Much of the evidence behind the assumption of low black self-esteem has come from studies showing that black children prefer light-skinned dolls, pictures, or puppets to those with brown skin, or that they show problems of self-esteem in psycho-therapeutic sessions. While many of these studies are of a high order of excellence, they characteristically suffer from certain limitations with regard to method: (1) self-esteem has almost invariably been inferred by the investigator from indirect evidence rather than direct examination; and (2) the samples have rarely been representative, so that it is difficult to know to what populations they properly apply. As a result of these considerations, we undertook a study of self-esteem among black and white children in Baltimore during the spring of 1968. The population of this study was the public school pupils in Baltimore City above the second grade. In contrast to some of the earlier investigations, ours attempted to obtain a reasonably large and representative sample of a public school population and to measure self-esteem in a direct fashion. Our interest was not only in comparing the self-esteem of black and white children but also in learning how certain aspects of their respective social environments would bear upon their self-attitudes, and how children of each race would respond to these environmental influences. (Author/JM)