This display was about celebrating Unsung Champions within the field of Pyschotherapy and Counselling
“We will have stability—moral stability—and justice in a society when those who are not the immediate victims of injustice feel as intensely the injustices as the victim himself,” - Dr. Kenneth Clark.
In the late 1930s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark began to study the self-image of black children and were among the first to describe the “harm and benefit” thesis in the area of civil rights and desegregation law. They were instrumental in challenging and changing inequalities around segregated education in the United States.
Dr. Kenneth B. Clark graduated from George Washington High School in 1931 and received bachelor and master degrees from Howard University in Washington D.C. 1935 and 1936, respectively. Clark then enrolled at Columbia University and in 1940, became the first African American to earn the doctorate in psychology at the University in 1943. Clark taught at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) from 1940 to 1941. In 1942, he moved to the City College of New York, becoming the institution’s first permanent black faculty member.
Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark graduated from her segregated high school at 17 as a prodigious student who was particularly gifted with math. She was offered scholarships to attend two historically black universities and ultimately accepted Howard, where she met Kenneth Clark. As she became discouraged with her math major due to a lack of support towards female students, Kenneth persuaded her to join him in the psychology department, where she would be able to explore her interest in working with children.
Kenneth and Mamie married in 1938 and moved to New York, where they were awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship to support their continued studies. They enrolled in the psychology doctorate program at Columbia University, where Clark challenged herself by studying under Henry E. Garrett, a prominent statistician who was brazenly racist and a eugenicist both personally and professionally. Despite his discouragement, she not only completed her thesis work, on How intelligence changes across age in children, but also continued work on the Rosenwald-funded research project that extended the studies from her master’s degree. She and her husband became the First black recipients of psychology doctorates at Columbia University in 1943.
Both Kenneth and Mamie Clark were enlisted by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP legal team to provide testimony in three of the four cases leading to the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Using the Clark’s “Doll Test” research, NAACP lawyers argued that racially separate educational facilities were psychologically harmful to African Americans and thereby violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Despite a mountain of racially motivated resistance from both political and psychology groups (even the APA, who later posted an apology in 2021), ultimately schools were instructed to integrate ‘with all deliberate speed’.
Over the next two decades, Kenneth published numerous books and articles in the field of social psychology. His books include Prejudice and Your Child (1963), The Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965), and Crisis in Education (1971). He was awarded numerous prizes including the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1961. Mamie had a more difficult time finding a position and described being a black woman with a psychology PhD as an “unwanted anomaly” in 1940s New York City, though she served on various board such as of the American Broadcasting Companies, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York City Public Library and Teachers College at Columbia University.
Undeterred, Mamie and Kenneth opened the Northside Center for Child Development (1946) in Harlem, one of the first agencies to focus on providing psychological services for black children as well as social advocacy (particularly involving the City of New York and their practice of disproportionately, and incorrectly, determining black children to have learning difficulties). They continued to build the centre and Mamie worked there until her retirement in 1979.
In 1966, Columbia recognized the couple's work by awarding each the Nicholas Murray Butler Silver Medal.
Considered to be one of Jamaica’s most renowned psychiatrists, Professor Frederick Hickling was the former Head of the Department of Psychiatry at The UWI Mona from 2000 to 2006, and was Instrumental in developing the UWI Caribbean Institute of Mental Health and Substance Abuse (CARIMENSA), where he acted as Executive Director. In 2011, he was appointed Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry.
Professor Hickling was well respected among his local and international peers, to that end he was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association in 2008, he was also a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists UK in 2011. In the same year, he was appointed Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at UWI in 2011.
During his academic career he authored and co-authored more than 100 publications, and was the author and editor of six books. In recognition of his contribution to nation building through the pursuit of his passion, psychiatry, in 2012, he received the Order of Distinction (Commander) by the Government of Jamaica.
According to Samuel O. Okpaku M.D., Ph.D., Dr. Hickling had many facets: He was a poet, a musician, a debater, and, above all, a sensitive, caring individual who was sometimes misunderstood because of his deeply held philosophical and political views. Long before becoming a physician, he studied at the University of the West Indies and then at St. Thomas Hospital in London and Edinburgh University in Scotland. While in the United Kingdom, he witnessed how the West Indian and other immigrants were treated and was aggrieved by the lack of social justice. He encountered discrimination himself when some of his early original research papers were rejected for publication. Nevertheless, he was not deterred by these kinds of experiences, which fuelled his determination to address the wounds of slavery.
After his psychiatric training and practice in the United Kingdom, he returned to his native Jamaica to continue his work. His thoughts and creativity flourished against setbacks. He was moved by the early history of the West Indies, including the trauma of slavery and colonization. His interest in this area was very broad and buttressed by his wide reading and experience.
In wanting to give back to his people, Dr. Hickling was engaged in a variety of mental health care projects in Jamaica including a deep interest in training African mental health workers. Dr Hickling taught the Bellevue staff not to fear the inmates and was a strong believer in the mentally ill remaining at home with family while undergoing therapy. He urged Jamaicans to “own our madness…if we are to develop as an independent and free people”, a thought he expounded on in the best known of his six books, Owning Our Madness. In his book Psychohistoriography (2009), he coined the term European-American psychosis which refers to the 500-year collective delusion of European world ownership and white supremacy based on Divine Right.
His cultural therapy program led to the creation of four full-length sociodrama pageants portraying the history of psychiatry and mental health in Jamaica, performed by hospital patients and staff for audiences from the mental hospital and the surrounding community in a 1500-seat Garden Theatre built by the patients and staff! No small feat! This program also resulted in profound stimulation of community insight about mental illness contributing to a process of psychological deinstitutionalization. This health promotion activity fused cultural therapy programs with the telecommunications media in preparing the society for deinstitutionalization. He was also perhaps one of the few legitimate critics of Western classificatory systems of classifications.
Dr. Hickling had too many accomplishments to list here and appeared to be such an amazing and fascinating scholar and individual. In a recent award lecture in Berlin, he emphasized his frequent exhortation to his students: “If you don’t write it, you haven’t done it.”
