Mamie Phipps Clark
Biography:
April 18, 1917 – August 11, 1983
Mamie
Phipps Clark was born on April 18, 1917 to an educated family in Hot Springs,
Arkansas. Her parents encouraged her to pursue her education, and so she did.
She attended Howard University as a mathematics and physics major. However, her
partner and future husband, Kenneth B. Clark persuaded her to switch majors. In
1938 she graduated magnum cum laude and earned her B.A. degree in Psychology.
She and her husband married in 1937. Both continued their studies at Colombia
University.
While in
graduate school, Kenneth and Mamie had two children, Hilton and Kate. Mamie’s
Master thesis work was centered on the formation of racial development and
self-esteem. In 1943 she became the first African-American woman to receive a
Ph.D. from Colombia University. Her husband, Kenneth Clark, was the first
African-American man to receive the same honor from Colombia University.
In 1945,
Kenneth was an assistant professor at the City College of New York and Mamie
was a consultant doing psychological testing at the Riverdale Children’s
Association; an organization for homeless black girls. At this time, both Mamie
and Kenneth realized the lack of mental health programs in Harlem for under
privileged minority children. They approached social services of New York and
worked to expand the programs for these children. When this attempt failed in
1946, they founded the Northside Center for Childhood Development in Harlem.
This became the first program to provide psychological services to children and
families in the Harlem area. Mamie Clark continued to run the Northside Center
as it’s director until she retired in 1979.
The Doll Experiments:
Mamie
Phipps Clark’s most well known work is her doll experiments. Emerging from her
work on her Master’s thesis, the Clark’s wrote several papers on children’s
self-perception in relation to their race. The Clark’s conducted an experiment
using dolls that were identical aside from different skin and hair colors. One
doll was white with yellow hair, and the other was brown with black hair. The
minority children were presented with both dolls, and was then asked questions
such as which doll would they play with, which doll was the nice doll and which
was the bad doll, and which doll had nicer hair. They found a clear preference
for the lighter colored doll, providing evidence of self-hatred and
internalized racism in African-American children.
This study
also revealed that children who attended segregated schools would be more
likely to choose the white doll as the “nice” doll than those who attended
integrated schools. This experiment and its findings played an important role
in the Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954. These experiments showed the
negative effects of segregation, and the Supreme Court thus ruled segregation
in education as unconstitutional.
Other Contributions:
Mamie
Phipps Clark played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement and also
explained that “separate but equal” was not at all equal for children in public
education. Her work with self-perception in minorities opened up many new areas
of research in the field of developmental psychology.
References:
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