Dr. Mamie Clark was interviewed in 1976 for the Oral History Research Office by Ed Edwin, a journalist and radio reporter who covered New York and national politics for a variety of media in New York and Washington, D.C. Edwin also conducted interviews with Bayard Rustin, Justice Thurgood Marshall, and many New York political figures for the Office. In this interview, Dr. Clark succinctly recounts the turning points in her life, including witnessing a lynching as a child in Arkansas, studying children's concepts of race at Washington, D.C., nursery schools, choosing to study with a racially prejudiced professor at Columbia, and deciding to establish the Northside Center for Child Development. The education career of Mamie Clark is further documented in the more than thirty interviews conducted for a project on the history of the Northside Center.

Interview Excerpt
In her early work, Mamie Clark found that African American children develop a consciousness of themselves as black at a young age. Read Clark's discussion of how her findings led to further investigations into the impact of this realization on children.

Read transcript