inferences and recommendations which psychologists and mental re-
searchers were making from the test data. Curiously, these black
scholars raised few questions about the testing instrument itself or the
raw data it generated. Instead, they focused on the ends to which
data, showing differences along racial and regional lines, could and
probably would be used to legitimize racist public policies against all
blacks and certain immigrant groups.
The formative attacks were directed at conclusions reached by such
researchers as Edward M. East and Paul Popenoe, both exponents of
Spencerian notions of natural selection. One editorial undercut their
“mulatto hypothesis,” while another took exception to their “selective
migration theory.”6 Typically, East (1920, p. 621) had written that
“the Negro is a happy-go-lucky child, naturally expansive under simple
conditions, oppressed by the restrictions of civilization, and unable to
assume the white man’s burden. He accepts his limitations; indeed, he
is rather glad to have them. Only when there is white blood in his
veins does he cry out against the supposed injustice of his position.” In
response to these and other kinds of racist conclusions drawn by East
from test data, Johnson’s editorials first attributed the observed differences in test scores to the better educational advantage and more
beneficial environment in the North. States with the poorest showing
on tests invariably were those with the fewest schools, worst paid
teachers, and the greatest amount of illiteracy (“Verdict of Common
Sense,” Opportunity [June 1923]). Next, they asserted that the dis-
tribution of “white blood” in southern Negroes was as general as it was
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
in northern Negroes, and that it had nothing to do with the state of
mind of blacks nor their ability to think (“Intelligence, North and
South,” Opportunity [April 1923]).
Horace Mann Bond
Horace Mann Bond, a graduate of the University of Chicago (A.M.
Ph.D.), was a social scientist who responded to the psychological testing data from the army. A protegee of Newton Edwards and Charles
H. Judd at Chicago, Bond posited that individuals using intelligence
tests (and specifically the army tests) and instruments of evaluating
racial differences had made erroneous assumptions. One of these was
that the groups which they had compared had a common background
of experience. To demonstrate the pervasive effects of schooling and
achievement on test scores and to refute notions about the inherent
inferiority of blacks, Bond began with a comparison drawn between
the Army Alpha test performance of northern and southern whites
(1924, pp. 197-202).
By limiting his comparison to intraracial differences among whites,
he removed completely from his analysis the issue of differences due
to race. This allowed him to question whether, as a result of differences in test performance, the exponents of intelligence testing as a
discriminator of racial differences would assert that southern white
draftees were inherently and racially inferior to whites in other regions of the country.
Using Leonard P. Ayers’s study, which ranked the states in the
order of their educational achievement on the basis of educational
efficiency criteria, Bond showed that the correlation between the ran
order of the states with regard to the relative efficiency of their school
systems and the rank order of the median score of white draftees o
the Army Alpha was .74. Specifically, Bond found that nine southe
states occupied the nine bottom positions in test performance by whi
draftees, their scores ranging from 47.35 to 41.25. By comparison,
white draftees from states such as Oregon, Washington, California
Wyoming, Idaho, and Connecticut attained median test scores rang-
ing from 79.85 to 72.30. Furthermore, these same nine souther
states ranked in the nine bottom positions in the rankings of educ
tional efficiency of their school systems. Bond’s astute observation
put hereditarian proponents on the defensive. They had to adm
either that the racial stock of these so-called racially pure states w
distinctly inferior to whites in states having a higher percentage o
southern and eastern European stock or that test performance w
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dependent on environmental conditions and cultural advancement
reflected in schools.
Further evidence of the correlation between test performance and
environment was the fact that the average wage for farm laborers, as
arranged by states and the rank, correlated with Alpha. This comparison yielded a correlation of .83, a striking similarity in view of the fact
that 60 percent of the Negroes tested during the war were rural farm
laborers. If educational opportunities and environment were so
highly correlated with test performance by whites on Alpha, factors
such as occupation and socioeconomic status could not be overlooked
when these criteria were applied to blacks and their test performance.
Drawing now upon specific data on black draftees, Bond compared
the median test scores of southern whites and northern blacks, a
matter which test interpreters had largely ignored. He noted that the
median test scores for northern blacks ranged from 49.50 to 42.00
while the median for whites from Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas,
and Georgia, “with their almost pure Anglo-Saxon heritage,” ranged
only from 42.12 to 41.25. These comparisons reaffirmed his belief
that the army tests were measuring opportunity for experience and
education, not racial differences.
While acknowledging that racial differences did exist in degree, not
in kind, Bond posited that as the educational deprivation of white
mountain residents seemed to explain their low scores in intelligence
tests, so blacks’ performance could be explained in terms of educa-
tional deprivation. For Bond, however, these scores were not constant, but might be raised.
In an essay on testing as a tool of propaganda, Bond (1924, pp.
