Inez Beverly Prosser

Inez Beverly was born in Yoakum, Texas, around 1895, the eldest of eleven children. She graduated as valedictorian of her segregated Yoakum high school in 1912 and took her undergraduate teaching certificate at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College — the historically Black land-grant institution in Texas.

She taught in segregated Texas public schools through the 1910s and 1920s while completing further education in stages: a Bachelor of Arts at Samuel Huston College in 1924 and a Master of Arts in education and psychology at the University of Colorado in 1927.

She entered the University of Cincinnati doctoral program in educational psychology in 1929. Her dissertation, completed in 1933, examined the psychological consequences of attending segregated versus integrated schools on African American children — concluding, on the evidence of her empirical fieldwork, that Black children fared better in segregated Black schools that had Black teachers committed to their advancement than in racially integrated schools where they faced sustained discrimination from white teachers and peers. The thesis anticipated by two decades the analyses that would shape debates around Brown v. Board of Education and its aftermath.

She thus became, in 1933, the first African American woman to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in psychology from any American university.

She returned to teach at Tougaloo College in Mississippi as Dean of Women and head of the Department of Psychology.

She was killed in an automobile accident near Shreveport, Louisiana, on the fifth of September 1934 — fourteen months after receiving her doctorate. She was approximately thirty-nine.

She is honored here as the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in psychology, whose scholarly life was cut to thirteen months.