By: Gibran Rodriguez, MA
Every February, Canadians and Americans alike celebrate Black History Month to honour the legacy, triumphs and struggles of Black communities in North America. In the spirit of commemorating the contributions of Black scientists and scholars in advancing knowledge and technology, this time, we will talk about a quintessential figure in the history of Western developmental psychology: Mamie Phipps Clark.
Mamie Phipps Clark was born in 1917 in Arkansas. As the daughter of a respected physician, she was inspired to access higher education in a period when racial segregation was common across educational institutions. During that time, women also experienced significant challenges to enter fields and careers dominated by males. Yet Mamie Phipps Clark graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1938 from Howard University, majoring in physics and mathematics – an “unusual” choice for black women of the era.
At Howard University, Mamie met her future husband, Kenneth Bancroft Clark. It is said that Kenneth encouraged Mamie to pursue a career in psychology. However, Mamie was already interested in childhood development due to her previous experience working in an all-Black nursery school. Shortly after finishing her undergraduate education, Mamie Phipps Clark enrolled in the graduate program in Psychology in the same higher education institution. Her work focused on “race consciousness” or, in other words, the process by which Black children become aware of themselves as belonging to a historically oppressed ethno-racial group. Mamie was passionate about looking for solutions for racial segregation and racial oppression – problematic social dynamics that she experienced throughout her childhood and adolescence.
Soon thereafter, Mamie Phipps Clark became the first Black woman to earn a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Columbia University. She and her husband developed a series of studies that addressed racial bias, self-identification, and self-esteem in Black children within the educational system. Mamie’s most famous study involved the following: a group of school-aged Black children were given a set of dolls that were identical in everything except colour (some were White, and others were Black). The children were then asked questions about their preference for a particular doll or the doll they thought was “nice” and the doll that was “bad”. They were also asked about the dolls that best represented them. Mamie Phipps Clark reported that not only a high proportion of Black children identified the Black doll as the “bad” doll, but also some of them recognised the White doll as the one that best resembled them.
Mamie Phipps Clark’s experiment was fundamental in supporting the idea that racial segregation was harmful to children. Her work played an essential role in the Brown vs. the Board of Education case, which led to the Supreme Court ruling that this kind of segregation in U.S. educational institutions and schools was unconstitutional. Mamie Phipps Clark and her husband founded the Northside Center for Child Development in 1946. They devoted their lives to offering psychological, counselling, testing and casework services to families in Harlem, New York. They also continued to work on experiments that evidenced the issues of racial biases in educational settings. Their contributions transcended their professional expertise, as both Mamie and her husband strived to make a difference by participating in the community and on multiple committees.
Mamie Phipps Clark died in 1983 at the age of 66. Her legacy was, without a doubt, influential to the Civil Rights movement. She paved the road for new areas of research in developmental psychology and stressed the role of self-identity in childhood and adolescence. However, it is unfortunate that many of her contributions are often overlooked, as courses and books on the history of psychology mention her only briefly or in passing. This is common in the history of psychology, as the work and influence of BIPOC and female psychologists are often neglected. Therefore, let’s take a moment to reflect and acknowledge the figure of Mamie Phipps Clark in fostering acceptance, compassion, and antiracism within the discipline of psychology.
Image retrieved from: https://feministvoices.com/profiles/mamie-phipps-clark