Inez Beverly Prosser

Inez Beverly Prosser (189? - 1934) was the first African American female to received Ph.D in psychology. Prosser was the oldest daughter of eleven children. Prosser graduated valedictorian from Yoakum Colored High School in 1912 and then went on to receive a degree in teacher training from Prairie View Normal College where she was also valedictorian.

After receiving her degree she went back to Yoakum and taught for a short time at their segregated schools. Prosser then accepted a teaching position in Austin, where she took up classes at Samuel Huston College. In approximately 1924, she graduated with distinction from Samuel Huston with a major in education. Shortly after her graduation she married Rufus A. Prosser, a young man from Texas.

Prosser decided to continue her education with the help of awards given to her and eventually obtained a masters of arts degree in education from the University of Colorado. She then accepted a position at Tillotson College teaching education, where she was recognized as an excellent teacher and leader. This recognition as an excellent leader had given her the chance from 1929 to 1930 to coordinate a series of lectures that featured a visit by George Washington Carver. Then from 1921 to 1930 Inez served as dean and registrar at Tillotson College. In 1931 Prosser was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation General Education Board Fellowship to continue her graduate study. She then accepted a teaching and administrative position at Tougaloo College, in Tougaloo, Mississippi. In 1933 she received a Ph.D., one of the first African-American women to accomplish this in the United States, in educational psychology from the University of Cincinnati.

Her dissertation, was on The Non-Academic Development of Negro Children in Mixed and Segregated Schools. In it, she concluded that voluntary segregation was beneficial to many black children, because of the social climate difference between integrated and segregated schools. It was also one of the earliest treatises on the social domain of elementary school children.

During Dr. Inez Beverly Prosser's lifetime she was also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She also established a fund, all while completing her own education, that enabled her sisters and brothers to obtain a college education. Of the eleven brothers and sisters, all completed high school and six completed college. Then in 1934 Inez Beverly Prosser was killed in an automobile accident near Shreveport, Louisiana.