Biography To educated parents Katie and Harold Phipps, Mamie Phipps Clark was born on April 18, 1917 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her father was a doctor and greatly influenced her education. Despite growing up during the Great Depression and during a time of cruel racism, she described her childhood as very happy and enjoyable, living a privileged life with her father’s prestigious occupation and income. Phipps Clark graduated from Pine Bluff’s Langston High School at the young age of sixteen in 1934 and was offered several scholarships to pursue higher education. At Howard University, one of the most prestigious black universities at the time, Phipps majored in math and minored in physics before later focusing her studies on psychology.…show more content… Board of Education court case. The test was a kind of investigation of the development of racial identity in African American children. These African-American children were given a sheet of paper with drawings of a boy and a girl, along with a box of crayons. The child would be asked to color the picture the same color they were. Children with lighter brown skin tended to color the picture correctly, but most of the darker skinned black children colored the picture with a noticeably lighter shade than their own skin color. Next, the child was asked to color the opposite gendered drawing the color they wanted it to be. Most children colored the second drawing white or tan. Some children used an irrelevant color, like red or green. Because most children colored themselves brown, though it tended to be lighter than their own skin, they showed that they had self-identification. However, by coloring the other child white or an inappropriate color, the children displayed a kind of emotional anxiety in terms of their own skin. Along with this conclusion, the Clarks speculated that black children saw themselves as inferior in society.
