Dr. Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, the infamous married African American psychologist team responsible for “the doll test” that held great influence in the US Supreme Court Case Brown vs. Board of Education, were a driving force for racial justice through science. Together they founded the Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and the Northside Center of Child Development.

They were expert witnesses in two major supreme court cases on the effects of negative racial psychology on children.

Mamie Clark, born Mamie Phipps in Hot Springs, Arkansas, was a child of immigrants from the British West Indies. She attended Howard University as a physics and mathematics major, but felt the need early in her college career to change majors due to the lack of support by the institution as a woman in the field.

Phipps met the man that would eventually be her husband and research partner, Kenneth Clark in school. Clark began his journey at Howard University as a political science major, but after working with mentor Francis Cecil Sumner, the first African American to receive a doctorate in psychology, he returned to school to receive a doctorate in psychology. Clark, himself a student of psychology, had convinced Mamie to change her major to the same field of study, and from that point on the pair became unstoppable.

After completing her undergraduate degree, Mamie and Kenneth were married and took residence in Harlem, where Kenneth had grown up with his family after immigrating from the Panama Canal Zone. The Clarks continued their education in psychology at Columbia University in the 1940s, where Mamie Phipps Clark became one of the first African American women to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University, and the second at Columbia to receive a doctorate in psychology – her husband Kenneth being the first.

As a Black woman in psychology, it was difficult for Mamie to enter the field. Therefore her first job after graduation was working in a law office. She later worked for the American Public Health Association, and moved on to work at the United States Armed Forces Institute.

After a challenging start in professional psychology, Mamie followed her passion for working with children, and began working to improve social services for troubled youth in Harlem, She did psychological testing at the Riverdale Children’s Association. She and her husband eventually opened their own children’s psychological centers in Harlem.

Kenneth Clark quickly landed a job at the City College of New York. He became the first fully tenured African American professor at the school. He later started a psychology department at Hampton Institute in 1942, became the first African American to be appointed to the New York State Board of Regents (1966), and became the first African American to be president of the American Psychological Association.