61-64) also launched a series of critical attacks on Terman’s The
Measurement of Intelligence, which he labeled racist. He questioned the
use of data from the Alpha test to demonstrate the intellectual inferiority of those who had given their lives for their country. He was
likewise critical of Carl Brigham’s claims that northern blacks were
more intelligent than southern blacks, both of whom, Brigham
claimed, had the same schooling. Bond asked, “By what yardstick did
Brigham measure the training of Negroes?” He pointed again to the
different levels of school funding for blacks in the South and North,
and to the fact that northern blacks were favored by better homes and
civil conditions. He cited an earlier study of college freshmen at Lincoln University, in which Bond had found that men from northern
high schools did make higher scores on mental tests than did those
from southern ones. Yet, in the same environment at Lincoln, he
maintained, southern blacks were just as quick to grasp the best from
their environment as others were.
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
Francis C. Sumner
As Bond became frustrated because the evidence blacks produced was
not able to contravene the strong racist assertions which were gaining
credence in the world of scholarship, so too was Francis C. Sumner
skeptical of how blacks could best challenge racist claims. Ironically,
Sumner, the first American black to receive a doctorate in psychology
(Clark University, 1920), had studied under G. Stanley Hall, the
academic mentor of Goddard, Cattell, and Terman.
Sumner rejected the conclusions of certain whites which attributed
the academic success of blacks to their racial admixture or their ex-
cellent memory. He pointed first to an eagerness on the part of some
to defend Nordic superiority as the motive for the hereditarian point
of view. He contended that researchers had failed to ascertain
whether the environment was a constant factor in accounti
mental racial differences. Comparing the environmental condi
of black and white intellectuals, for example, he pointed to fa
militating against creative scholarship among blacks: (1) eco
factors such as blacks’ having to teach in segregated schools
deemphasized research and paid depressed salaries; (2) geogr
factors, isolating blacks from centers of American scholarship b
of the geographical location of black colleges; and (3) race preju
which generated an “oppression psychosis,” limiting blacks’
energies to combating racism (Sumner [1925]; the plight of
teaching in the South was similar).
E. Franklin Frazier
No less adamant in condemning the notions derived from intelligence
testing was E. Franklin Frazier. He saw mental testing being used in
the same manner as both the Bible and various theories on evolution
had been used in earlier times, that is, as bases for rationalizing beliefs
concerning blacks’ mental capacities. Educated at Howard and Clark
Universities, Frazier earned his doctorate from the University of
Chicago in 1931.
Frazier suggested that the attempts to determine traits of blacks’
psychological adjustment were barren. Researchers had failed to
“consider the social matrix in which the Negro’s mind had been
formed and to analyze these collective phenomena which represented
responses to the social milieu.” In Frazier’s view, it was the blacks’ lack
of opportunity which had limited their psychological and intellectual
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Thomas
characteristics. He suggested that blacks were able to master the symbols designated by a white culture. For example, when whites made
the measure of intelligence the ability to master Greek and Latin,
Negroes studied and mastered the classics. He attributed a large part
of blacks’ increased intellectual powers to urbanization, which had
hastened the breaking down of isolationism in which the race had
lived; to the positive impact of the Negro Renaissance, demonstrated
by the surge of literary accomplishments of blacks in the twenties; and
to the rise of Howard and Fisk Universities (Frazier 1928).
Charles H. Thompson
Another black educator who espoused the environmentalist point of
view in interpreting mental test results was Charles H. Thompson, a
University of Chicago graduate (Ph.D., 1925) in educational psychology. Writing in an issue of the Annals, Thompson (1928) asserted that
prevailing conclusions about the intelligence of blacks were untenable
and refutable by facts. One of his criticisms of the research on the
intelligence of black youth was that the researchers had given no
consideration to the facts that there were differences in environ-
ments; the tests which were used measured acquired abilities rather
than innate abilities; educational and environmental influences had
acted with equal force on individuals; and the results of the tests we
modifiable by education and environment. Thompson was ci
cumspect about his being part and parcel of the current mental tes
ing research in the field. He studied the educational achievement of
black children, hypothesizing that differences between white an
black children are quantitatively and qualitatively the same as, or le
than, those differences found within the same racial group but
diverse socioeconomic status. He suggested that some causes of d
ferences within a racial group (socioeconomic status, geographic
distribution, school efficiency) were the same ones that account fo
differences between groups. Thompson pointed out first that other
educational psychologists’ research demonstrated that white childre
selected from the same general locality as black children, were almos
invariably superior in their achievement on mental and achievemen
tests. In fact, there was a 75-80 percent efficiency on mental tests a
an 80-90 percent efficiency on scholastic tests. Second, whites selecte
from a different and inferior locality from blacks were, when com
pared, very often inferior in their achievement. Third, the greates
disparity between white and black children in mental and scholasti
test performance occurred when there were separate school faciliti
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
and where the disparities between those facilities were great. Finally,
differences within either racial group were equal to, or greater than,
differences between two racial groups when they were selected on the
basis of environmental studies.
