Prosser, Inez Beverly

Impact on the world

Earned her PhD in educational psychology from the University of Cincinnati in 1933, becoming the first African American woman to hold a psychology doctorate; her dissertation, 'The Non-Academic Development of Negro Children in Mixed and Segregated Schools,' found that Black children in integrated schools faced greater social difficulty than those in segregated ones, a finding that, controversially and arguably against her own broader convictions about Black children's welfare, was later cited by segregationists opposing the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Life & background

Born in San Marcos, Texas, the eldest daughter of eleven children, Prosser nearly missed her own education entirely, since her family had initially planned to send only her older brother to college; she and that brother together persuaded their parents to fund her schooling instead, an investment she repaid many times over by later establishing a fund that helped six of her ten siblings complete college themselves. After graduating as valedictorian from her segregated high school and from Prairie View Normal College's teacher training program, she taught for years in Texas's segregated schools before earning a master's degree at the University of Colorado and taking faculty and administrative posts at Tillotson College and then Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where she served simultaneously as registrar, dean, and principal of the affiliated high school. A 1931 research grant from the Rockefeller-founded General Education Board, secured by explicitly framing her work as research that would improve elementary and high school teaching, allowed her to pursue doctoral study at the University of Cincinnati, where in 1933 she became the first Black woman to earn a psychology PhD; some scholars dispute her precedence on narrow disciplinary grounds, since a different Black woman earned a comparable degree the following year from a psychology department specifically, while Prosser's was awarded through an education program. Her dissertation's central finding, that Black children in racially mixed schools experienced greater social and emotional difficulty than peers in segregated Black schools, became one of the era's earliest empirical investigations into the social development of Black schoolchildren, and was later cited, controversially and likely against the spirit of her own broader life's work supporting Black educational advancement, by opponents of school desegregation following Brown v. Board two decades after her death. She died in 1934, roughly a year after completing her doctorate, when a car carrying her, her husband, and her sister collided head-on with another vehicle near Shreveport, Louisiana; she was approximately 38 years old.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; American Psychological Association Monitor; British Psychological Society; African American Registry; Oklahoma State University Psychology Museum