William Blake is associate professor and associate chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He previous served on the faculty at Indiana University, IUPUI. William earned his Ph.D. in Government at the University of Texas in 2013, having received an M.A. in Government from Texas in 2012. He graduated magna cum laude and with high honors from the College of William and Mary in 2004, with an A.B. in Government.
Professor Blake’s major research interests include public attitudes towards the Constitution and judicial decisionmaking. William’s curriculum vitae can be found here.
About Footnote 11
The name of this blog is taken from the following section of Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 494:
“A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.”
Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority.^11
Footnote 11. K.B. Clark, Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development (Mid-century White House Conference on Children and Youth, 1950); Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making (1952), c. VI; Deutscher and Chein, The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation A Survey of Social Science Opinion, 26 J.Psychol. 259 (1948); Chein, What are the Psychological Effects of Segregation Under Conditions of Equal Facilities?, 3 Int.J.Opinion and Attitude Res. 229 (1949); Brameld, Educational Costs, in Discrimination and National Welfare (MacIver, ed., 1949), 44-48; Frazier, The Negro in the United States (1949), 674-681. And see generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944).
Footnote 11: Law and Social Science 