To test his hypotheses, Thompson determined the “coefficients of
educational efficiency” of city blacks, rural whites, and rural blacks, in
terms of city whites, using their average performance on achievement
tests. These data led Thompson to conclude that rural blacks, relative
to their very poor educational facilities, showed a higher degree of
educational achievement than did rural whites and that rural whites,
although they had school facilities equal in efficiency to those of city
blacks, did not equal them in educational achievement. As his col-
leagues had done, he attributed differences to environmental differences, not to inherent mental inferiority of rural whites to city blacks.
Summary
What Bond, Sumner, Frazier, and Thompson attempted was to
undercut inferences by certain white psychologists that revealed dif-
ferences on mental tests were due to hereditary factors. These intellectuals were faced with the reality that southern blacks scored
lower on mental tests than their northern white and black counter-
parts. A consequence of this phenomenon was that public policymakers and opinion shapers were gaining an effective edge in perpetuating discriminatory practices in the allocation of goods and services in
the public sector. Furthermore, such practices were being legitimized
by seemingly irrefutable research at which most blacks had had little
experience, due principally to their own depressed educational op-
portunities in the South. Such conditions apparently gave the
hereditarian view the upper hand in the sense that the burden fell
upon blacks to disprove the voluminous data which well-known researchers were publishing in reputable scholarly journals at their respective universities.
Although acknowledging that differences existed in the test scores
of blacks and whites, these black scholars were adamant in their environmentalist theories in accounting for these apparent differences.
In no instance, however, did they challenge the testing instrument,
per se, as a “scientific demon.” Conversely, they perceived it as a
highly accurate measure of opportunity for experiences and education, for testing to determine the effects of environment.
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Challenging Statistical Conclusion Validity
Black intellectuals were not too naive to recognize the immense dif-
ficulties involved in producing hard data to refute outright the
hereditarian perspective through the nonempirical evidence they
were using to support environmental claims. Therefore, early in the
nature-nurture controversy, black scholars began to question critically
the data that mental tests generated, the methodology for obtaining
these data, and the unscientific motives of many of the researchers.
These writers were resolute in their environmentalist arguments, incorporating this perspective into their critiques of the sampling and
testing procedures. To accomplish this, these scholars turned to the
expertise which the few newly trained black psychologists brought to
the fore.
To illustrate, in 1923, one editorial (“The New Vivisectionists,” in
Opportunity [June 1923]) took strong exception to the “grave and
sadistic tendency of the many scientists who are newcomers to the
laboratory as intelligence testers with 100 percent Nordic press
agents.” It reported that they were attempting to establish that certain
human stock was “dangerously and irredeemably inferior” and that
philanthropy and medicine were at fault for keeping this racial stock
alive. The inhumanity of the experiments, suggested the editor, lay in
the fact that (1) blacks were the favorite subjects; (2) the experiments
began with presumptions against blacks, who were damned as a
species for all posterity; and (3) the experiments were handled by
amateurs. The writer claimed further that there had not been made a
strictly scientific investigation of the mental capacity of blacks; yet, the
“world is advised to accept the theory with respect to them that ‘a pint
can never be educated to hold more than a pint.'”
Charles S. Johnson
In a critical analysis of the testing instrument, how it was administered, and the ends to which data were being used, Charles S. Johnson
(1923, pp. 21-25) noted that intelligence was a “vague, uncertain, and
indefinable quality.” Although he was not a psychologist, Johnson
believed that blacks lived in a maze of environmental circumstances
and handicaps from which it was extremely difficult to be assured a
strictly unbiased examination. He was particularly suspicious of the
comparative test scores in light of the frank interest expressed in the
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
industrial education of blacks. He suggested that some people concluded that industrial education was the only kind for which blacks
were suited, yet no such conclusions were reached for whites who fell
within the same limits of the ratings assigned to blacks.
Johnson directed six major criticisms at both the statistical data
from the tests and the expressed intention of administering them by
the army, as details of the tests were reported in Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. In the first place, since the army immediately
needed relatively very few men for officers’ training camps, the tests
were timed to allow only a small percentage to finish. Second, the
intention was even more evident with respect to black draftees. The
army’s use of service troops had been decided long before they were
tested. Johnson, citing from the Memoirs, noted that “the matter of
distribution according to grades of intelligence was of less importance
in the case of the Negro and the matter of elimination was not so
much one of excluding the lowest from regular military service as it
was one of admitting the highest” (Yerkes 1923, p. 705).
