Clark, Mamie Phipps and Kenneth

By: Rachelle Gold

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Clark, Mamie Phipps and Kenneth

educational psychologists. Kenneth Bancroft Clark (b. 24 July 1914; d. 1 May 2005) and Mamie Katherine Phipps Clark (b. 18 April 1917; d. 11 August 1983) were husband-and-wife collaborators who studied the relationship between racial identity and children's self-esteem and development.

Kenneth Clark was born in 1914 in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father, Arthur, worked for the United Fruit Company. In 1919 his mother, Miriam, decided to move to America, so she separated from her husband and moved to Harlem with Kenneth and his younger sister. When Kenneth was in junior high school, a career counselor recommended that he prepare for a vocational trade, but his mother, who was earning a very low wage as a seamstress, insisted that he transfer to a school where he would have a rigorous course of study. He went on to earn his bachelor's and master's degrees at Howard University and then, in 1940, his PhD in psychology at Columbia University—the first African American to do so there. In 1942 he became a professor at the City College of New York, where he taught until 1975 and was the first black tenured professor. Clark's many books include Prejudice and Your Child (1955), Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965), and Crisis in Urban Education (1971).

When he was a master's student at Howard, Clark met Mamie Phipps. Phipps was born in 1917 in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where her father, Harold, a native of the British West Indies, was a doctor; her mother, Kate, assisted him with procedures. Her father's medical practice allowed the family middle-class status, but Mamie's education was still segregated. In 1934 she graduated from high school and, having won a scholarship, attended Howard University intending to study math and physics. After she met Kenneth, he suggested that she pursue instead his field, psychology, because then she could explore her interest in children.

In 1937 Mamie and Kenneth eloped, in part because her parents disapproved of her marrying before graduation. In 1938 Mamie graduated magna cum laude from Howard, and she was offered a graduate fellowship so that she could pursue her master's degree at Howard. She began working with children in an all-black nursery school, studying their self-identification. Mamie's research involved two psychological tests: a coloring test and a test with dolls. In 1939 she completed her master's thesis, “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children.” She and Kenneth proposed further research on self-perception in black children, and they updated her versions of the coloring and doll tests. Their proposal was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1939, renewed twice.

The fellowship enabled Mamie to pursue her PhD in psychology at Columbia, which she earned in 1943—the first African American woman and the second African American, after Kenneth, to do so there. Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted many studies on racism's effect on child development and found that segregation was psychologically damaging and emotionally harmful to both black and white children. In one famous study—subsequently criticized by some scholars—black children stated that they preferred white dolls to black dolls. The Clarks interpreted the responses to mean that the children saw themselves as inferior to their white peers, and they published their research and findings.

Facing racism and sexism from employers, from 1944 to 1946 Mamie Clark held two jobs that she was overqualified for, analyzing data for the American Public Health Association and researching for the U.S. Armed Forces Institute. In 1946 she became a testing psychologist at the Riverdale Home for Children, working with black girls, and while there she became aware of the lack of psychological services for Harlem's children, many of whom were simply labeled “mentally retarded.” The Clarks petitioned existing service agencies to offer mental-health support for black and other minority children; when they met resistance they created their own agency.

Thus in March 1946 the Clarks opened the Northside Testing and Consultation Center, later called the Northside Center for Child Development, and offered psychiatric and psychological services to children and families in Harlem. Because of the stigma of mental illness, Harlem residents were initially afraid to use the center, but soon the center's intelligence testing services made it popular. Many parents wanted their children who had been labeled mentally retarded by the state schools to be tested independently because they doubted the diagnosis. The center staff determined that most of the children had IQs exceeding mental retardation, thus revealing the schools’ illegal practice of misidentifying children based on their race.

In order to compensate for a lack of educational support for minority children, in 1947 the Clarks instituted remedial math and reading programs at Northside. Mamie Clark served as Northside's executive director from its founding until 1979. In addition to advising the national Head Start planning committee, she served on the boards of, among others, the New York Public Library, Teachers College of Columbia University, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Kenneth Clark's Center for Child Development. Dr. Kenneth Clark, New York psychologist, educator, and founder of the Northside Center for Child Development, attends a staff meeting at the center, 1965.

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Meanwhile, in 1953 Kenneth Clark worked with other social scientists to compose a brief report showing the results of the Clarks’ study on black children's self-perception, and the report was presented to NAACP lawyers. Subsequently the Clarks’ work was cited in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court school-desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which acknowledged the psychological harm of segregation on children as one reason that separate schools were inherently unequal. Kenneth Clark often spoke before the New York school system in the 1950s and 1960s and advocated for fully integrated classrooms, reduced class sizes, more advanced curriculum for all children regardless of race, and higher-quality school buildings.

In 1961 Kenneth Clark received the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP's highest award. Clark was the first African American to be elected to the New York Board of Regents, where he served for twenty years from 1966. In 1971 Clark became the first African American to be elected president of his profession's premier organization, the American Psychological Association.

The Clarks had a daughter, Kate, in 1940 and a son, Hilton, in 1943. Mamie and Kenneth Clark were married forty-five years before Mamie died in 1983. Kenneth died at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, in 2005.

[See also Brown v. Board of Education and Social Sciences and Civil Rights.]

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