Mamie Phipps Clark
Mamie Phipps Clark was a social psychologist who, along with her husband Kenneth Clark, focused on the development of self-consciousness in black preschool children. Clark was born and raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Clark received her post-secondary education at Howard University, and she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees there.
For her master's thesis, known as "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children," Clark worked with black Arkansas preschool children. This work included doll experiments that investigated the way African American children's attitudes toward race and racial self-identification were affected by segregation. According to the study, children who attended segregated schools preferred playing with white dolls over black dolls. The study was highly influential in the Brown v. Board of Education court case.
Early life
Born on October 18, 1917, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Mamie Phipps attended highly segregated schools, including a Catholic elementary school. Her father, Harold H. Phipps, born in the British West Indies, was a well-respected physician and a manager of a resort. Phipps's mother, Katy Florence Phipps, was a homemaker and she was often involved in her husband's work as a physician. As a result, she did not need to work to supplement the family income. Her younger brother became a dentist.Clark graduated from Langston High School, even though it was very uncommon for a black student to do so. She received two offers and scholarships from black prestigious universities, Fisk University and Howard University. She enrolled at Howard in 1934. Despite her attending college during the Great Depression, her father was able to send her $50 per month. She majored in math and minored in physics. It was highly unusual for black women to receive an education in those departments at the time.
At Howard University, Mamie Phipps Clark met her future husband, Kenneth Bancroft Clark, who was a master's degree student in psychology. It was Kenneth Clark who urged her to pursue psychology because it would allow her to explore her interest in working with children. Phipps once stated "I'd always had an interest in children. Always from the time I was very small. I'd always thought I wanted to work with children, and psychology seemed a good field."
Mamie Phipps and Kenneth Bancroft Clark eloped during her senior year in 1937. In 1938, Mamie Phipps Clark graduated magna cum laude from Howard University. After she immediately enrolled in Howard University's psychology graduate program. For her master's thesis, she studied when black children became aware of themselves as having a distinct "self," as well as when they became aware of belonging to a particular racial group. She defined "race consciousness" as the perception of self-belonging to a specific group, which is differentiated from other groups by obvious physical characteristics. Her conclusions about African American children became the foundation and the guiding premise for the famous doll studies which her and her husband would later become very well known for. Phipps confessed that it was not until the end of her undergraduate years that she finally became confident about creating solutions for segregation and racial oppression. The summer after her graduation Phipps worked as a secretary in the law office of Charles Houston, who was a prominent lawyer and leading civil rights figure at a time when segregation cases were being taken up by the national Association for the Advancement Colored People legal defense fund. There she witnessed the work of William Hastie, Thurgood Marshall, and others in preparation for the court challenges that would lead to the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education. As she later noted: "I can't even remember the names of them all, but they converged in his office to prepare these cases and that was the most marvelous learning experience I ever had- in the whole sense of really, blasphemy, to blacks, was brought very clearly to me in that office." This had an influence on her master's thesis, "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children," which would later be responsible for the research and experiments which influenced the Supreme Court Case, Brown v. Board of Education.
Clark was the first Black woman to earn her Ph.D. in experimental psychology, which she did in 1943 from Columbia University. She returned to student life with the vivid and optimistic idea that an "actual tangible approach" could be used to further her research and findings about African American children. Phipps Clark's dissertation adviser was Henry E. Garrett, later president of the American Psychological Association. He is noted as an exceptional statistician but also an open racist. Later on in her career, she was asked to testify in the Prince Edward County, Virginia, desegregation case in order to rebut his testimony offered in that court in support of inherent racial differences.
After graduation, she experienced a lot of frustration career-wise. She attributed this to the "unwanted anomaly" of being a Black woman in a field dominated by white males. One instrumental role was a job in 1945 conducting psychological testing for homeless black girls for the Riverdale Home for Children. Here, she created and carried out psychological tests, as well as counseling homeless African Americans and other minority children in New York City: "I think Riverdale had a profound effect on me, because I was never aware that there were that many children who were just turned out you know, or whose parents had just left them, so to speak."
Doll study
Phipps Clark's doll study expanded upon the research she conducted for her master's thesis. The thesis had been influenced by Ruth and Gene Horowitz's investigations into "self-identification" among nursery school children. Her thesis not only sparked her husband Kenneth Clark's interest in the topic but also laid foundation for their late collaborative studies on the racial preferences of Black children. Although the thesis contained significant findings, she chose not to publish it because she felt it would be exploitative to do so under a professor's name. Instead, she told Kenneth that they would publish the work together.The doll experiment ultimately became a pivotal piece of evidence in the legal battle that culminated in the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, demonstrating that segregation inflicted psychological harm on children. Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Clark had originally conducted the study fourteen years earlier. Its results became the first social science research ever presented as hard evidence in the Court's history.
The study used four dolls identical in all ways except color. It was administered to children ages 3–7, asking questions to identify racial perception and preference. The following questions were asked:
The experiment showed that children consistently preferred the white doll across all questions and assigned positive characteristics to it. From these results, the Clarks concluded that prejudice, discrimination, and segregation caused Black children to internalize feelings of inferiority and self-hatred. Phipps Clark further explained that "if society says it is better to be White, not only White people but Negroes come to believe it," nothing that a child may attempt to escape this imposed sense of inferiority by denying their own race." The original study paved the way for later experiments conducted jointly by Phipps Clark and her husband. In an expanded investigation, she interviewed three hundred children from segregated school districts across the country and found the same patterns of preferences.
As an additional component of the doll study, Phipps Clark provided children with outline drawings of a boy and a girl and instructed them to color the figures to match their own skin tone. Many Black children colored the figures white or yellow.
Subsequent analyses of the doll study emphasized its significance because of its status as one of the first empirical demonstrations of how societal structure shapes children's developing racial identity. Later researchers contextualized the work within the current research on stereotype internalization and social identity formation; in it, children demonstrated that they absorbed cultural messages about status well before being able to articulate it. Other scholars have observed that the simplicity of the study, though groundbreaking at the time, underlined the need for more differentiated measures of self-concept in young children and encouraged expansion of methodologies in later developmental research.
The results of both the doll tests and the broader segregation-related studies demonstrated that school segregation had harmful effects on children. The study's methodology used dolls that were identical in every aspect except for skin color.
Additional research
Mamie and her husband conducted multiple studies prior to their famous doll study. In 1939, they conducted a study to determine when self- consciousness, specifically racial consciousness develops in African American children. Segregated African American children ages 3–5 years were given line drawings of white and colored boys, along with line drawings of different animals. Children were then asked to identify which picture described themselves or someone close to them. The results of their study showed that some 3-year-old children chose animals to describe themselves, while 4-year-old children do not. This suggests that around the age of 4, children begin to understand that they are distinctly human which the researchers suggest develops before children understand that they are a part of certain groups of individuals. In addition, the study found that children begin to identify themselves as white or colored around the same age. There was an increase in colored identification in the 4-year-old children compared to the 3-year-old children, however, this trend was not significant between 4 and 5-year-old children. The researchers did not believe that children stop continuing their racial identity development at age 5, but they suggested that their way of measuring this was not advanced enough to capture this development.The Clarks's work allowed future researchers to use similar methodology and expand on the couple's research. Jensen and Tisak cited the Clarks' study and used a similar methodology to find that white preschoolers preferred white girls and non white preschoolers preferred non white girls, expanding on the idea that young children racially identifying themselves, adding that children prefer others that fit their racial identity.