Third, since blacks were not needed in large numbers in the higher
echelons of service, the examiners were instructed to act accordingly.
Fourth, outside of the fact that blacks were summarily directed to take
the Beta test, which was not as satisfactory a test for illiterate blacks as
for illiterate whites (many of whom were immigrants), blacks were
largely inattentive and fell asleep. Fifth, white recruits failing the test
were reexamined, while “with the Negroes, ‘the standard procedure
was often modified to meet the unusual situation.”‘ Fifty percent of
the blacks were rated “D-,” and of those, only one-fifth were recalled
for reexamination. Of this recalled group, 86.9 percent made higher
scores, just as the performance of those making D on the first exam
increased from 3 percent to 30 percent. Last, the test called attention
to significant differences between southern and northern blacks, but
comparative intelligence ratings for white northern and southern recruits were avoided, for the “staff feared to come to hasty conclusions
upon this comparison of states with data” whose precision was greatly
affected by individual testing centers.
Howard H. Long
Another of the critics of intelligence testing was Howard H. Long, a
1916 (M.A.) graduate of Clark University in experimental psychol-
ogy. In addition to teaching psychology at Howard University and
earning his doctorate at Harvard (1933), he was assistant superin-
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Thomas
tendent in the Department of Research in the Washington, D.C.,
public schools.
His 1923 review of Carl C. Brigham’s book took issue with the
author on several crucial points. Brigham had asserted that there is a
high correlation between the “unbroken increase of proficiency in
mental tests and the length of residence in the United States” and had
insisted that “the decline in proficiency with the recency of arrival in
America is due to a change in stocks,” early immigrants having been
Nordic and recent ones from Alpine and Mediterranean countries.
Black intellectuals were particularly sensitive to the importance of
their challenges to conclusions that were being drawn about southern
and eastern Europeans. To be sure, if insidious inferences about them
went unchallenged, it would not be too long before they would be
made about blacks.7 Therefore, Long responded by pointing to
Brigham’s failure to consider differences of environment among nations compared. He stated, “There are indications of a positive correlation between the social conditions in these countries and the rating
of immigrants in intelligence as judged from the Army examination”
(Long 1923, pp. 222). He called attention to the fact that Brigham
insisted on the inferiority of foreign-born whites. Long was critical of
his failure to give significant attention to the distinction between the
average intelligence of northern and southern blacks (12.94 and
10.88 years mental age, respectively), as well as those white draftees
from Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, concerns consistent with those of Bond. These test scores, when compared with
those of northern whites, could have justified arguments against
southern native and northern whites’ intermarrying.
Long noted one final disparity in Brigham’s conclusions, in addition
to the questionable statistical procedure of appealing to the normal
curve of distribution of his data as a criterion of its validity. Brigham
had estimated the proportion of Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean
blood in each of the European groups. He contended that in dec-
rements of five, the percentage of Nordic blood in groups from Sweden, Norway, Scotland, and England ranged, respectively, from 100
to 80 percent. The percentage of Mediterranean blood in these same
groups ranged from zero to 20, the English having the highest percentage. Ranking these groups in intelligence, Sweden ranked ninth,
Norway tenth, Scotland third, and England first. To this inconsistency
Long responded, “Here is a strong indication of a high negative correlation between race and test scores. England, the most inferior of
the white race, takes first rank in intelligence, according to Brigham,
who concludes from his discussion that the Nordic are markedly
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
superior to the rest of the white race, and that, of course, the Negro is
out of the question. In fact, he views the introduction of the Negro
into American institutions as one of the most sinister events in Ameri-
can history” (Long 1923a, p. 222).
In an earlier article, Long (1923b, p. 23) warned against farreaching and unwarranted generalizations which had run ahead of
facts and speculation. “Theories should not be lightly projected
which, if taken too seriously by the always uncritical public, may cause
injury to large groups of people.” In raising the question of environmental influences upon test results, Long did not deny the influence
of heredity. He posited that “the ‘stuff’ out of which intelligence is
made has a peculiar characteristic of being very susceptible to stimuli.
This is inherited just as the peculiar mechanism of the chameleon,
which causes the organism to take on the color of its surroundings;
but what change it takes on is determined very largely by its environment” (p. 23). Long’s thesis was advanced by his assertion that native
intelligence, per se, is not measurable. Only acquired intelligence is
measurable to any degree because tests measure intelligence in-
directly. The validity of the test, therefore, depends on the degree to
which that which is measured in the test correlates with the actual
quality being inferred from the test results.
After a statistical review of the data gathered from the army test,
Long then pointed to the effect of motivation and drive on blacks’
performance on tests, alluding, as did Charles S. Johnson, to army
psychologists’ complaints of the “extreme difficulty of getting Negroes
to take certain parts of the mental test seriously” (Long, p. 28).
