Black History Month: Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark
Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas on April 18, 1917. She was exposed to the violence of racism at a young age. She recalled having developed a conscious awareness of her identity during her childhood because “you had to have a certain kind of protective armor about you, all the time…you learned the things not to do…so as to protect yourself.” She studied psychology at Howard University in Washington, D.C. where she met her husband, fellow psychology student and future research partner, Dr. Kenneth Clark.
The summer before commencing her master’s in psychology, Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark was a secretary for a NAACP lawyer whose work sought to dismantle Jim Crow laws such as segregation in schools. This inspired her thesis which aimed to understand the issues of race and child development and more specifically, when and how African-American children came to be aware of their African-American identity. After completing her masters, she joined her husband Dr. Kenneth Clark at Columbia University in pursuit of a Ph.D. in Psychology. The Clarks were the first African-Americans to obtain doctoral degrees in psychology from Columbia University.
Despite her accomplishments, Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark struggled to find a job, but eventually ended up as a psychologist for the Riverdale Home for Children. Disheartened by the lack of available services for African-American children in Harlem, she advocated for more resources, but was met with silence. This led her and her husband to establish the Northside Center for Childhood Development in 1946. It was the city’s first and only organization that offered mental health services to African-American children and as such, it became a center for activism.
Additionally, Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark and Dr. Kenneth Clark devised a research test known famously today as “The Doll Test” which played a huge role in the Civil Rights Movement. The test was instrumental in exposing internalized racism and the subsequent negative impacts that segregation had on the development of African-American children.
Together, the Clarks analyzed 253 African-American children in total. 134 of these children attended segregated schools in Arkansas while the remaining 119 of them attended integrated schools in Massachusetts. During the test, the children were given 2 Black dolls and two white ones and were asked to identify the races of the doll and which they wanted to play with. An overwhelming majority chose the white doll and assigned it positive traits. Based on this data, the Clarks concluded that African-American children tended to form a sense of racial identity by the age of 3 with affixed negative traits. Using this data, the Clarks provided testimonies in school desegregation cases, most famously in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 which ended American school segregation. The use of their data in this case also marked the first acceptance of “social science evidence” as hard fact by the U.S. Supreme Court.
References
https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/psychologists/clark
https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/psychologists/clark
https://ampsychfdn.org/funding/clark-grant/
About The Author
Valentina is a 4th year Concurrent Education student at Queen’s, majoring in history. She is very passionate about the arts and enjoys drawing and painting in her free time.