1. Mamie and Kenneth Clark

2. Zeitgeist Following the Civil War (1861 – 1865)

3. Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, defining citizenship. Individuals born or naturalized in the United States are American citizens, including those born as slaves. This nullifies the Dred Scott Case (1857), which had ruled that blacks were not citizens.
1870- Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, giving blacks the right to vote

4. Civil Rights Act of 1875.
This legislation made it a crime for an individual to deny “the full and equal enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color.”
Cartoon:

5. In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 act, ruling that the 14th Amendment did not give Congress authority to prevent discrimination by private individuals.
The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 were a group of five cases consolidated by the Supreme Court because of their similarity. Each case involved Black Americans being denied entrance to a public area that was privately owned. According to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, it was illegal to discriminate against citizens based on their race. In an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court ruled this act unconstitutional and Justice Bradley proclaimed that private business owners should have the right to regulate who has access to their business.
Victims of racial discrimination were told to seek relief not from the Federal Government, but from the states. Unfortunately, state governments were passing legislation that codified inequality between the races. Laws requiring the establishment of separate schools for children of each race were most common; however, segregation was soon extended to encompass most public and semi-public facilities.

6. The phrase "Jim Crow Law" can be found as early as 1892 in the title of a New York Times article about Louisiana requiring segregated railroad cars.[2][3] The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of blacks performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, which first surfaced in 1832 and was used to satirize Andrew Jackson's populist policies. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" by 1838 had become a pejorative expression meaning "Negro". When southern legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against blacks at the end of the 19th century, these statutes became known as Jim Crow laws.

7. States passed "Jim Crow" laws designed to segregate whites and blacks
Blacks were still elected to local offices throughout the 1880s, but their voting was suppressed for state and national elections. Democrats passed laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease.[5][6] Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements.

8. In 1896, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
In 1896, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. which upheld the constitutionality of Louisiana’s Jim Crow law.

9. In part the court said:
“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it… The argument also assumes that social prejudice may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured except by an enforced commingling of the two races… If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.”

10. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The NAACP was established in 1909 America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Formed in New York City by white and black activists. Video

11. Born in Hot Springs, Ark., in 1917
Mamie Phipps Clark
Born in Hot Springs, Ark., in 1917 
Father - Harold H. Phipps, a physician.
Mother - Katy Florence Phipps, a homemaker.
One younger brother who became a dentist.
Picture is Harold and Katy Phipps

12. Pythian Bathhouse
Father was an immigrant from St. Kitts in the British West Indies. Had a private medical practice but supplemented his income as the manager of the only bathing facility for African- American clients in Hot Springs.

13. Privileged Middle-class Childhood
Mamie grew up during the Depression and during a time of racism and segregation.  Her father’s occupation and income, allowed the family to live a middle-class lifestyle and even got them into some white- only parts of town. In many ways she had a privileged childhood.

14. Yet very aware of segregation
Mamie attended segregated elementary and secondary schools.
Picture is Linda Brown – student central to Brown Vs. Board of Education.

15. Many facilities were white only and only hired whites.
“COMPLETE, SANITARY, CONVENIENT, WHITE ATTENDANTS: THIS MEANS SERVICE“. 
Many facilities were white only and only hired whites.

16. Education
Graduated from Langston High School in 1934 at 16 years old. Won scholarships to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Howard University in Washington DC.
Both universities are Historically Black. She elected to attend Howard to study mathematics and physics, departments that were not particularly supportive of her as a student, possibly due to prejudices against women entering such fields at the time.

17. Kenneth Clark
Born in 1914 and raised in Harlem, N.Y. His father, Arthur, worked for the United Fruit Company in Panama City. Miriam (Mother) and Beulah (his Sister) moved to Harlem NY in The Harlem Renaissance
Both parents Jamaican Born.
Panama was a troubled place (Banana Wars)
Mother brought 4 year old Kenneth and 2.5 year old Beulah to NY for better schools and life.

18. Miriam (Mother) and Beulah (his Sister) moved to Harlem NY in 1918
Miriam (Mother) and Beulah (his Sister) moved to Harlem NY in The Harlem Renaissance
Lived on the northern edge of Harlem in a predominately white area. Attended predominately white (Irish and Jewish) school. Spoke English and Spanish and the kids called him Spanie. Teachers expected the same performance from all students. Kenneth does not remember color being an issue up through 5th grade.

19. What happened in 5th grade?
Hubert Thomas Delany “I remember one of my classmates telling me that there was a colored teacher, and I went to the door to look at him. I was so proud I remember the joy, the prode, the thrill I had and I think I wnet home and told my mother that I saw a colored teacher,”
Hubert Thomas Delany, then a student at City College came to PS 5 to do student teaching.

20. Neighborhood became increasingly black
Middle School was the beginning of his segregated education experience.
When considering high schools , his guidance counselor urged him to attend a vocational school.
There was one whte student in his graduating class (Italian-American).
Teachers were still committed to teaching all student:
No one of those teachers at that time – this is in the 1920’s gave adman about the fact that I came from a broken home, or that my mother was a labor organizer in the garment industry. Those were absolutely irrelevant things, in terms of what they saw as their responsibility and their goals in the classroom, and there were kids in my class at 139 who were poorer than I, But everyone was poor. It didn’t matter a damn, you know.