A 1925 article by Long purposely skirted the issue of whether races
were equal in respect to their mental capacities, a matter which Long
left for the propagandists to debate. Instead, it presented a technical
criticism of mental testing in its relationship to the psychology of
races, leading to the following conclusions: (1) a need to question the
validity of tests applied to groups having quite different experiences
and incentives from those on whom the test had been standardized;
(2) mental age scores are inadequate for comparing the mentality of
races unless account is taken of the correlation of the raw scores with
chronological age; (3) the IQ has the same limitations since it is derived in part from mental age; (4) the variability unit is limited by the
assumption of normality, which is usually not met; (5) the practice of
measuring differences between average attainment of groups in
terms of the variability units of one of the groups is not justified
theoretically or practically; it tends to exaggerate the differences; (6)
the standard deviation of probable error of the combined distribution
of the groups compared is a better unit for measuring such differ-
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Thomas
ences; (7) what we know of heredity does not justify the claims to
accurate prediction of mental or physical characteristics of offspring
from those of parents; (8) prejudice plays an all-too-important role in
studies in race psychology.
Summary
To a great extent, Long, having special expertise in psychology, was in
a unique position to go beyond the rhetorical and qualitative analysis
of his environmentalist contemporaries. While he and Johnson critically scrutinized the tests and the data, sampling procedures, a priori
assumptions about the research subjects, and the insensitivity of the
researchers, there is convincing evidence that they too perceived
mental testing as a reliable means to differentiate individuals and
groups, just so long as environmental variables were taken into account. That they did so would have telling consequences for black
youth in subsequent decades of mental testing experimentation.
Rise of Empirical Investigators
Blacks of the 1920s also launched a campaign to develop an alternative data base by administering the tests themselves. The purpose of
this strategy was articulated by one of these empirical researchers,
Joseph St. Clair Price. He referred to the paucity of blacks conduct-
ing major experiments in the field of mental measurement. He
suggested that “it is reasonable to expect that if any considerable
process is to be made in these investigations, the bulk of the research
must be undertaken by Negroes” (Price 1929, p. 343). Without
negating the role and works of those white researchers who protested
the racist inferences drawn from intelligence test data, such re-
searchers as Price, Ira Reid, Horace Mann Bond, and Herman
Canady recognized the need for highly specialized, well-trained
blacks sharing the necessary sensitivity to the controversy to step for-
ward and address the issues.
Ira DeA. Reid
One of the earliest empirical studies conducted by a black researcher
on intelligence testing and cultural background was executed by
sociologist Ira DeA. Reid.
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
In 1925 Reid studied 205 black inmates of the Western Penitentiary
of Pennsylvania, comparing intelligence test data with those pertaining to their ages, education, places of birth, and occupational status
(Reid 1925, pp. 168-70). The mental test disclosed that 110 (54 percent) of the 205 subjects clustered in the moron range; 42 (21 percent)
were borderline; and 27 (13 percent) scored dull-normal. He re-
ported that there were significant variables affecting the statistical
profile of the inmates, although he did not correlate IQ with these
other variables. Twenty-six and nine-tenths percent of the group
were illiterate, and 83 percent (169) had had less than a sixth-grade
education. More than half of them were unskilled or occupationless.
Reid, like his colleagues, espoused an environmental perspective; he
did not view these data as indices of heredity, but as the results of the
sordid life situations which the test subjects had encountered.
Addressing one variable affecting the administration of the test,
Reid noted that dialect also proved to be a serious handicap for the
subjects who took the test. They frequently confused such words as
“bonfire” with “barn fire,” “roar” with “row,” “mellow” with “melon,”
“fen” with “fin,” and “priceless” with “price list.” These findings are
consistent with those reported by Opportunity in an editorial entitled
“The Intelligence of Negro Children.” The editorial claimed that
problems of differences in dialect between black children and white
examiners arose when the children confused such words as “lecture”
with “electric” and “civil” with “silver” (Opportunity [March 1927]).
