"Mamie-Phipps-Clark" (October 18,1917-August 11,1983)

She was in Hot Springs,to British West Indies Native Harold H.Phipps,and  a physician,and Kate Florence Phipps,who assisted in his practice.Her only sibling,her younger brother,Harold became a dentist.


Mamie attended  a segregated public elementary school and the segregated Langston High School,graduating in 1934 and winning scholarships to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee,and Howard University in Howard University in Washington DC.Mamie elected to attend Howard  to study mathematics and physics,departments that were not particularly supportive of her as a student,possibly due to prejudices against women entering such fields at the time.


While at Howard,she met Kenneth Bancroft Clark,a master's student in psychology born in the Panama Canal Zone.Kenneth influenced Mamie to switch to psychology.Mamie & Kenneth eloped during her senior year in 1937 and later had two children:Kate in 1940 & Hilton in 1943.Mamie receive her BA in psychology in 1938,graduating with honors,magna cum laude,and earned a graduate fellowship to enter Howard's master's degree program in psychology.Mamie worked that summer as a secretary in the law office of William Houston.there,she witnessed and was deeply impressed by the work of Willliam Hastie,Thurgood Marshall,and other legal actvists in preparing civil rights cases that would ultimately culminate in the 1954 Brown decision.Her master's thesis,"The Development of Consciousness in Negro Pre-School Children," completed in 1939,entailed an experiment which demonstrated that young African-American children,completed in 1939,entailed an experiment which demonstrated that young African American children when presented with identical dolls-and one African-American and one white-preferred the white doll over the African-American doll.The major find findings were that African-American children "became aware of their racial identity at about age three,and-simultaneously with their awareness of racial identity-acquired a negative self image."This pioneering "research into the importance of self in African-American children,completed fifteen years before the Brown decision,paved the way for an increase in psychological research into the areas of self-esteem and self-concept," according to Women in Psychology:A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook (1990.Mamie research is regarded as an important step in opening areas of inquiry of development psychology.Mamie & Kenneth received a three-year grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship program in 1939 to pursue research on racial indentification in African-American children,which three articles were published.Mamie entered the Ph.D. program in psychology at Columbia University that year.The only African-American student in the department,Mamie was sponsored by Dr.Henry Garrett who,she would later write,was "not by by any means a liberal on racial matters," as he did not believe the public schools should be desegregated.Mamie completed her Ph.D.In 1943,and the title of her dissertation was "Changes in Primary Mental Abilities with Age."


Employment opportities were partically non-existent,and Mamie concluded "that a black female with a Ph.D.in psychology was an unwanted anomaly in New York City in the early 1940's." She found it "heartbreaking to learn to learn that a number of white men & women with far less qualifications were hired at relatively high salaries." She two jobs from 1944-1946-analyzing data about nurses for the American Public Health Association (a position she "called humiliating") and as research psychologist with the United States Armed Forces Institute.

In 1946,she took a position as psychologist with the Riverdale Home for Children,"a private agency for protection of African-American homeless girls." Mamie found the work very rewarding but discovered that there was a severe lack of psychological services for minority children,many whom incorrectly indentified as "Children of Retarded Mental Development" by the New York public schools.Unable to persuade directors of social agencies serving Harlem to provide psychological services for children,that same year,Mamie & Kenneth opened the Northside Testing and Consultation Center,later called the Northside Center for Child Development,where they made important contributions to the understanding and treating the problems of minority children.The center was the first full-time institution in the Harlem area that offered psychological and casework services to local families.The work carried out there help to establish that the problems of minority children are psycho-social in nature and that "orthodox psychoanalytically-oriented psychiatric treatment is not necessarily the most effective way of helping families whose massive problems are associated with living in a "ghetto." Mamie served as executive director of the center from 1946-1979.


Mamie serve on the boards of trustees of Teachers'College,Columbia University,Mount Sinai Medical Center,the New York Mission Society,the New York Public Library,the Phelps Stokes Fund,the Museum of Modern Art,the American Broadcasting Company (ABC),and on advisory groups for non-prifit agencies.