Inez Beverly Prosser was a teacher, school administrator, psychologist, and the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology in the United States. Her dissertation The Non-Academic Development of Negro Children in Mixed and Segregated Schools would become highly influential as part of the opposition to desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954.
Prosser was born Inez Beverly on December 30, 1895, to Samuel Andrew Beverly and Veola Hamilton in San Marcos, Texas. She was the first daughter of 11 children. Growing up, the Beverly family moved to several cities across Texas including Yoakum in 1900 and Corpus Christi in 1907. In 1908, Inez and her older brother, Leon, returned to Yoakum to attend high school. She attended Yoakum Colored School and graduated as valedictorian in 1910.
Beverly enrolled at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University), graduating in 1912 with a teaching certificate. She again returned to Yoakum and taught at various segregated elementary and high schools around the area. She became an assistant principal at Clayton Industrial School in Manor, Texas, and then accepted a position at Anderson High School in Austin, Texas. While at Anderson, she taught English and coached the Spelling competitions of the Interscholastic League. During this period, Beverly met Allen Rufus Prosser, an elevator operator at a department store in Austin, Texas. The two were married in 1916.
Prosser would continue to pursue her education, completing her bachelor’s degree at Samuel Houston College (Now Huston-Tillotson University) in 1926. A year later she received her master’s degree in education at the University of Colorado and returned to Samuel Houston College as a faculty member. In 1930, she took a faculty post at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi and served as a register. A year later, Prosser left Tougaloo College and enrolled in the PhD. Program in the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati. There she began to research her dissertation, The Non-Academic Development of Negro Children in Mixed and Segregated Schools. Studying African American students attending segregated schools and integrated schools in the Cincinnati area, she argued that Black children fared better in segregated schools with Black classmates and Black teachers. Black children who attended integrated schools experienced more social maladjustment, felt less secure in their social relationships, and had less satisfactory relationships with their families. Prossor’s research also showed that Black students felt inferior to whites in an integrated school, had less satisfactory relationships with their teachers, and were more eager to leave school early. While by today’s standards, her assessment appears controversial, at the time her research conclusions paralleled the ideas of prominent historians Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B DuBois.
In 1933, Prossor completed her dissertation and received her Ph.D. in Psychology which made her the first African American woman to receive a doctorate in that field. On September 5, 1934, Prossor died in a car accident in Shreveport, Louisiana at the age of 38. Twenty years after her death, opponents of desegregation used her research to bolster their arguments before the Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education case. Nonetheless the Court ruled against segregated education.
