Inez Beverly Prosser

Inez Beverly was born on December 30, 1895 (sources vary between 1894 and 1896) in San Marcos, Texas, a small town between Austin and San Antonio, one of eleven children in a striving Black family. Around 1900 the family settled in Yoakum, where she was raised and educated in the town's segregated "colored" schools. Brilliant from the start, she graduated as valedictorian of the Yoakum Colored School in 1910.

She trained as a teacher on a two-year certificate at Prairie View Normal College (now Prairie View A&M University), again finishing at the top of her class, then taught while continuing her own studies. She earned her bachelor's degree at Samuel Huston College in Austin in 1926 and a master's degree from the University of Colorado, all while teaching and helping to send five of her siblings through college.

In 1933, at the University of Cincinnati, Inez Beverly Prosser earned her PhD in educational psychology, becoming the first African American woman to hold a doctorate in psychology. Her dissertation examined the schooling of Black children, comparing those in segregated and integrated settings — research that spoke directly to questions the nation would confront decades later in Brown v. Board of Education.

Her life was cut short on September 5, 1934, in a car accident near Shreveport, Louisiana; she was only about thirty-eight. In a few short decades she opened a door that had never before been opened, and she carried her family through it with her. We honor Dr. Inez Beverly Prosser, who turned a segregated schoolhouse into the threshold of a science, and lit the way for every Black woman scholar who followed.