Clark, Mamie Phipps (1917–1983)

Early Life

Clark was born in 1917 in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and, like all Black children, attended a segregated school. Her father, Harold H. Phipps, was a physician; her mother, Katie Florence Phipps, was a homemaker. Clark described her childhood as comfortable, secure, and happy despite an omnipresent awareness of racism and the personal experience of legalized discrimination. Coping with these facts of everyday life in the Jim Crow South required resilience and determination. Phipps drew on both of these qualities in her decision to pursue postsecondary education.

Upon graduating from high school, Phipps chose to attend prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C., with a desire to major in mathematics. She enrolled in 1934 at the age of 16. At Howard she quickly discovered that the segregated public school system had ill-prepared her to meet the intellectual demands of her new environment. She realized that there were huge gaps in her education, but she acted quickly to compensate: “Well, I had to study harder. I really did. I went to summer school. I went to summer school the first two summers when I was in college, to make up the deficiencies…. But I was taking five courses in summer school, and that's a lot of courses” (Clark, 1976, p. 12).

Training in Psychology

Clark's desire to pursue mathematics at Howard gave way to an interest in child development and psychology, partly because of the lack of encouragement given female students in mathematics and partly because of the influence of her future husband, Kenneth Clark. She transferred into the field with the support of Francis Cecil Sumner, the head of Howard's psychology department and the first African American to receive a doctorate in psychology. There were no Black women on the staff of the department. Clark reported retrospectively that the absence of Black women with advanced degrees in psychology itself represented a silent challenge.

Mamie Phipps married Kenneth Clark in 1937. She graduated with her bachelor's degree from Howard in 1938 and spent the summer working in the law offices of Charles Hamilton Houston, a pioneering Black civil rights attorney. She also discovered the work of psychologists Ruth and Eugene Horowitz (later Hartley) on self-identification in nursery school children. She [Page 1053]decided to merge her interests in race and child development in her master's research, resulting in her thesis, “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-school Children.” In this work, she explored the development of racial identity in 300 Black children in segregated nursery schools in the Washington, D.C., area. Over the course of the next year, she published three more articles with Kenneth, looking at the effects of skin color and segregation on the racial self-identification of Black children.

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