It is no secret that many psychology textbooks tend to overlook women psychologists. This is especially the case for women of color. A primary example would be Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, who often worked alongside her husband, psychologist Kenneth Clark. However, she had not received the same attention or recognition as her husband. Thus, let’s shed some light today on Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, an extraordinary psychologist who made great impacts on psychology and the Civil Rights movement with her work.
Born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on April 18, 1917, Clark grew up in the Jim Crow South. While her parents encouraged her to pursue an education, she had to go to a segregated school and witnessed racial violence. As a result, Clark was made aware of the stigmas surrounding heras from a young age leading her to say, “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," as an adult. However, despite the Great Depression and prevalent racism in her youth, Clark had a happy and comfortable childhood. Because her father was a well-respected physician and had substantial financial success and her mother stayed home to care for the family, which was rare for African Americans, Clark acknowledged that she had a “privileged childhood”
After graduating high school, Clark went to Howard University on a merit scholarship. During her time there, she found the professors in the math and physics departments to be unsupportive and cold, causing her to switch her major to psychology. In 1938, Clark graduated magna cum laude with her bachelor’s degree. However, she was not done with her schooling yet. She returned to Howard University and obtained her master’s degree in 1939 with her thesis “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children” serving as inspiration for one of her groundbreaking projects. After obtaining her master’s, Clark became the first African American woman to receive a doctoral degree in psychology from Columbia University in 1943. Amidst all her schooling, Clark married her husband Kenneth in 1937.
After her graduate years, Clark became confident that there were solutions to segregation and racial oppression. However, she could not find an academic job despite her accomplishments. Fully aware that it was because of her race and gender, she said that a “black female with a Ph.D. in psychology was an unwanted anomaly in New York City in the early 1940s.” So in 1946, she opened an agency with her husband called Northside Center for Child Development to offer mental health, social, and academic services to children in the Harlem area because no one was providing these services to African American children. The following year, Clark conducted ground-breaking research with her husband connecting race to psychology.
In 1947, Mamie and Kenneth Clark conducted their famous “Doll Experiments.” In this experiment, 253 African American children aged three to seven were introduced to four dolls. Two dolls had white skin and blonde hair and the other two had brown skin and black hair. Children had to identify their race and which one they wanted to play with. Results showed that they overwhelmingly chose the white dolls and assigned them positive traits more often than their black counterparts. Thus, Mamie and Kenneth Clark concluded that African American children formed a racial identity by three years old and associated negative attributes to their own identity, further maintained by the prevalent racial segregation and prejudice. After this project, the two continued to conduct experiments centering on racial biases in education, testifying in many civil rights cases concerning school desegregation, like Brown v. Board of Ed and Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County.
Before Clark passed away in 1983, she won many awards. In 1973, she was awarded the American Association of University Women Achievement award for her “admirable service to the field of mental health.” And right before she passed away, Clark was awarded the Candace Award for humanitarianism in the National Coalition of 100 Black Women. On August 11, 1983, Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark died of lung cancer. But, her contributions to academic research and the civil rights movement remain notable to this day.
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