Sumner, Francis Cecil

Impact on the world

Earned his PhD in psychology from Clark University in 1920, becoming the first African American to hold that degree, then in 1930 established Howard University's psychology department as an independent academic unit, building it over more than two decades into the institution that trained the majority of America's earliest Black psychologists; his most influential student, Kenneth B. Clark, would go on to conduct the landmark psychological research cited directly in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a case decided the same year Sumner died.

Life & background

Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Sumner was homeschooled by his own self-educated father after the local high schools available to him proved too poor in quality to attend, passing an entrance examination to enroll at Lincoln University at just 15 and graduating magna cum laude in 1915. At Clark University, where he earned a second bachelor's degree, he developed a close mentorship with university president G. Stanley Hall, founder of the American Psychological Association, who approved Sumner's doctoral application and supported him through a wartime interruption serving in a segregated U.S. Army labor unit in France; Sumner returned to complete his dissertation comparing the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Adler, earning his PhD on June 14, 1920. After teaching positions at several historically Black colleges, he joined Howard University in 1928 and, with university president Mordecai Johnson's support, established its psychology department as an independent unit in 1930, separate from the philosophy and education departments where Black institutions' psychology instruction had typically been housed; though Howard would not confer its own psychology PhDs until 1972, by then 60 of the roughly 300 African Americans who had earned psychology doctorates nationwide had passed through Sumner's department first. His most consequential student, Kenneth B. Clark, went on to become the first Black president of the American Psychological Association and to conduct, with his wife Mamie Phipps Clark, the influential 'doll studies' on child self-perception that were cited directly in Brown v. Board of Education; Sumner died of a heart attack while shoveling snow outside his Washington home in January 1954, just months before that landmark ruling, and was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Encyclopedia of Arkansas; Oklahoma State University Psychology Museum; The Decision Lab; British Psychological Society