October 18, 1917

Mamie Phipps Clark, the first African-American woman to earn a Doctor of Philosophy degree in psychology from Columbia University, was born in Hot Springs (Garland County). The research she did with her husband was important in the success of the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” with regard to education to be unconstitutional because such separation generated “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community” on the part of African-American students.

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