The Lesser-Known Story of Mamie Katherine Phipps Clark

Faith Kollien

            This post tells the lesser-known story of Mamie Katherine Phipps Clark, a psychologist who studied developmental self-consciousness in Black preschool children in the mid-twentieth century. Clark is often overshadowed by her husband, Kenneth Clark, who was also a psychologist. Mamie Phipps Clark was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and attended a segregated elementary school and segregated high school.[1] Phipps (before she was Clark) then went on to attend Howard University in Washington D.C., where she met her husband, Kenneth Clark. After graduating with honors, magna cum laude, and with a BA in psychology in 1938, Mamie Phipps Clark earned a graduate fellowship that granted her a summer position as a secretary in the William Houston law office. There she observed the work of legal activists, such as Thurgood Marshall, for civil rights cases.[2] Before getting involved in law, Marshall was rejected from the University of Maryland because he was African American.[3] This rejection inspired Marshall to become a civil rights activist, and the education Marshall received from Howard University Law School prepared him to become a lawyer and the first African American man to serve as associate justice for the U.S. Supreme Court. Clark’s secretarial position, plus work in the field of child development in Black preschool children, together shaped the Clarks contributions to the case of Brown v. Board of Education, a highlight of their careers.

Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Clark performed an experiment on African-American children using two dolls, one Black and one White. They found that the children associated more positive connotations with the white doll and more negative connotations with the black doll. This analysis was critical to the ruling in the Brown case in 1954. While the Doll Test itself is quite well known, the fact that the Doll Test was partially Mamie Phipps Clark’s idea and that it was based on an experiment Mamie Phipps Clark performed in earlier years, The Line Drawing Test, is often overlooked.[4] In an interview for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954-1956), Dr. Kenneth Clark said, “The Dolls Test was an attempt on the part of my wife and me to study the development of the sense of self, self-esteem in children. We worked with Negro children—I'll call black children—to see the extent to which their color, their sense of their own race and status, influenced their judgment about themselves, self-esteem. We've now—this research, by the way, was done long before we had any notion that the NAACP or that the public officials would be concerned with our results. In fact, we did the study fourteen years before Brown, and the lawyers of the NAACP learned about it and came and asked us if we thought it was relevant to what they were planning to do in terms of the Brown decision cases. And we told them it was up to them to make that decision and we did not do it for litigation. We did it to communicate to our colleagues in psychology the influence of race and color and status on the self-esteem of children.”[5]

In 1939, Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, assisted by Dr. Kenneth Clark, performed the line drawing experiment. African American children, both boys and girls, ranging from three years old to five years old were asked to identify either themselves from an array of line drawings, or to identify a male that was familiar to them. The drawings consisted of a black boy, a white boy, a lion, a clown, a hen, and a dog. The results showed that a majority of the children over the age of three were able to correctly identify themselves as a black child, suggesting that personal consciousness develops around the age of four and progresses from that age onwards. Since Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark’s line drawing experiment further established Dr. James Mark Baldwin’s idea of “ejective” personal consciousness in young children, the ability to identify people who look similar to or face similar experiences as themselves, the Doll Test was a logical next step in testing how exactly the perceptions of children were affected by segregation.[6]

The Doll Test was performed in 1941 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reached out to the Clarks in 1954 to ask the psychologists if they thought their Doll Test provided relevant information to the Brown v. Board of Education case.[7] When presented with the evidence, US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren stated that segregated African American children felt, “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."[8] The Brown ruling ultimately decided that state-sanctioned school segregation was a violation of the 14th amendment, was unconstitutional, and that regardless of equalization of school facilities amenities, the racial divide of segregation alone would permanently harm the self-esteem of Black children.[9]

