her to pursue psychology because it would allow her to explore her interest in working with children. Phipps once stated "I'd always had an interest in children. Always from the time I was very small. I'd always thought I wanted to work with children, and psychology seemed a good field." Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Bancroft Clark eloped during her senior year in 1937. In 1938, Mamie Phipps Clark graduated magna cum laude from Howard University. After she immediately enrolled in Howard University's psychology graduate program. For her master's thesis, she studied when black children became aware of themselves as having a distinct “self,” as well as when they became aware of belonging to a particular racial group. She defined “race consciousness” as the perception of self-belonging to a specific group, which is differentiated from other groups by obvious physical characteristics. Her conclusions about African American children became the foundation and the guiding premise for the famous doll studies which her and her husband would later become very well known for. Phipps confessed that it was not until the end of her undergraduate years that she finally became confident about creating solutions for segregation and racial oppression. The summer after her graduation Phipps worked as a secretary in the law office of Charles Houston, who was a prominent lawyer and leading civil rights figure at a time when segregation cases were being taken up by the national Association for the Advancement Colored People legal defense fund. There she witnessed the work of William Hastie, Thurgood Marshall, and others in preparation for the court challenges that would lead to the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education. As she later noted: "I can't even remember the names of them all, but they converged in his office to prepare these cases and that was the most marvelous learning experience I ever had- in the whole sense of really, blasphemy, to blacks, was brought very clearly to me in that office." This had an influence on her master's thesis, "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children," which would later be responsible for the research and experiments which influenced the Supreme Court Case, Brown v. Board of Education. Clark was the first Black woman to earn her Ph.D. in experimental psychology, which she did in 1943 from Columbia University. She returned to student life with the vivid and optimistic idea