Horace Mann Bond
Research into the “mulatto hypothesis” was still another area investigated by blacks. Given the favored position of lightercomplexioned blacks since slavery (see Herskovits 1926), and the
sociopolitical implications which continued race mixing held for racial
purity doctrinaires, questions around the mulatto hypothesis were
potentially volatile. Although psychologist Martin D. Jenkins would
emerge in the 1930s as the leading black researcher on factors contributing to superior intelligence of some blacks (1936, 1943, 1949),
Horace Mann Bond’s 1927 study of thirty exceptional children in
Chicago got to the heart of black intellectuals’ spirited interest in
refuting the hereditarian view. That was to effect change in the environment of black youth, allowing human talent to emerge when it
could be identified. Bond had spoken out earlier on the assumptions
and conclusions made about the inferiority of blacks, relying much on
qualitative analysis of racist data to support his environmentalist
claims. This time, in an empirical vein, Bond (1927, pp. 257-59, 279282 American Journal of Education
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Thomas
80) selected samples from what he termed “professional, middle class,
and laboring homes,” and administered the original Binet-Simon test
in his attempt to identify “exceptional Negro children.” Terman
(1916, chap. 5), sampling 1,000 children, had estimated that ap-
proximately 33 percent would score above 106, 5 percent above 122, 3
percent above 125, and 1 percent above 130. When Bond compared
data on his 30 subjects with those of Terman, they showed that 63
percent scored above 106, 47 percent above 122, 42 percent above
125, and 26 percent above 130.
In the refutation of the mulatto hypothesis, which sought to explain
the high increment of intelligence of blacks in terms of race mixture,
Bond pointed to the fact that one girl, who evidenced no admixture of
“white blood” in her lineage, had a score of 142. Furthermore, five
children with the highest score were no lighter in complexion than
Africans. While he did not view his sample of children as an exceptional lot, for such a group could have been found in any black community, Bond did take pride in the fact that “exceptional individuals
Twere] being proliferated in our race” and regarded them as a “‘Balm
in Gilead’ to ease our discouraged hopes for racial betterment” (1927,
p. 259). Bond’s case studies led him to conclude that regardless of the
socioeconomic status of the family, high scoring children come from
families which encourage reading. Turning once again to the
established research of whites, he pointed to the works of Felix Adler
and Arnold Gessell, which had suggested that mental superiority was
a product of mental stimulation in the first three years of life. Bond
asserted further that parents often feared supernormal children and
did not encourage stimulation until school age, when it was too late.
He perceived that the highly talented child’s intelligence was being
snuffed out by poor teaching, poor schools, unambitious playmates,
prejudice, and parental irresponsibility in leaving to the “wretched”
schools the single educational task which could be done at home.
Joseph St. Clair Price
Somewhat less concerned with “inherent” racial differences in mental
ability, studies by some blacks did take cognizance of interracial differences, primarily to determine the extent to which black students
were measuring up to the students in predominantly white colleges.
In his study of interracial differences, Price (Ed.D., Harvard, 1940),
who later became dean at Howard University, held that the results of
group tests comparing the intelligence of blacks and whites had been
misleading, probably due to the influence of nurture (Price 1929).
He aimed his investigation at discovering whether there were any
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
significant quantitative differences in the intelligence of freshmen at
certain first-rate black colleges. Having compared these freshmen
with a group of black freshmen in northern, predominantly white
universities, he then sought to compare the black college groups’ intelligence scores with a group of 954 freshmen in six white colleges.
His data were obtained primarily from seven black colleges, and consisted of the crude scores on intelligence tests administered entering
freshmen in 1927. Similar information was reported to Price from six
white colleges, Cornell, Dartmouth, Indiana University, Northwestern, Purdue, and Ohio State University. One of his conclusions was
that there were quantitative differences in intelligence among the
freshmen of different black colleges. Price’s data from the Otis Selfadministering Test showed that 43 percent, 27 percent, and 23 per-
cent of the freshmen at Morehouse, Hampton, and Lincoln, re-
spectively, reached or exceeded the norm group’s median score, while
only 18 percent, 12 percent, 10 percent, and 9 percent of their counterparts at North Carolina State College, Fisk, West Virginia State,
and Virginia Union, respectively, did so. These data, according to
Price, tended to confirm little more than the fact that Morehouse and
Hampton selected a better student than the other colleges did.
Price then compared black freshmen in white colleges with blacks in
black colleges and concluded that, for five white colleges, the differences between the median scores of the 42 black freshmen therein
and the 433 black freshmen at three black universities were in-
significant; at Ohio State the difference between the scores of 70 b
freshmen and 857 black freshmen in seven black colleges was negli
ble, being less than one point in favor of the latter.
When Price examined the differences between the median scores of
867 freshmen in black colleges and the 954 white freshmen in white
colleges, he found a 10-point difference in favor of whites, the median IQ of the whites being 109 and that of the blacks being 98. The
differences he attributed, in part, to the fact that the white students
represented part of the population on whom this test had been standardized in January 1924. While the whites were 66 percent as variable as the blacks, he also found that 20 percent of the black freshmen
exceeded the median score of the whites.
