Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark was a trailblazing social psychologist whose brilliance and passion contributed to breaking down segregated barriers throughout history. Mamie Phipps was born on April 18, 1917 in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the Jim Crow era in the South. Her father was a doctor, a native of the British West Indies. Even though Mamie Phipps grew up during the Depression and a time of racism and segregation, she had a privileged childhood. Her father's occupation and income allowed them to live a middle-class lifestyle and even got them into some White-only parts of town. Mamie Phipps, however, still attended segregated elementary and secondary schools, graduating from Pine Bluff's Langston High School in 1934 at only 16 years old.
Despite the small number of opportunities for Black students to pursue higher education, Mamie Phipps received scholarship offers from two of the most prestigious Black universities at that time, Fisk University in Tennessee and Howard University in Washington DC. Mamie choose Howard University, because the department head of psychology, Francis Cecil Sumner, allowed her to work part-time in the psychology department where she expanded her knowledge about psychology. During her senior year in 1937 Kenneth Clark, another mentee of Sumner's, and Mamie Phipps got married. They had to elope because her mother did not want her to get married before she graduated. A year later, she earned her B.A. magna cum laude in psychology (1938).
In the fall of 1938 Mamie Phipps Clark went to graduate school at Howard University to get a master's degree in psychology. After Phipps Clark graduated, she struggled being a psychologist as an African-American woman living in New York. She found it difficult to get a job; she lost some opportunities to less qualified White men and women. In the summer of 1939, Mamie took one of her first jobs as a secretary in the legal office of African-American lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston. At the time, Houston was a popular civil rights lawyer and Mamie was privileged to see lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall come into the office to work on important cases. She admits that she did not think anything could be done about segregation and racial oppression until after this experience.
While working on her master's degree, Phipps Clark became increasingly interested in developmental psychology. The inspiration for her thesis came from working at an all Black nursery school. She contacted psychologists Ruth and Gene Horowitz for advice. At the time they were conducting psychological studies about self-identification in young children and suggested that she conduct similar research with her nursery school children. Her master's thesis was entitled "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children." This thesis was the basis from what would later become the Clarks' famous doll study on racial preference.
Her husband Kenneth was fascinated by her thesis research and after her graduation they worked together on the research. They developed new and improved versions of the color and doll tests used in her thesis for a proposal to further the research. Mamie went on for additional study at Columbia University. In 1939 they both received a three-year Rosenwald Fellowship for their research that allowed them to publish three articles on the subject and also permitted Phipps Clark to pursue a doctoral degree at Columbia University. During her time at Columbia, Mamie was the only Black student pursuing a doctorate in psychology and she had a faculty adviser, Dr. Henry Garrett, who believed in segregation.
Despite their differences in beliefs, Phipps Clark was able to complete her dissertation, "Changes in Primary Mental Abilities with Age." In 1943, she earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Not only was she the only Black woman in the entire program, but she also became the second African-American to earn a doctorate from Columbia, the first being her husband. Even after earning her Ph.D., Mamie Phipps Clark found finding good job opportunities to be difficult. In 1944, she found a job through a family friend at the American Public Health Association analyzing research about nurses, which she hated. She stayed at that job for one year but was grossly overqualified for the position, which she found embarrassing.
Mamie Phipps Clark later obtained a position at the United States Armed Forces Institute as a research psychologist but she still felt pigeonholed. In 1945 she was able to get a better job working for the United States Armed Forces Institute as a research psychologist. As World War II ended the Armed Forces Institute did not feel the need to employ her anymore. Later in 1946, Phipps Clark got a job in New York at the Riverdale Children's Association where she saw potential to perform meaningful work. Founded by Quakers in 1836 as the Colored Orphan Asylum, in 1944, just two years before Dr. Clark arrived, the then 108 year old institution had changed its name. At Riverdale, she conducted psychological tests and counseled young, homeless Black people.
While there, she saw first hand how insufficient psychological services were for minority children. Many of the children were being called mentally retarded by the state but Clark tested them and found they had IQs above then accepted levels for such claims. She saw society's segregation as the cause for gang warfare, poverty, and low academic performance of minorities. This was a "kick start" to her life's work and led to her most significant contributions in the field of developmental psychology. Her unrelenting research on the identity and self-esteem of Black people expanded work on identity development.
Kenneth and Mamie Clark decided to try to improve social services for troubled youth in Harlem as there were virtually no mental-health services in the community. Kenneth Clark was then an assistant professor at the City College of New York and Phipps Clark was a psychological consultant doing testing at the Riverdale Children's Association. Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Bancroft Clark approached social service agencies in New York City urging them to expand their programs to provide social work, psychological evaluation, and remediation for youth in Harlem. None of the agencies took up their proposal. The Clarks "realized that we were not going to get a child guidance clinic opened that way. So we decided to open it ourselves."
Together in 1946 the Clarks created the Northside Center for Child Development, originally called the Northside Testing and Consultation Center. They started in a one-room basement apartment of the Dunbar Houses on 158th Street (Manhattan). Two years later in 1948, Northside moved to 110th Street, across from Central Park. In 1974, Northside moved to Schomburg Plaza. The Clark's goal was to match or surpass for poor African Americans, the mental health services then available for other children. It served as a location for initial experiments on racial biases in education and the intersection of education and varying theories and practices around social psychology. Northside was the first center that offered psychological services to minority families around Harlem.
Mamie remained the director of the Northside Center for 33 years irector until her retirement in 1979. Mamie Phipps Clark did not limit her contributions to her Northside work. She was a very involved member of the community. She was on the boards of directors for several community organizations, along with being involved with the Youth Opportunities Unlimited Project and the initiation of the Head Start Program. Mamie also volunteered in the psychiatric clinic of the Domestic Relations Court while she was completing her doctorate at Columbia and went on to teach at Yeshiva University.
The Clarks' "doll experiments" grew out of Mamie Clark's master's degree thesis. They published three major papers between 1939 and 1940 on children's self-perception related to race. Their studies found contrasts among African-American children attending segregated schools in Washington, DC versus those in integrated schools in New York. In the doll experiment, the Clarks showed Black children two dolls that were identical in every way except that one doll was White and one was Black. The children were then asked a series of questions. They included which doll they preferred to play with, which doll was a "nice" doll, which one was a "bad doll," and which one looked most like the child. The researchers discovered that not only would 59% the children identify the Black doll as the "bad" one, nearly 33% selected the White doll as the one they most resembled.
One of the conclusions from the study is that a Black child by the age of five is aware that to be "colored in American society is a mark of inferior status." This research also paved the way for an increase in psychological research into areas of self-esteem and self-concept. This work suggests that by its very nature, segregation harms children and, by extension, society at large, a suggestion that was exploited in several legal battles. The experiment played an important role in the Brown vs the Board of Education case by demonstrating the harmful effects of segregation on children. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled racial segregation to be unconstitutional in U.S. in this case.
Mamie Phipps Clark played an important role in the civil rights movement, as her work with her husband demonstrated how the concept of "separate but equal" provided a far from equal education for Black youth. Her investigations into self-concept among minorities inspired further research on the subject and opened up new areas of research within the field of developmental psychology. Mamie is not as famous as her husband. It has been noted that she adhered to feminine expectations of the time and often took care to "remain in the shadows of her husband's limelight". For her contributions, Phipps Clark received a Candace Award for Humanitarianism from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1983. She died of lung cancer on August 11, 1983, at her home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.