![]() ![]() ![]() The demand, however, had always been there. Major magazines like Esquire, Life, Time, Ebony, and Newsweek announced the doll’s arrival, but sales were eventually disappointing due to manufacturing flaws. She first appeared in the 1951 Sears Roebuck Christmas Catalog. It was the first attempt to mass-market a realistic African American baby doll. The Ideal Toy Company-founded by the creators of the first mass-produced Teddy Bear-took on the enterprise of manufacturing the doll, named Sara Lee, selling the toy between 19. In 1950, Hurston wrote to Creech in praise of her intention to “meet our longing for understanding of us as we really are, and not as some would have us.” At the same time, Creech’s friend Maxeda von Hesse brought Eleanor Roosevelt onto the project, who enthusiastically supported it as well, going so far as to host a tea with Mary Bethune, Ralph Bunche, and Jackie Robinson, among other influential figures, “ to consult on the appropriate skin.” Hurston “was enthusiastic about the project” and, in turn, pledged to “show pictures of the doll to the ‘well known and influential members’ of the black community with whom she had connections.” Creech submitted the idea to her friend Zora Neale Hurston, pioneering ethnographer of African American culture and premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. If this “sounds a little white savior-y,” writes Temple, “I’m with you,” but there’s much more to the story. Already a social justice warrior, as they say-“active in the women’s movements since the mid 1930s” and helping to found “an Interracial Council in Belle Glade”-Creech decided she would create a doll that “would represent the beauty and diversity of black children.” Black children had been internalizing racism-learning to associate positive attributes with white dolls and negative attributes with black dolls.īut those children (and their parents) had also been rejecting the racist caricatures and forms of erasure on offer. Temple writes of how one white woman, Sara Lee Creech “noticed two black children playing with white dolls in a car outside of a post office in Belle Glade, Florida.” She felt that they should have toys that represented their experience as well. “Those that weren’t” caricatures “were just white dolls that had been painted brown.” This had been the case for two centuries, as Collectors Weekly explains. What often goes unremarked in accounts of this research is that at the time “almost all of the African American dolls on the market were modeled after racist stereotypes,” as Emily Temple notes in an article on LitHub drawing on the work of historian Gordon Patterson. ![]() “These studies played an important role in the NAACP’s battle in the 1950s to end segregation in public schools.” The findings suggested that the children had internalized dominant prejudices against them “by the time they reached nursery school,” notes the National Museum of Play. usually chose dolls with lighter skin colors when given a choice. In the 1930s and 40s, child psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark found that very young black children in the U.S.
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