Mamie Phipps Clark

Mamie Phipps Clark was an American social psychologist who, together with her husband Kenneth Clark, studied how segregation affected the racial self-image of Black children. For her graduate research she worked with Black preschool children in Arkansas, developing what became known as the doll experiments, in which children were shown Black and white dolls and asked which they preferred and which they thought was good or bad; children attending segregated schools tended to favor the white doll. That research was cited as evidence in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down school segregation. With her husband she also founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem to provide psychological services to children in the community.