The long road to diversity

Even as late as the 1930s, only four black colleges offered psychology as an undergraduate major.

The barriers women faced a century ago in becoming psychologists were shared also by people of color, who were largely cut off from higher education. This was particularly true for African-Americans who lived in the South.

The 83 black colleges operating in the United States by 1900 were usually undergraduate only, or emphasized fields other than psychology. Psychology courses in black colleges typically were found in programs of education, preparing students to become teachers in the segregated public schools.

Even as late as the 1930s, only four black colleges offered psychology as an undergraduate major. While there were no formal restrictions against them taking advanced degrees in Northern universities, the overwhelming percentage of African-American students were to be found in the South--97 percent, as late as 1933, according to Robert Guthrie.

However, at Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., where psychologist and APA founder G. Stanley Hall was president, African-Americans were accepted to study for doctoral degrees in psychology. Among the six African-American students who received advanced behavioral science degrees at Clark between 1916 and 1920 were Howard Long, with an MA in psychology in 1916 and Francis Sumner, with a PhD degree in 1920.

Sumner was the first African-American to receive an earned doctorate in any American university. He worked closely with Hall during his time at Clark, and his dissertation--published in Pedagogical Seminary, which later became the Journal of Genetic Psychology--focused on "Psychoanalysis of Freud and Adler."

After graduation, Sumner accepted a position at West Virginia Collegiate Institute, and remained there until 1928. During those years, he continued to publish widely in experimental and nonexperimental psychology. Sumner spent the remainder of his career at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He helped establish an independent department of psychology there in 1930 and remained its chair until his death in 1954.

Howard would become a center of education for black psychologists. In those days, Sumner's program awarded only an MS degree. Between 1927 and 1950, it graduated 62 masters students, with several becoming leaders in the field. Perhaps the best known was Kenneth B. Clark, who earned a Howard MS degree in 1935. His work on the effects of segregation on black youth was cited as a significant influence on the Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. the Board of Education. Clark would also become APA's first African-American president in 1970-71.

Harman George Canady, who succeeded Sumner at West Virginia College in 1928, received his MA degree in clinical psychology from Northwestern in 1927, and his doctorate there in 1941. Frederick Payne Watts, long associated with Howard University, received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1941.

After World War II, with the veterans' GI Bill of Rights and a widespread increase in educational opportunities, more blacks and other minorities won advanced degrees in all fields, including psychology. Progress within the association was perceived by leaders to be too slow, however. Dissatisfaction with the pace of the APA's movement on racial issues in psychological training and employment led to the founding of the Association of Black Psychologists in 1968. The split acted as a wake-up call for organizational and professional psychology alike, and helped spur greater attention to questions of race within psychology.

Today, people of color are still underrepresented in academic departments and in graduate programs, although their numbers and influence are increasing.

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