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Well, because those birds didn't come back, I kept listening to Sumner, really for the rest of my life, until he died at the age of 57 of a heart attack, after I received my PhD. This man was a major influence in my life. I decided I wasn't going to medical school. I was going to learn as much about psychology as Sumner could teach me. I became not only his student but his disdiple. We had, we developed a very close personal professional relationship, so close that at one time he said to me, “Kenneth, you have to understand that friendship cannot be suffocating. It has to give all the parties room to breathe.”

And he told it to me in such a gentle, wonderful way that it didn't interfere, but deepened our friendship.

Side 4

Continuation of the interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark, February 4, 1976.

I started to say, I want to believe, and I don't care whether the facts prove otherwise, that I was his prize pupil. Because I think, from the time I got involved with Sumner, whom I called “Dr. Sumner” up until the time he died, my life just wasn't the same. I lived, breathed, you know, everything, with the exception of my personal life and my sex life with Mamie, and the children, everything was psychology. In fact, my courtship of Mamie became dominated by psychology. I insisted that she shift from a major in mathematics to a major in psychology. Everything was psychology.

And the regret I have is that Sumner did not live long enough (school desegregation decision, 1954) to see the Brown decision made, and he did not live long enough to see me elected president of the American Psychological Association. These two things would have made him ecstatically happy, I am convinced.