Earned M.A. from Howard University

In 1939, Mamie Phipps Clark completed her Master of Arts degree in psychology at Howard University. Her master's thesis, which explored the development of racial identity and self-consciousness among Black preschool children, marked the beginning of what would become her life's most influential body of research.

This early work laid the conceptual and methodological groundwork for the famous "doll tests" she would later develop with her husband, Kenneth Clark, whom she married in 1938 during this period of graduate study. Her master's research demonstrated an early and rigorous scientific interest in how societal racism shaped the psychological development of Black children—a topic virtually unexplored by mainstream psychology at the time.

Completing her M.A. positioned Mamie to pursue doctoral studies, an extraordinarily rare achievement for a Black woman in the late 1930s. Few graduate programs admitted Black students at all, and fewer still admitted Black women. Her persistence and intellectual rigor during this period set the stage for her historic doctoral achievement at Columbia University just a few years later, cementing her place as a pioneering figure in American psychology.