Psychology and Social Justice

1967

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968)

In September of 1967, less than a year before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. gave an electrifying address to more than five thousand members of the American Psychological Association (APA) in Washington, D.C. The presence of King at APA was unprecedented; in fact, race and social problems were not issues that the leadership of APA had ever addressed effectively.

The organized discipline of psychology in the United States was largely conservative in its view of the need to make their science and practice relevant to social problems, despite the saliency of the long civil rights struggle in the United States. But a group affiliated with APA, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), invited King to give an address at the annual APA convention. King spoke on “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement.” The speech galvanized many psychologists and led them to become more involved in social issues. The very next year, APA approached Kenneth B. Clark, a prominent African American social psychologist and friend of King’s, to run for the APA presidency. To date, he is the only African American to be president of APA.

Prior to this time, Clark had not been actively involved in APA. The research on racial identity conducted by Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, known as The Doll Studies, was cited in the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. This had made him a public figure, with influence far beyond the field of social psychology. Since then, Clark had grown pessimistic about the possibility of a just society that was free from racism. He wrote a friend, “How long can our nation continue the tremendous wastage of human intellectual resources demanded by racism?”

King’s speech made a difference. By the 1970s, there were active efforts to create more opportunities for graduate training in psychology to students of color.

SEE ALSO Black Psychology (1970), The BITCH Test (1970), Liberation Psychology (1989)

Martin Luther King Jr. at the American Psychological Association Convention, 1967.