With the slavery-deforming-Black-people theory no longer sustainable in the early 1950s, assimilationists conjured up the segregation-deforming-Black-people theory. They cited the famous doll tests of psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark, as well as popular books on the subject, such as The Mark of Oppression (1951) by two psychoanalysts. Discrimination and the separation of the races, the assimilationists argued, had been having a horrible effect on Black personalities and self-esteem.
