Carolyn R. Payton

Carolyn Robertson Payton (May 13, 1925 – April 11, 2001) was appointed Director of the United States Peace Corps in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. She was the first female and the first African American to be Peace Corps Director. Payton was a pioneer in black women’s leadership within the American Psychological Association and psychology.

She was born Carolyn Robertson in Norfolk, Virginia in 1925. Her father, Leroy Solomon Robertson, was a chef and her mother, Bertha Flanagan Robertson, a seamstress and homemaker. Payton came from a close knit family that emphasized the value of education. Her grandfather, although born into slavery, saw to it that all of his children attended college. Payton's father enrolled her at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1941 majoring in home economics and graduated in 1945. Payton said that Bennett, a small historically Black women’s college, shaped her aspirations, attitudes, and expectations and gave her a sense of her capabilities as a woman. She remained close to Bennett College during her entire life and established a scholarship fund there in the late 1990s.

Payton transferred to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for her M.S. degree in clinical psychology in 1948. Under the "separate-but-equal" doctrine, the state of Virginia covered her expenses at the out-of-state school because she pursued a graduate degree in a discipline available to White students at a White state schools, but unavailable to Blacks at a Black state school. Payton conducted her masters thesis on the then newly developed Wechsler-Bellevue Test of Intelligence and concluded that the test provided an inaccurate measure of the true ability of Blacks.

While at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Payton married Raymond Rudolph Payton, a police detective, but the marriage lasted less than four years and the two divorced in 1951. Payton began taking summer courses at Columbia University's teachers college in 1952 and received her Ed.D. in counseling and student administration in 1962.

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