Herman G. Canady
One other black scholar of this period contributed to the empirical
body of knowledge on mental testing. Herman Canady, who earned
his Ph.D. in psychology at Northwestern in 1941, wrote his master’s
thesis on the effects of rapport on IQ (1928). His was one of the
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Thomas
earlier assessments by black researchers of the importance of rapport
in test administration. Testing the hypothesis that black children do
not respond to white examiners as white children do, Canady administered the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence
Scale to 48 black and 25 white children attending elementary school in
Evanston, Illinois. Twenty-three black and 18 white children were
tested first by a black examiner and then by a white examiner. The
remaining 25 black and seven white children were tested by a white
and then by a black examiner in order to measure the gains and losses
of both groups of children. The interval between testing ranged from
a day to a year.
Canady found that the average increase in IQ for black children
was about the same as the average loss of the white children. Only
four children in the combined black groups gained more than 10 IQ
points under a black examiner, and only five children of the combined white group lost more than 10 points. An average increase of
six points in IQ was found for blacks tested by a black examiner and
an average decrease of six points for the whites. Canady saw these
fluctuations as haphazard rather than progressively upward or
downward. He noted further that a change of 10 points occurred in
18 percent of the combined groups. These figures seemed to correlate
well with those in studies by Terman (1919, pp. 135-64), which
showed on the average a change from the first IQ of about 5 points up
or down, while a change of as much as 10 points appeared in only
10-15 percent of all the cases. Holding that the IQ was not characteristic of the individual, Canady concluded that the group-for-group
comparison of the performances of black and white subjects failed to
reveal any differences that might legitimately be interpreted as due to
the personal equation of the examiners.
Critical, however, of the methodology employed in mental testing
research and the problems which arose from extrapolating test data,
Canady aimed much of his criticism at the inherent cultural bias in the
tests. Consistent with the empirical findings of Price, he perceived that
blacks were being measured with tests which had been standardized
on a northern, urban, white culture and were applicable only to indi-
viduals of similar background and upon whom the tests had been
standardized.
Postscript
This essay raises some important questions in the sociology of know
edge, the most obvious point being how the black critique was a
continued to be ignored in the mainstream of psychological sch
May 1982 285
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
arship. Less obvious is the fact that the same words and ideas may
convey certain meanings at one time and place and different meanings at another. In each instance, such words and ideas may be used at
one time to effect change by challenging social class relationships and
at another time to preserve the social structure.
Ten black intellectuals cited here launched an attack upon racist
assumptions and conclusions which mental tests stimulated. Their
primary concerns were (1) how to contravene notions that these tests
were measuring human qualities which were innate and independent
of the effects of environment; (2) how to refute conclusions that
blacks were innately inferior to whites; and (3) how to challenge inferences from the test data which would be used to relegate blacks to
further peonage. With unanimity, black intellectuals acknowledged
that mental tests showed differences in individual abilities both within
and across social groups and localities and that these differences were
a function of environment.
By 1930, however, many of these black scholars entered a new
phase of mental testing research, investigating the effects of culture
(home, schooling, socioeconomic status); the effects of heredity (racial
admixture); and the effects of testing methodology (sampling and
rapport) on test performance by blacks. Having gained greater access
to northern universities, they developed greater sophistication in the
administration of mental tests and reporting quantified research data.
Once again they called upon the cooperation and authority of white
intellectuals and issued a definitive statement on mental abilities in the
1934 yearbook of the Journal of Negro Education.
Ironically, a disturbing chain of events was occurring. Black col-
leges, and some secondary schools, were beginning to adopt mental
testing (1) as a scientific tool of educational and vocational guidance;
(2) as a modern mechanism for curriculum differentiation; and (3) as
a means to adjust black youth to the harsh realities of economic depression, biracialism, and the heterogeneous onslaught entering public schools and colleges (Thomas 1981). Mental testing for sorting and
social adjustment purposes had even become institutionalized in
many of these schools by 1940. By then, black educators had donned
the white coats of science, asserting that its application to education
had progressed “beyond the most sanguine hopes” of earlier mental
testers. Ambrose Caliver, a specialist in Negro education, contended
further that science was moving toward the vanguard of social progress, helping black educators to base decisions on the power of fact
and to “escape from the educational morass through more religiously
applying scientific methods in our educational procedures” (1933, pp.
10-13). No less of a convert to science, Bond (1937, p. 361), now dean
286 American Journal of Education
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Thomas
at Dillard University in Louisiana, even asserted that “it is time we
recognized the fact that our entrants do differ widely in preparation
and abilities. This is [no] occasion to develop a violent anger at intelligence testing and to say that intelligence testing ‘is the bunk.”‘ As
willing vehicles for perpetuating differences through the uses of “science,” black colleges, now administered by the same cadre of black
intellectuals who had spoken out against uses of intelligence tests,
were becoming institutions of adaptation and adjustment to prevailing societal norms of inequality in a democratic society.
