Mamie Phipps Clark

Early lifeedit

The oldest of three children, two girls and one boy, Mamie Phipps was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Harold and Katie Phipps. Her father was a doctor, a native of the British West Indies. Her father also supplemented his income as a manager at a nearby vacation resort. Her mother helped him in his practice and encouraged both their children in education. Her brother became a dentist. Even though Mamie grew up during the Depression and a time of racism and segregation, she had a privileged childhood. Her father's occupation and income allowed them to live a middle-class lifestyle and even got them into some white-only parts of town. However, Mamie still attended segregated elementary and secondary schools, graduating from Pine Bluff's Langston High School in 1934 at only 16 years old. Being able to do things that white people could do, but still having to go to a segregated school allowed her to see how society treated white and black people differently. This realization contributed to her future research of racial identity in black children. Despite the small amount of opportunities for black students to pursue higher education, Mamie was offered several scholarships for college. Fisk University in Tennessee and Howard University in Washington D.C. were two of the universities to offer Mamie a scholarship and were also two of the most prestigious black universities at that time.

Sumner also allowed her to work part-time in the psychology department where she expanded her knowledge about psychology. During her senior year in 1937 Kenneth and Mamie got married; they had to elope because her mother did not want her to get married before she graduated. A year later, she earned her B.A. magna cum laude in psychology (1938). Both Kenneth and Mamie went on for additional study at Columbia University. They later had two children together, Katie Miriam and Hilton Bancroft.

In the fall of 1938 Mamie Clark went to graduate school at Howard University to get a master's degree in psychology. The summer following her undergraduate graduation Mamie worked for Charles Houston as a secretary at his law office. At the time, Houston was a popular civil rights lawyer and Mamie was privileged to see lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall come into the office to work on important cases. She admits that she did not think anything could be done about segregation and racial oppression until after this experience. Believing in a tangible end to segregation inspired Mamie's future studies whose results went on to aid lawyers, such as Houston and Marshall, win the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Case in 1954.

While working on her master's degree, Mamie became increasingly interested in developmental psychology. The inspiration for her thesis came from working at an all black nursery school. Mamie contacted psychologists Ruth and Gene Horowitz for advice. At the time they were conducting psychological studies about self-identification in young children and suggested that she conduct similar research with her nursery school children. Her master's thesis was entitled "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children." Her husband Kenneth was fascinated by her thesis research and after her graduation they worked together on the research. They developed new and improved versions of the color and doll tests used in her thesis for a proposal to further the research. In 1939 they received a three-year Rosenwald Fellowship for their research that allowed them to publish three articles on the subject and also permitted Mamie to pursue a doctoral degree at Columbia University.

During her time at Columbia, Mamie was the only black student pursuing a doctorate in psychology and she had a faculty adviser, Dr. Henry Garrett, who believed in segregation. Despite their differences in beliefs, Mamie was able to complete her dissertation, "Changes in Primary Mental Abilities with Age." In 1943 Mamie Phipps Clark was one of the first African-American women to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She was the second black person to receive a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University, following her husband Kenneth.

Careeredit

After Mamie graduated she had a hard time being a psychologist as an African American woman living in New York. She had a hard time getting a job; she lost job opportunities to less qualified white men and white women. One of Mamie's first jobs was as a secretary at the Office of William Houston. This law firm involved the planning of legal action that would challenge the segregation laws. In 1944 she found a job through a family friend at the American Public Health Association analyzing research about nurses, which she hated. She stayed at that job for one year but was grossly overqualified for the position and found it embarrassing. She then obtained a position at the United States Armed Forces Institute as a research psychologist but she still felt pigeonholed. In 1945 she was able to get a better job working for the United States Armed Forces Institute as a research psychologist; but, as World War II ended they did not feel the need to employ her anymore and she was fired 1946. Later that year, Mamie got a job that she finally thought was rewarding, at the Riverdale Home for Children in New York; there she conducted psychological test and counseled young homeless black people. While here she saw how insufficient psychological services were for minority children. Many of the children were called mentally retarded by the state and Clark tested them and realized that they had IQ's that were above mental retardation. She saw society's segregation as the cause for gang warfare, poverty, and low academic performance of minorities. This was a "kick start" to her life's work and led to her most significant contributions in the field of developmental psychology.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark decided to try to improve social services for troubled youth in Harlem, as there were virtually no mental-health services in the community. Kenneth Clark was then an assistant professor at the City College of New York and Mamie Clark was a psychological consultant doing psychological testing at the Riverdale Children's Association. Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark approached social service agencies in New York City to urge them to expand their programs to provide social work, psychological evaluation, and remediation for youth in Harlem. None of the agencies took up their proposal. The Clarks "realized that we were not going to get a child guidance clinic opened that way. So we decided to open it ourselves."

Together in 1946 the Clarks created the Northside Center for Child Development, originally called the Northside Testing and Consultation Center. They started it in a one-room basement apartment of the Dunbar Houses on 158th Street (Manhattan). Two years later in 1948, Northside moved to 110th Street, across from Central Park, on the sixth floor of what was then the New Lincoln School. In 1974, Northside moved to its current quarters in Schomburg Plaza. It continues to serve Harlem children and their families in the 21st century.

Their goal was to match or surpass the quality of service for poor African Americans. They provided a homelike environment for poor black children that provided pediatric and psychological help. It served as a location for initial experiments on racial biases of education and the intersection of education and varying theories and practices of psychology and social psychology. The psychological work that they did here led them to the conclusion that the problems of minority children are psychosocial. This was the first center that offered psychological services to minority families in the areas around Harlem.

Mamie remained the director of the Northside Center for 33 years. Upon her retirement, Dora Johnson, a staff member at Northside, captured the importance of Mamie Clark to Northside. "Mamie Clark embodied the center. In a very real way, it was her views, philosophy, and her soul that held the center together". She went on to say that "when an unusual and unique person pursues a dream and realizes that dream and directs that dream, people are drawn not only to the idea of the dream, but to the uniqueness of the person themselves." Her vision of social, economic, and psychological advancement of African American children resonates far beyond the era of integration.

Mamie did not limit her contributions to her work. She was also a very involved member of the community. She was on the boards of directors for several community organizations, along with being involved with the Youth Opportunities Unlimited Project and the initiation of the Head Start Program.

Published workedit

One of Mamie's published works was titled "The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children." This study was an investigation of early level of conscious racial identity in black preschool children. This study included 150 black children from segregated nursery schools in Washington, D.C. 50% of the participants were girls and 50% were boys. There were 50 three-year-old, 50 four-year-old, and 50 five-year-old children involved. Each participant was given a set of pictures that included white and black boys, a lion, a dog, a clown, and a hen. The participants were asked to point to the drawing that represented who or what they were asked about. An example of this procedure would be a black boy being asked to point to his cousin or brother. The results of this study showed that the group tended to choose the black drawing more than the white drawing. As age increased, there was an increase in the ratio of choosing the black boy in contrast to the white boy in favor of the black boy. This finding indicates that a great amount of self-conscious development and racial identity happens between ages three and fours years old. Once past four years old, this identification with the black boy plateaus. This plateau may imply that the picture study is not sensitive enough for children over four. It also suggests that maybe five-year-old children have reached a self-awareness and now see themselves in an intrinsic way and are less capable of external representations.