African-American married psychologist duo
Kenneth Bancroft Clark (July 24, 1914 – May 1, 2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (April 18, 1917 – August 11, 1983) were American psychologists who as a married team conducted research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. They founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). Kenneth Clark was also an educator and professor at City College of New York, and first Black president of the American Psychological Association.
They were known for their 1940s experiments using dolls to study children's attitudes about race. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in "Briggs v. Elliott" (1952), one of five cases combined into "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954). The Clarks' work contributed to the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in which it determined that "de jure" racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the "Brown v. Board of Education" opinion, "To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone."
Mamie Phipps Clark.
Early life.
The oldest of three children, two girls and one boy, Mamie Phipps was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Harold and Katie Phipps. Her father was a doctor, a native of the British West Indies. Her father also supplemented his income as a manager at a nearby vacation resort. Her mother helped him in his practice and encouraged both their children in education. Her brother became a dentist. Even though Phipps Clark 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. Phipps Clark, however, still attended segregated elementary and secondary schools, graduating from Pine Bluff's Langston High School in 1934 at only 16 years old. This upbringing gave her a unique perspective on how society treated White and Black people differently. This realization contributed to her future research of racial identity in Black children. Despite the small number of opportunities for Black students to pursue higher education, Phipps Clark was offered several scholarships for college. Phipps Clark received scholarship offers from two of the most prestigious Black universities at that time, Fisk University in Tennessee and Howard University in Washington D.C.
Francis 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, another mentee of Sumner's, and Mamie Clark 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). Both Kenneth and Mamie went on for additional study at Columbia University. They later had two children together, Katie Miriam and Hilton Bancroft.
In the fall of 1938 Mamie Clark went to graduate school at Howard University to get a master's degree in psychology and while she was enrolled her father would send her an allowance of fifty dollars a month. The summer following her undergraduate graduation Mamie worked for Charles Houston as a secretary at his law office. 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. Believing in a tangible end to segregation inspired Phipps Clark's future studies, the results of which would help lawyers, such as Houston and Marshall, to win the "Brown v. Board of Education" Supreme Court case in 1954.
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. In 1939 they 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, Mamie Phipps Clark was the first African-American women to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She was the second Black person to receive a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University, following her husband Kenneth.
Career.
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. This law firm involved the planning of legal action that would challenge the segregation laws. 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. She then 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; but, as World War II ended they did not feel the need to employ her anymore. She was fired in 1946. Later that year, 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.
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. Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps 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, on the sixth floor of what was then the New Lincoln School. In 1974, Northside moved to Schomburg Plaza. As of 2023, Northside continues to serve Harlem children and their families from its center at the intersection of E. 108th Street and Park Avenue, New York.
The Clark's goal was to match or surpass for poor African Americans, the mental health services then available for other children. Northside provided a homelike environment for poor Black children that provided pediatric and psychological help. 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. The psychological work they did led them to the conclusion that the problems of minority children are "neither purely psychiatric, purely social, nor purely environmental, but psychosocial." 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. Upon her retirement, Dora Johnson, a staff member at Northside, captured the importance of Mamie Clark to Northside. "Mamie Clark embodied the center. In a very real way, it was her views, philosophy, and her soul that held the center together". She went on to say that "when an unusual and unique person pursues a dream and realizes that dream and directs that dream, people are drawn not only to the idea of the dream, but to the uniqueness of the person themselves." Her vision of social, economic, and psychological advancement of African-American children resonates far beyond the era of integration.
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. She 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.
Published work.
One of Phipps Clark's early, published studies was titled "The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children." This research was an investigation of early level of conscious racial identity in Black preschool children. The study included 150 Black children from segregated, nursery schools in Washington, D.C. with 50% of the participants being girls and 50% boys. There were 50 three-year-old, 50 four-year-old, and 50 five-year-old children in the study. Each participant was shown a set of pictures that included a white boy, a black boy, a lion, a dog, a clown, and a hen. The participants were asked to point to the drawing that represented who or what they were asked about. An example of this procedure would be a Black boy being asked to point to his cousin or brother. The results showed that the group tended to choose the drawing with a black child over the white child but as age increased, there was still some increase in the ratio of those identifying with black over white. Their finding indicated that a great amount of self-conscious development and racial identity happens between ages three and fours years old. Once past four years old, this identification with the Black boy plateaus. This plateau may imply that the picture study is not sensitive enough for children over four. It also suggests that maybe five-year-old children have reached a self-awareness and now see themselves in an intrinsic way and are less capable of external representations.
Legacy.
Phipps Clark's work provided key contributions to the fields of developmental psychology and the psychology of race by shedding light on the impact of racial discrimination. She made lasting contributions at the United States Armed Forces Institute and the Public Health Association. Her unrelenting research on the identity and self-esteem of Black people expanded work on identity development.
Clark is not as famous as her husband. It has been noted