Keturah Whitehurst

Keturah Whitehurst (March 12, 1912 – May 20, 2000) was an African American clinical psychologist who graduated with a PhD in psychology from Radcliffe in 1952. Keturah Whitehurst is regarded as "the mother of Black psychology".

Early life and education Keturah Whitehurst was born in 1912 in Florida. Her father was a preacher, and her grandfather had escaped enslavement in Alabama. Keturah was an only child. When Keturah was 11 years old, she began to attend a faith-based boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, because the local school was segregated and said to be inadequate when measuring its merit by the local white school. After moving states from Florida to Virginia, Whitehurst's reciprocal license was approved by the Commonwealth of Virginia. This meant that Whitehurst was designated as the first African-American clinical psychologist to hold that license in the state. She was also the first African-American woman to be an intern at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Whitehurst returned to school with a Rockefeller Scholarship that financed her entire doctoral degree. Whitehurst's doctoral dissertation is called Psychological growth as reflected in fantasy. This resulted in two publications written by Whitehurst from her public health research in 1953 and on student leadership and cultural child development in 1954.