The history of African porcelain dolls is a multifaceted narrative, reflecting themes of representation, identity, and cultural heritage. From the 19th century to the present day, these dolls have served as both playthings and powerful symbols, embodying the complexities of race and history.
Installation view of “Black Dolls,” New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, New York, N.Y.
Early Representations and Stereotypes
Black doll manufacture dates back to the 19th century, with representations being both realistic and stereotypical. Several 19th-century European doll companies preceded American doll companies in manufacturing Black dolls. These predecessors include Carl Bergner of Germany, who made a three-faced doll with one face of a crying black child and the other two, happier white faces.
Objects featuring racist caricatures, often referred to as “blackamore” or “black Americana,” emerged from post-Civil War black-face minstrel shows. These shows depicted African Americans as simpletons with exaggerated features. These caricatures carried over to children’s books and dolls.
Stereotypical characters such as matronly Mammies, passive Uncle Toms, and pickaninny children like Little Black Sambo appeared as dolls made of composition, celluloid, and rubber in the early 20th century. Effanbee and Horsman, for example, made Mammies pushing baby carriages for decades. The Nancy Ann Storybook Doll Company made characters from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while Reliable Doll Company was one of many that produced a Topsy, characterized by three knots of hair.
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Minstrel caricatures were also prominent in advertising: Cream of Wheat adopted the male Rastus character in 1893, and that same year, the Aunt Jemima brand of pancake mix was trademarked. For some poor black families in 1895, the paper dolls printed inside the pancake-mix cardboard box, featuring Aunt Jemima and her whole family, were the only black dolls they could afford.
The "Mammy" Figure
The "Mammy" is a figure from the history of United States slavery. The female African-American slaves were tasked with the duties of domestic household workers. This tradition continued well after slavery as many African-American women had their first jobs as domestic help.
The "Mammy" image was: An older woman, dark skinned, overweight, whose job it was to prepare meals, clean homes, and nurse and rear children. She was an idealized figure of a caregiver, amiable, loyal, maternal, non-threatening, obedient, and submissive, and demonstrated deference to white authority. This figure is still present in modern times with Mrs. Butterworth's and Aunt Jemima used by food corporations.
This doll is of medium to heavy set build, has bulging eyes, large dark lips, and a medium brown complexion. She wears a bandana, plaid clothes, and an apron, to show that she is a kitchen worker.
Basic Black: The History of Black Dolls
Early Efforts to Counter Stereotypes
Even in the 1910s, early civil rights activists like Marcus Garvey and R.H. Boyd were pushing back against these stereotypes. Boyd started his National Negro Doll Company in 1911, importing elegant black porcelain dolls from European dollmakers and selling them in the United States before his firm went out of business in 1915. Between 1919 and 1922, Garvey launched his Black Star Line, a steamship company that helped found several other black-owned businesses, including a black doll manufacturer.
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Part of the reason that Boyd’s company failed might have been that most black people didn’t have the money for fancy china dolls. But perhaps black families wouldn’t have wanted them. While Pat Hatch and Roben Campbell have discovered plenty of soft-cloth folk art black dolls made from the 1870s to the 1930s, Garrett knows that during that time that some black parents handmade their children white dolls instead.
Because of the false belief that anything white was better than anything black, some early dolls that black parents and children made from household items were often in the image of white people,” Garrett says. “I didn’t personally make any dolls as a child, but I have heard of those who used a Coke bottle as the doll’s body and undyed rope as hair.
Example of a handmade Black doll
The Work of Leo Moss and Harriet Jacobs
From the 1890s to the 1930s in Macon, Georgia, a black handyman named Leo Moss was a pioneer of black dolls. He painted doll faces black with chimney soot and had his wife design their clothes. Their papier-mache heads were made out of scrap pieces of wallpaper he collected on odd jobs he performed for white families. Every single doll was unique, created in the images of family and friends.
AFTER HER BRAVE AND HARROWING ESCAPE from enslavement, Harriet Jacobs was employed in New York by Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867), a white, well-paid writer and magazine editor who worked with Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Jacobs, who titled her 1861 autobiography “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” made Black dolls wearing cotton dresses for Willis’s three daughters.
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The Evolution of Black Dolls in the 20th Century
Black dolls were mass-produced in the 20th century, as American manufacturers started creating the first commercial rag, stuffed and black plastic dolls. In the 1950s, as Beatrice Wright Brewington, a black entrepreneur, founded B Wright’s Toy Company, black dolls entered the global market. Another early black doll company owned and operated by African Americans was Shindana Toys, founded in Los Angeles in 1968.
Louis Smith, the company’s president, once said in an interview that self-love was an important part of creating black dolls. “We believe that only by learning to love oneself can one learn to love others,” he said.
Mattel Toys created the first Black dolls in the popular Barbie line, Francie and Christie, in 1967 and 1969 respectively. In addition, American Girl has also released Black dolls portraying girls of color from various points in American history such as Addy Walker and civil rights-era Melody Ellison, as well as those from the present day.
Museums and Exhibitions
To honor the history of Black dolls, in 2012, three sisters named Debra Britt, Felicia Walker, and Tamara Mattison opened the National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture in Mansfield, Massachusetts. The Philadelphia Doll Museum was founded in 1988 by Barbara Whiteman.
More than 200 objects and Black dolls dating from 1850 to 1940 are on display at the New-York Historical Society, including dolls by Jacobs and Moss. The Black dolls offer a unique, historic view of race, representation, and play, insights that are explored throughout the show in sections such as Slavery and Abolition, Growing Up with Jim Crow, The Art and Craft of Dollmaking, Child’s Play, and Race Play.
Now, the largest collection of rare Leo Moss dolls is in an exhibition at the Charles H Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. “The purpose really is to show how dolls empowered African Americans throughout history as a way to see yourself, to empower yourself,” said Jennifer Evans, the assistant curator at the Wright Museum. “Having so many dolls in one place, and for those growing up who couldn’t have a black doll, is very powerful.”
The chronological exhibition starts with a photo of a wooden paddle doll from ancient Egypt, which dates back to 2000 BC, and a Milliner’s model doll, from 1850. The dolls showcased are on loan from 25 collectors alongside the museum’s own collection, showing the evolution from African dolls to American dolls from the 19th and 20th century to the present day.
Black dolls on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
