Historical Context: Black Dolls

In her book on black dolls, writer Myla Perkins claims that "black dolls have been used as far back as one can practically go in our African history."¹ This study concerns itself with black dolls used as children's toys, particularly in an American context. Such black dolls came to the United States in the early colonial era as the playthings of slave children. As Buster writes, many dolls of this kind "have the humblest of origins, fashioned by the hands of anonymous black seamstresses, craftsmen, and other plain folk who simply liked to make things." ² Such dolls -- called "folk dolls" to distinguish them from their mass-produced counterparts -- were often (at least in the colonial and pre-Civil War U.S.) the possessions of slave children; store-bought dolls were a luxury few could afford.

In the early nineteenth century, commercially made black dolls appeared on store shelves and in catalogs. Manufactured in Germany and France, the "heartland" of toy production in this era, the dolls, while rare, were sold in the U.S. These dolls were likely owned by whites and "were made to be used as supplementary dolls, used in play situations as maids, servants, slaves, etc., for the white dolls."³ Most were fashioned after adult females and dressed "to represent household slaves"⁴; Reno notes that such dolls "were made to resemble mammies," and "are often holding tiny white babies, symbolizing the mammy's role in the household."⁵

In the mid-1800s, production of black dolls came to American shores. Reno notes that by the early twentieth century, U.S. productions were rare and, when available, often "character dolls" made for the kitchen use of whites: these dolls could hold whisk brooms or cover toasters.⁶ Like earlier renditions, these dolls reinforced notions about black servitude and subservience. Similarly, U.S. productions that "tended to play up the comic aspects of . . . black dolls" reinforced dominant popular mythologies about blacks; their emergence echoes the "Jump Jim Crow" caricature that came to light in the U.S. through popular minstrelsy routines in the early nineteenth century.⁷ Add to this the fact that virtually all black dolls in this era were produced from the same mold as white dolls and merely dyed or painted a darker color, with no attempt to craft dolls with "ethnically correct features."⁸ Perhaps expectedly, black families felt prompted to boycott mass-produced dolls in favor of homemade productions.⁹

Black dolls with ethnically correct features emerged as early as the 1950s and 1960s, amidst the "growing awareness" caused by the burgeoning Civil Rights movement.¹⁰ Buster cites Sarah Lee Creech, a white civil rights activist, with leading "an early effort to produce a black doll that was more than just a browner shade of pale."¹¹ Perkins credits two companies -- Remco Industries, which "introduced four 'ethnically correct' Negro dolls" designed by black artist Annuel McBurrows in the late 1960s, and Shindana Toys, "the first large-scale national black-owned-and-operated doll manufacturing company" -- with popularizing realistic-looking black dolls.¹² These dolls were widely embraced by blacks in the U.S.

Since the 1950s and 1960s, a new kind of black doll owner has emerged: the doll collector. While doll collecting has existed in some form since the nineteenth century (primarily as a pastime for "a few refined ladies"), black doll collecting gained momentum in the later half of the twentieth century, with the establishment of the nation’s first black doll museum in 1988 and the publication of several black doll collectors guides. Today, the black doll collecting community thrives through conventions, online publications, and regional collector networks.

Notes:
1. Myla Perkins, Black Dolls: An Identification and Value Guide, 1820-1991 (Paducah, Ky.: Collector Books, 1993), p. 5.
2. Larry Vincent Buster, The Art & History of Black Memorabilia (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2000), p. 130.
3. Perkins, p. 6.
4. Ibid.
5. Dawn E. Reno, The Encyclopedia of Black Collectibles: A Value and Identification Guide (Radnor, Pa.: Wallace-Homestead Book Co., 1996), p. 103.
6. Ibid., p. 104.
7. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. xiv.
8. Buster, p. 132.
9. Perkins, p. 80.
10. Ibid., p. 102.
11. Buster, p. 132.
12. Perkins, p. 102-103.