With all the obvious arguments against discrimination and segregation, the smoking gun presented to the high court was little two baby dolls wielded by a Black woman.

Dr. Mamie Phipps-Clark would have been a force against racism even without her groundbreaking research. Born in Hot Springs, AR in 1917, Dr. Mamie was one of the rare Black students with the privilege, persistence, and promise to graduate the city’s first high school for Black students with flying colors.

Attending Howard University at the peak of the Great Depression, she graduated with a Master’s in Psychology, a field where women, and especially Black women, were almost unheard of.

Certainly, this was more than anyone could have hoped from a small town girl in a segregated world. But Dr. Mamie’s barrier breaking was only just beginning.

In 1943, she became the first Black woman to graduate Columbia University with a Doctorate in Psychology. And she did so with a thesis that ultimately changed the shape of the nation.

Dr. Mamie originally presented “The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children” as her Master’s thesis at Howard. The topic occurred to her when she simply couldn’t remember a time that she didn’t know that she was Black.

“I became acutely aware of that in childhood, because you had to have a certain kind of protective armor about you, all the time … You learned the things not to do…so as to protect yourself,” she said, describing a phenomenon known to millions of Black children before and since. Dr. Mamie’s initial study included 150 Black children from a DC nursery school, and the results were summed up by her husband and fellow psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark as “disturbing.” They wanted to dive deeper.

At Columbia, Dr. Mamie leveraged the university’s Ivy League status to further fund, explore and legitimize her work. The 1920s and 30s were widely known as “the era of scientific racism,” the belief that there is empirical and/or biological evidence to support white supremacy. By the late 1930s, Black and progressive white psychologists were working to debunk these theories, but a Black woman fearlessly asserting that “Black people were not limited by innate biological difference but by social and economic barriers to success” was entirely revolutionary.

And so was the evidence to prove it.

The “Doll Test,” as it’s come to be known, had a simple premise. 253 school-aged Black children—134 who attended segregated schools in Arkansas and 119 from integrated schools in Massachusetts—would be presented with four dolls—two Black, two white. But even that simplicity came with challenges: Black dolls weren’t manufactured in 1947, so Dr. Mamie had to paint white dolls Black instead.

With her dolls at the ready, the experiment was on:
“Give me the doll that you would like to play with or like best.”
“Give me the doll that is the nice doll.”
“Give me the doll that looks bad.”
“Give me the doll that is a nice color.”
“Give me the doll that looks like a White child.”
“Give me the doll that looks like a colored child.”
“Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child.”
“Give me the doll that looks like you.”

The majority associated positive traits to the white doll and negative traits to the Black doll. But these Black childrens’ responses to the last question shook the Clarks so deeply, they didn’t even want to publish the results. When asked to identify the doll that looked most like them, some of the children burst into tears.

Results showed that by age three, Black children were aware of their race and attached negative traits to their own identity, which were then perpetuated by a racist and segregated society. Dr. Kenneth’s summary of the Doll Test was especially clear and truly devastating: “These children saw themselves as inferior and they accepted the inferiority as part of reality.”

When a young upstart lawyer named Thurgood Marshall discovered the Clarks’ Doll Test, he presented its damning evidence to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. And in a historically unanimous decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed with Dr. Kenneth that “To separate [Black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

With the 1954 decision, segregation was ruled unconstitutional in the United States. And that’s not all. The Doll Test was the first time social science research was submitted as hard evidence in Supreme Court history.

In 2010, nearly 60 years after Brown v. Board, child psychologist and University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer revised the Doll Test for a pilot study testing both white and Black children. The results were not as progressive as one might hope.

Though all the children demonstrated a positive bias towards whiteness, white children much more frequently identified their own skin with positive attributes and darker skin with negative attributes. For instance, when asked to point to the dumb child, about 76% of the white children pointed to illustrations of the two darkest children. 66% identified the two darkest as “the mean child.” Dr. Spencer’s conclusion differed little from Dr. Kenneth’s all those decades before: “we are still living in a society where dark things are devalued and white things are valued.”

Devastated by the results of the Doll Test and the constant feeling of being an ”unwanted anomaly” in her field, Dr. Mamie Phipps-Clark left experimental psychology. Instead she focused her efforts on undoing the emotional, mental and educational damage inflicted upon Black children by a society that viewed them so negatively.

As a psychologist at the Riverdale Home for Children, she counseled unhomed Black girls until 1946, when she and her husband opened the Northside Center for Child Development to provide psychological services to minority children in Harlem and study racial biases in education. 16 years later, the Clarks opened Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited to provide resources for Harlem schools and reduce unemployment among Black high school dropouts.

Though she died in 1983 without seeing her work complete, Dr. Mamie set about treating a wound the United States didn’t even know it had, setting us on a course to finally heal the toxic infection of racism.

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