While  Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark did play a role in the Brown decision, her work was also important outside of this case. Clark’s scholarship was dedicated to understanding African American child psychology and the effects of race-recognition, self-esteem, and racism on child development. Clark’s findings lead her and her husband to develop The Northside Center for Child Development, a center offering minority families and children psychiatric, psychological, and casework services in Harlem, New York.[10] Mamie Phipps Clark is only one example of an African American female scientist’s work being hidden behind that of men. For instance, Katherine Johnson performed all of the necessary calculations for the American moon landing of 1969 but the media chose to focus on the astronaut Neil Armstrong instead. Similarly, Dr. Gladys West, the African American woman responsible for inventing the mathematical calculations for the Global Positioning System (GPS) in 1956 was only recognized for her contribution in December 2018, when she was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame.[11]

In conclusion, Mamie Phipps Clark was a brilliant psychologist who pioneered the study of developmental self-consciousness in Black preschool children, which was helpful in determining the lasting effects of segregating children in schools and other public settings. The negative connotations observed in African American children indicated a lack of self-worth, which realistically could last long-term, especially during the time period of the Civil Rights Movement when racial issues were being questioned and brought to the public’s attention. It is important that we encourage society to recognize the accomplishments of women, especially women of color like Mamie Phipps Clark, in all fields, as despite being arguably the most oppressed people during the mid-twentieth century, they made important contributions to our understanding of the world around us.

 

[1] “Brown v. Board of Education” 1954.

[2] Butler, Stephen N. “Mamie Katherine Phipps Clark.” Encyclopedia of Arkansas. 2018.

[3] “Thurgood Marshall | Biography, Legal Career, & Supreme Court Tenure.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 2020.

[4] Gibbons, William, and Sydney C. Van Nort. “Mamie Phipps Clark: The ‘Other Half’ of the Kenneth Clark Legacy.” Encounter 22 (4): 28–32. 2009.

[5] “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954-1965)” 1985.

[6] Clark, Mamie K., and Kenneth B. Clark. “The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Radical Identification in Negro Preschool Children.” Classics in the History of Psychology, no. 10: 591–99. 1939.

[7] “Kenneth and Mamie Clark Doll” Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service). April 10, 2015.

[8] “Kenneth and Mamie Clark Doll” 2015.

[9] “Brown v. Board of Education” 1954

[10] O’Connell and Russo. “Models of Achievement: Reflections of Eminent Women in Psychology.” Columbia University Press. 2001.

[11]Witter, Brad. “Katherine Johnson and 9 Other Black Female Pioneers in Science.” Biography. 2020.

Sources

“Brown v. Board of Education.” Our Documents. 1954. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=87.

Butler, Stephen N. “Mamie Katherine Phipps Clark.” Encyclopedia of Arkansas. 2018. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/mamie-katherine-phipps-clark-2938/.

Clark, Mamie K., and Kenneth B. Clark. “The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Radical Identification in Negro Preschool Children.” Classics in the History of Psychology, no. 10: 591–99. 1939.

            https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Clark/Self-cons/

“Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954-1965).” Eyes on the Prize Interviews. 1985. http://wayback.archive-it.org/8967/20171023214228/http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eop;cc=eop;rgn=main;view=text;idno=cla0015.0289.020.

Gibbons, William, and Sydney C. Van Nort. “Mamie Phipps Clark: The ‘Other Half’ of the Kenneth Clark Legacy.” Encounter 22 (4): 28–32. 2009.

http://fscproxy.framingham.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=

true&db=aph&AN=49007046&site=eds-live

“Kenneth and Mamie Clark Doll.” Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service). April 10, 2015. https://www.nps.gov/brvb/learn/historyculture/clarkdoll.htm.

O'Connell & Russo, A., N. Models of achievement : reflections of eminent

women in psychology. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 2001. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=XvshAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Models+of+achievement+:+reflections+of+eminent+women+in+psychology&ots=DfPoaNBmb7&sig=fogZp2LJbZKihoW0hZ8W1yNljDM#v=onepage&q=Models%20of%20achievement%20%3A%20reflections%20of%20eminent%20women%20in%20psychology&f=false

Witter, Brad. “Katherine Johnson and 9 Other Black Female Pioneers in Science.” Biography. January 16, 2020. https://www.biography.com/news/katherine-johnson-black-female-science-technology-engineering-mathematics.

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