J. Henry Alston (1920)
J. Henry Alston was the first African American to publish his research findings on the perception of heat and cold in a major US psychology journal. His study provided the basis for understanding how skin receptors of warmth and cold work together to create the sensation of intense heat.
At Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, there were several African American students who earned master’s or doctoral degrees between 1915 and 1920. The aforementioned G. Stanley Hall, founder and president of Clark, believed that Africans and people of African descent were in the adolescent stage of civilization development. In Hall’s (1904) view, African Americans were not inferior to whites, they were just not as developed and so could not be expected to perform equally the intellectual and educational tasks that were natural to whites. Of the black students there in this period, three earned degrees in psychology: Howard Hale Long (MA, 1916), J. Henry Alston (MA, 1920), and Francis Sumner (PhD, 1920). All had important careers in psychology.
Source: www.psychology.ccsu.edu/fallahic/outline%20of%20history%20of%20psych.ppt