This seeming shift to a more elitist posture at a time when educa-
tional opportunities were becoming more accessible to southern
blacks must be viewed in several lights, one of which is the ideological
functions of progressive and modernizing directions in the education
of black youth. As larger numbers of blacks from lower-class homes
entered traditionally middle-class secondary schools, the gateway to
higher education, new concerns emerged over differentiation in curricular offerings and pedagogical methodology to address the needs
of individual students. These trends were coupled with the pro-
fessionalization of guidance as a modern educational vehicle of social
adjustment of blacks to the realities of caste and class in an economically prostrate southern society. Intelligence testing enabled black
educators to single out superior students from the effects of heterogeneous mixing and “democratizing” of public schools. Psychologist
Herman Canady, writing from West Virginia State College, reported
the results of his study of the academically talented student, suggest-
ing that although educators had always known that human beings
differed, “it is only in recent years that methods of precision in the
measurement of the traits involved have been developed” (Canady
1937, pp. 202-5). In an academic climate validating the notion that it
is as important that one discovers what one cannot do as it is to
discover what one can do, black educators had not come too far afield
from the postulations of Lewis Terman.
A second consideration is that as far back as the earlier organized
intellectual attack upon racist traditions, black intellectuals called
upon each other to “recognize rare genius, uncommon talent.”
Alexander Crummell wrote: “… here arises the need for the trained
and scholarly men of the race to employ their knowledge and culture
and teaching and to guide both the opinions and habits of the crude
masses. The masses, nowhere are, or can be, learned or scientific”
(cited in Aptheker 1970, pp. 773-74). In a statement anticipating
DuBois’s concept of “the talented tenth,” the founding president of
the American Negro Academy went on to urge his fellow intellectuals:
“If we are fortunate enough to see a clever mathematician of our
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
class, a brilliant poet, a youthful but promising scientist or philosopher, let us rush forward, and hail his coming with no hesitant admiration, with no reluctant praise…. It is only thus we can nullify and
break down the conspiracy which would fain limit and narrow the
range of Negro talent in this caste-tainted country” (p. 774). These
pronouncements, as well-intentioned as they seem, may well have set
the stage for the sorting and selecting process which would later occur
in black schools and colleges.
They do lead to questions of whether the early black critics of
mental testing were as devoutly opposed to the underlying assumptions of individual intellectual differences as their critiques suggest
they might have been. Significantly, as early as 1924, Bond had projected that “… . intelligence tests in time may come to be a very valuable addition to the pedagogical methodology of modern practice. As
a valuable instrument of classification, and as a remedy of the classic
faults of teachers’judgment, they may well bring about a revolution in
the schools of tomorrow” (1924, p. 202). In challenging the re-
searchers and their “scientific” bases for race prejudice legitimation,
black intellectuals were attracted to an ideological debate over what
they perceived to be racist, and perhaps even elitist, assumptions and
conclusions drawn from mental tests. By employing the tool which
had been used to build a body of racist data, blacks were co-opted into
an ironic and paradoxical legitimation of the instrument. In some
instances, they were graduate students writing theses and dissertations in psychology not only at northern universities but at black
southern colleges now offering master’s degrees principally in education. Conducting empirical studies on their own students, they lent
credence to the very instrument of which earlier blacks had been
critical. Under this aura of “science,” black schools were creating an
intellectual elite, using these tests to fit black students into the niche
that had been created for them by other groups.
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Notes
I wish to gratefully acknowledge the critical comments of Anthony J. Nitko,
professor, Educational Research, University of Pittsburgh, and H. Warren
Button, professor, Social Foundations of Education, SUNY at Buffalo.
1. With the possible exception of Guthrie’s work (1976, 1981), contemporary scholarship continues to disregard the contributions of black social scientists to the mental testing controversy. See, e.g., Cronbach (1975) and Fass
(1980).
2. For an illustrative essay on white southern progressives and interracial
cooperation, see Thomas (1981).
3. Which he did; see Boas (1910).
4. DuBois himself hurled a few caustic barbs, assailing in a brief editorial
the conclusions of M. R. Trabue of Columbia University. The then director of
the Bureau of Educational Services had asserted that the intelligence of the
average southern Negro was equal to that of a nine-year-old white child and
that educational programs should be arranged to make “waiters, porters,
scavengers, and the like” of most Negros. “Is it conceivable,” DuBois chided,
“that a great university should employ a man whose ‘science’ consists of such
utter rot?” (DuBois 1910).
5. Editorials in Opportunity challenged the hereditarian view, citing such
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Black Intellectuals on Early Mental Testing
writers as Walter Lippmann (1923) who contended that there was a close
correspondence between high mental tests and good schools (“Defending
Education against the New Psychologists,” Opportunity [December 1923]);
Henry C. Link, also a firm supporter of …
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