Mamie Phipps earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University in 1938, majoring in psychology and minoring in mathematics.
In 1938, Mamie Phipps graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University, one of the nation's premier historically Black universities. She initially intended to study mathematics, but after meeting fellow student Kenneth Clark, who encouraged her interest in psychology, she shifted her academic focus toward the emerging field of developmental and social psychology.
At Howard, Mamie was immersed in an intellectually vibrant community of Black scholars and thinkers, a stark contrast to the segregated public schooling she had experienced in Arkansas. Her professors, including prominent psychologist Francis Cecil Sumner, considered the "father of Black psychology," helped shape her rigorous scientific approach to studying race and child development.
Graduating magna cum laude, Mamie distinguished herself academically among her peers at a time when higher education, let alone graduate study, remained largely inaccessible to Black women in America. Her undergraduate achievement at Howard laid the groundwork for her subsequent graduate studies and her pioneering doctoral work, which would ultimately influence one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in American history, Brown v. Board of Education.