User:Awomannotagirl/sandbox

Born on April 18, 1917, in Arkansas, Mamie Phipps Clark attended highly segregated schools. Phipps's father, Harold H. Phipps, born in the British West Indies, was a well-respected physician, though black physicians were rare at that time, and a manager of a resort. Though Katy Florence Phipps, Phipps's mother, worked as a homemaker, she was often involved in her husband's work as a physician.

Her father's Harold's job allowed Mamie Phipps Clark to live what she considered a privileged childhood. Black physicians were rare during that time. Her mother did not need to work outside the home to supplement the family income. Phipps Clark [later?] stated,

Clark graduated from Langston High School, even though it was very uncommon for a black student to do so [to graduate, or to graduate from that school?]. She received two offers and scholarships from top colleges, 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 a black women to receive an education in those departments at the time.

At Howard, Mamie Phipps Clark would meet 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. In 1938, Mamie Phipps Clark graduated magna cum laude from Howard University. The summer after her graduation Phipps worked as a secretary in the law office of Charles Houston. 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 vs. Board of Education. This had an influence on her [year?] master's thesis, "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children."

Mamie Phipps Clark earned her Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1943 from Columbia University. 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”[needs a citation] 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. This spurred her desire to open the Northside Child Development Center.