Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965) is Kenneth Bancroft Clark's seminal sociological and psychological treatise, in which he likened the American ghetto, with Harlem as the prototype, to an urban colony in which the almost exclusively black inhabitants are emotionally and psychologically damaged and scarred as a result of the perpetual racism, greed, insensitivity, discrimination, and fear of a white ruling class that rationalizes racial segregation on the basis of the alleged inherent inferiority, subhumanity, and brutality of the “Negro.” Written in the wake of two 1964 events—the Harlem riot and the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, Dark Ghetto was Clark's self-proclaimed “anguished cry.” Although born in the Panama Canal Zone, Clark was raised by his mother in Harlem. Thus, he approached his boyhood home as an “involved observer.” Eschewing the notion of objectivity as unrealistic and unattainable, he sought the truth behind the Harlem “pathology”: the staggering rates of juvenile delinquency, family instability, drug addiction, infant mortality, and homicide. [Source: Encyclopedia of Black Studies; Dark Ghetto]
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