Mamie Phipps Clark (1917-1983) was an American social psychologist who focused on the development of self-consciousness in black preschool children that exposed internalized racism and the negative effects of segregation. For those of you tuning in for the first time, welcome! Here’s the deal: Every weekday, we highlight the stories of iconic women in history you may not know about, but definitely should. We’re talking about women from around the world and throughout history. Each month is themed. This month we’re going back to school, highlighting educators and intellectuals.
This month, we're going back to school with stories of the most influential women educators in history.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Womanica.
Many of us know the importance of Brown v. Board of Education -- the Supreme Court case that overturned segregation in U.S. schools. But it’s not that well-known that dolls played a key role in the winning argument. The woman responsible for the dolls was a social psychologist who studied the relationship between racial prejudice and child development. In the end, she helped make history. This is the story of Mamie Phipps Clark.
Mamie was born on April 18, 1917 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her father was a well-to-do physician. His position gave the family comfort rarely afforded to Black people, especially in the Jim Crow South. While Mamie attributed her later career success to growing up the way she did, she was not shielded from the stark racial realities outside her home. When she was six years old she witnessed a lynching. In an interview in 1976 she described knowing she was Black at a young age, she said, “I became acutely aware of that in childhood, because you had to have a certain kind of protective armor about you, all the time.”
After graduating from high school, Mamie received a scholarship to attend Howard University, a historically Black college, in Washington D.C. She intended to study math, which she loved. But the professors proved uninspiring. Then, she met a student named Kenneth Clark, who encouraged her to try out psychology. Kenneth’s suggestion led to Mamie’s lifelong career and to their 46-year long marriage.
The summer after Mamie graduated, she worked in the law office of the prominent NAACP lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston. It was there that she witnessed preparation for racial segregation cases. When she went back to Howard in the fall for her master’s degree in psychology, she planned to address racial disparities in her work.
Mamie’s thesis surveyed 150 Black pre-school aged children and set out to understand at which age Black children became aware that they were Black. For the study, she and Kenneth presented the children with different photographs, including of white boys, Black boys, and images of animals and other objects. They asked the boys to pick which picture looked like them, and then asked the girls to pick which picture looked like their brother or other male relative.
Mamie and Kenneth concluded that the boys showed a racial awareness at 3 or 4 years old, which Kenneth described as “disturbing”.
Mamie and Kenneth were on the forefront of a shift in the field. The1920s and 30s in psychology were dominated by the racist presumption that there were innate, biological differences in intelligence between racial groups. Mamie and Kenneth instead helped usher in the wave of work that examined what contributed to racial prejudice in the first place.
In 1940, Mamie and Kenneth received a grant to further their studies.
Their proposal included new methods to examine racial awareness in children. One method was called the “Doll Test”. Black children were placed in a room with two dolls before them — one Black and one white. The children were asked a series of questions:
Which doll is pretty? Which doll is ugly? Which doll is bad? Which doll is good? Which doll do you want to play with?
The children generally attributed the positive qualities to the white doll, and the negative ones to the Black doll. Finally, they were asked to identify the doll that looked most like them. Kenneth revealed later that some of the children stormed out of the room and became “emotionally upset at having to identify with the doll that they had rejected.”
Mamie and Kenneth offered the results as proof of the damaging effects of segregation. They could show that even before the children could fully articulate their feelings about race, they harbored a sense of inferiority or shame. They demonstrated that Black people were not limited by any biological difference, but by the social and economic barriers stacked against them.
In 1943, Mamie graduated from Columbia University with a PhD in psychology. She was the first Black woman to do so.
Mamie and Kenneth testified in many school segregation cases in the South over the subsequent decade. Then, in 1954, the lawyers in the Brown ruling asked Kenenth to pen some statements that described their research and argument for school integration. While some historians argue that the Doll Test research played a minor role in the grand scheme of the ruling, it was clearly influential. Traces of it are evident in the final opinion of the Supreme Court Justices:
Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote: “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 ever to be undone.”
Many historical accounts don’t give Mamie due credit, often only mentioning Kenneth’s role in the duo. But Kenneth made sure to credit Mamie, making clear the Doll Test was an extension of her master’s thesis. He said, “The record should show, [The Doll Test] was Mamie’s primary project that I crashed. I sort of piggybacked on it.”
Today, one of the Black dolls is on display at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Kansas. Mamie served children the rest of her life. In 1946 she founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, an organization that sought to provide mental health services for Black children in New York. She ran Northside until she retired in 1979.
In 1983, Mamie Phipps Clark died of lung cancer. She was 66 years old.
All month, we’re talking about women who changed the world of education.
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Talk to you tomorrow!