21. George Washington High School
Predominately White High School One of best students in the school Few options for University except for Howard. Mother found a way to pay his tuition.
Many famous Alumni including Henry Kissinger

22. Howard University 1931 Francis Sumner: Father of Black Psychology
- first African American to receive a PhD degree in psychology. 
Mentored by G. Stanley Hall*
Part of a small group of select students and professors who met and talked (often over beer, in their homes). These professors were “teaching not only their subject matter, but values. They were teaching the perspective of life and race. This is when I started really to become concerned with racial injustices in America, because these men were putting this into their relationship with you.”
Sumner was the chair and founder of Psychology (1928 – 1954)
Sumner was a student of G. Stanly Hall’s. - go forward a slide and back.
Clark was influenced by Sumner and other Howard Professors who thought racism could and would be overcome and that an integrated society was both necessary and possible.

23. G. Stanley Hall
Believed in Racial Eugenics but Hall believed in giving “lower races” a chance to accept and adapt to the “superior white civilization”.
Sumner was a student of G. Stanly Hall’s.
Hall was a student of William James. 1st Psych degree awarded in America. Area of study was education.
Believed in Racial Eugenics. In the 1920’s several states had forced sterilization of undesirable citizens (disabled, prisoners, racial minorities).

24. March 17th, 1934 – Led protest at US Capital.

25. The demonstration was prompted by the barring of Morris Lewis, an aide to the only African American U.S. representative Oscar DePriest, from the public House restaurant in January and the subsequent forcible removal of Mabel Byrd, a civil rights activist, from the Senate restaurant in February of 1934.
 Kenneth Clark, wrote an editorial for Howard’s student newspaper.
 The next day Clark and a few others organized thirty students, most dressed in suits, to attempt to obtain service at the House restaurant, but were barred by police. The Senate closed the restaurant in anticipation of the demonstration before the students arrived.
When the students went to the police station, four of their leaders were arrested for blocking the sidewalk.
 The precinct captain quickly dismissed the charges against the four and expunged their records.
 Newspapers ran sensational headlines about the demonstration and DePriest distanced himself from the ongoing protests
 There were calls from Congress to expel the students and university president Mordecai Johnson followed up by asking for expulsions or suspensions for the participants.
 However faculty disciplinary committee chair Ralph Bunche, a future Nobel Prize winner, argued that the students should be given medals and not discipline. The decision was no discipline
Aide Morris Lewis and Rep. Oscar DePriest: 1929

26. Mamie Phipps
Entered Howard University in 1934 at 16 years of age. Planned to major in Mathematics and Physics and planned to teach. Found the Mathematics' professors indifferent towards female student’s. Met and began to date Kenneth a graduate student, editor of the student newspaper. He convinced her that the social sciences had scientific rigor and would satisfy her desire to work with children.

27. 1937
Kenneth is accepted to Columbia - 1st African American student permitted to enroll in their graduate program. Mamie and Clark become engaged. Father’s reaction “I have envisioned an entirely different program for you; a brilliant scholastic career; equal brilliance in your chosen field of endeavor and then for me the honor and pleasure of giving you away in marriage.”
Cornell had turned him down. Said he would be unhappy there.
Her parents did not approve. Wrote to her: I have envisioned an entirely different program for you; a brilliant scholastic career; equal brilliance in your chosen field of endeavor and then for me the honor and pleasure of giving you away in marriage.

28. 1938 Eloped during Spring break
Kept the marriage secret because Mamie would not graduate until the end of June.
Undergrads were not allowed to be married.
She would have lost her chance at graduate school at Howard
Mamie was elected “May Queen” which meant she was a virgin.

29. Summer of 1938 – before Grad School
Mamie worked at law office of Charles Houston Known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow”, he played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston helped train future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.
Houston’s brilliant plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by using the inequality of the “separate but equal” doctrine (from the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision) as it pertained to public education in the United States was the master stroke that brought about the landmark Brown decision.

30. Houston made a big impression on both Clark’s
For Mamie this experience influenced her choice of Master’s Thesis
“The most wonderful thing happened today; a doctor at Freedman’s hospital made it possible to have access to 300 negro Nursery School Children under W.P.A. school projects.

31. The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children
In 1939 a white professor wanted to “have” her thesis presented at the APA convention that summer.
Kenneth and Mamie worked hard to publish her work within three months to protect it from being “read” by Dr. Max Meenes”!
Four publications in prestigious Academic Journals.
First article was by Mamie, next three were co-authored by Mamie and Kenneth.

32. Fellowship from Julius Rosenwald Foundation!
Awarded just after Mamie graduated in Kenneth and Mamie could now work together in New York. Mamie could enroll at Columbia University. Grant was to develop newer methods of a coloring test and a doll test to continue their work on race and identity.