Mamie Phipps Clark

Social Psychologist

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1917-1983

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Photographed by Cosmos Mariner, September 13, 2024

1. Mamie Phipps Clark Marker

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Excerpt:  Born on October 18, 1917, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Mamie Phipps attended highly segregated schools, including a Catholic elementary school. Clark graduated from Langston High School, even though it was very uncommon

Photographed by Cosmos Mariner, September 13, 2024

2. Mamie Phipps Clark Mural

for a black student to do so. She received two offers and scholarships from black prestigious universities, Fisk University and Howard University. She enrolled at Howard in 1934. Despite her attending college during the Great Depression, her father was able to send her $50 per month. She majored in math and minored in physics. It was highly unusual for black women to receive an education in those departments at the time.

At Howard University, Mamie Phipps Clark met her future husband, Kenneth Bancroft Clark, who was a master's degree student in psychology. It was Kenneth Clark who urged her to pursue psychology because it would allow her to explore her interest in working with children. In 1938, Mamie Phipps Clark graduated magna cum laude from Howard University.

The summer after her graduation Phipps worked as a secretary in the law office of Charles Houston, who was a prominent lawyer and leading civil rights figure at a time when segregation cases were being taken up by the national Association for the Advancement Colored People legal defense fund. There she witnessed the work of William Hastie, Thurgood Marshall, and others in preparation for the court challenges that would lead to the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education.

Clark was the first Black woman to earn her Ph.D. in experimental psychology, which she did in 1943 from Columbia University.

Photographed by Cosmos Mariner, September 13, 2024

3. Mamie Phipps Clark Mural

It is the rightmost of three historical murals at this location.

(By Emma Rothberg) Excerpt:  Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark was a pathbreaking psychologist whose research helped desegregate schools in the United States. Over a three-decade career, Dr. Clark researched child development and racial prejudice in ways that not only benefitted generations of children but changed the field of psychology.

Excerpt:  Psychologists Kenneth Bancroft Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, designed the “Doll Study” as a test to measure the psychological effects of segregation on black children. The Clarks’ “Doll Study” became the first psychological research to be cited by the Supreme Court and was significant in the Court’s decision to end school segregation. Using four plastic, diaper-clad dolls, identical except for color, African American children between the ages of three and seven were asked questions to determine racial perception and preference. Discouragingly, the majority of the children preferred the white doll and attributed positive characteristics

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to it, while attributing negative characteristics to the black doll.

Excerpt:  Landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in Brown, and its related cases, paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement.