[2] This work included doll experiments that investigated the way African American children's attitudes toward race and racial self-identification were affected by segregation.

[4] Her father, Harold H. Phipps, born in the British West Indies, was a well-respected physician and a manager of a resort.

It was Kenneth Clark who urged her to pursue psychology because it would allow her to explore her interest in working with children.

Her conclusions about African American children became the foundation and the guiding premise for the famous doll studies which her and her husband would later become very well known for.

[6] Phipps confessed that it was not until the end of her undergraduate years that she finally became confident about creating solutions for segregation and racial oppression.

The summer after her graduation Phipps worked as a secretary in the law office of Charles Houston, who was a prominent lawyer and leading civil rights figure at a time when segregation cases were being taken up by the national Association for the Advancement Colored People legal defense fund.

There she witnessed the work of William Hastie, Thurgood Marshall, and others in preparation for the court challenges that would lead to the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education.

[7][unreliable source] Clark was the first Black woman to earn her Ph.D. in experimental psychology, which she did in 1943 from Columbia University.

She returned to student life with the vivid and optimistic idea that an "actual tangible approach" could be used to further her research and findings about African American children.

Phipps Clark's dissertation adviser was Henry E. Garrett, later president of the American Psychological Association.

Later on in her career, she was asked to testify in the Prince Edward County, Virginia, desegregation case in order to rebut his testimony offered in that court in support of inherent racial differences.

One instrumental role was a job in 1945 conducting psychological testing for homeless black girls for the Riverdale Home for Children.

Her master's thesis spurred her husband's interests in the area and served as the basis of their later collaborative work on the racial preferences of Black children.

Findings from this study were the first social science research to be submitted as hard evidence in the Court's history.

The Clarks concluded that "prejudice, discrimination and segregation" caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred.

Phipps Clark interviewed three hundred children from different parts of the county where schools were segregated and found the same results.

[11] In February 1946, Mamie Phipps Clark founded the Northside Center for Child Development[12] in the basement of the Paul Lawrence Dunbar apartments, where her family lived.

Dr. Clark used this facility to establish her theory of conjoining social welfare and psychological outlooks on child development.

By the second year, this total more than doubled and services expanded to offer psychological testing to 80 children (Lal, 2002).

The center’s mission expanded to address more than just psychological challenges, but also the moral dilemmas that people of color face.

Kenneth Clark proposed busing to integrate schools, but protests from parents on both sides prevented this.

Mamie Clark said that the collaboration between her and her husband resulted in "a lifetime of close, challenging and professionally satisfying experiences".

She also served on the board of the American Broadcasting Companies, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, New York Mission Society, The Phelps Stokes Fund, Teachers College at Columbia University, and was a Commissioner of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission.

Phipps Clark's legacy and recognition of her contribution to the academic research world remains diminished today.

Phipps Clark faced both gendered and racial obstacles in her career yet she continued to work despite these challenges of intersectionality in the psychological field.

[14] It has been noted that she adhered to feminine expectations of the time and often took care to "remain in the shadows of her husband's limelight" and often presented as shy.