Mamie Phipps Clark was born in Hot Springs, Ark., in 1917 and Kenneth Clark was born in 1914 and raised in Harlem, N.Y.
Both obtained their bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Howard University. Influenced by her work with children in an all-black nursery school, Mamie decided to conduct her master’s thesis, “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children” (Butler, 2009). Not long after, she met her soon-to-be husband, Kenneth Clark, who partnered with her to extend her thesis research on self-identification in black children.
This work was later developed into the famous doll experiments that exposed internalized racism and the negative effects of segregation for African-American children (Butler, 2009).
In 1943, Mamie Clark received her Ph.D. from Columbia University, making her the first black woman to earn a psychology doctorate at Columbia, and the second black person – her husband Kenneth having been the first. With characteristic determination, Clark had selected Henry E. Garrett as her sponsoring dissertation professor – Garrett was an exceptional statistician but also an open racist whom she later confronted under oath during a court case.
Garrett was testifying as to the mental inferiority of black children. Unsurprisingly, upon graduating Clark encountered immense difficulty in finding work as a psychologist. As she explained her situation: “Although my husband had earlier secured a teaching position at the City College of New York, following my graduation it soon became apparent to me that a black female with a Ph.D. in psychology was an unwanted buy viagra koh samui anomaly in New York City in the early 1940s.”
The Clarks opened their own agency in 1946 called the Northside Center for Child Development. This was the first full-time child guidance center offering psychological and casework services to families in the Harlem area. There they also continued conducting experiments on racial biases in education (Butler, 2009).
Kenneth Clark helped found Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, served as a consultant to private and government bodies, was named the first black member of the New York State Board of Regents (1966), and founded Kenneth B. Clark & Associates (1986), a consulting firm for racially related issues. Besides Dark Ghetto (1965) he published many books and articles on the condition of African-Americans such as Prejudice and Your Child, A Possible Reality, and Pathos of Power.
The Clarks were influential to the Civil Rights movement and their expertise allowed them to testify as expert witnesses in several school desegregation cases, including Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 (Martin, 1994). Outside of their research and applied contributions they both served in the community and on committees to make a difference. Mamie Clark passed in 1983 at age 66, leaving behind two children and Kenneth Clark, who later passed in 2005 at age 91 (Butler, 2009). Both made significant contributions to the field of psychology and to the social movement of their time.