Mamie Phipps Clark
1917–1983 · American experimental psychologist
Mamie Phipps Clark (Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1917 – 1983) was an American experimental psychologist. Her research on racial identity in childhood played a key role in one of the most important court cases of the twentieth century.
She studied at Howard University, where she met Kenneth B. Clark, whom she married and worked with throughout her career. She earned her doctorate in experimental psychology at Columbia University in 1943, becoming the first Black woman to do so in that field. Her master's thesis, on racial consciousness among Black preschool children, laid the groundwork for the famous doll experiments.
In those experiments, segregated Black children preferred white dolls and gave them positive traits. The Clarks concluded that prejudice and segregation led children to internalize feelings of inferiority. Their findings were cited in Brown v. Board of Education, which in 1954 ruled school segregation unconstitutional in the United States. In 2005, the filmmaker Kiri Davis revisited the experiment in the documentary A Girl Like Me.
Key ideas
- Racial consciousness: children develop, from a very early age, a sense of themselves as members of a racial group.
- Internalized discrimination: stereotypes and segregation lead Black children to absorb feelings of their own inferiority.
- Research in the service of justice: empirical data on childhood can serve as evidence in debates about civil rights.
Curiosities
A thesis without a professor's name
Although her thesis contained significant findings, she chose not to publish it under a professor's name and proposed to Kenneth Clark that they publish it together.
A photograph in Ebony
The photographer Gordon Parks, also a Rosenwald Fellowship recipient, photographed one of the doll studies for Ebony magazine in July 1947.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.