I was standing over a group of greeting cards on a table at auction this week and separating out the ones celebrating new births when my auction buddy Janet walked by.
“Those are so cute,” she said. “Yes, they are,” I answered. “But why can’t I find ones with black babies?”
The answer: Because no one thought us cute enough back then to create baby cards with our likenesses. Or at least, I haven’t come across any at auction or through my Google searches.
And even if some company did, they’d find a way to stick a huge watermelon in our hands or paint our faces black and our lips red.
The cards I saw at auction that day were indeed cute, with the babies nestled in blankets of warmth. The cards appeared to be from the 1940s or 1950s. For any mother with a new baby, getting several of these from friends and family must have been a treat. As with these cards, mothers tended to hang on to them for years, along with birthday, valentine and other cards – many of which end up on auction tables in small boxes.
If you’d like to see other vintage birth announcement cards (some back to the 1900s), take a look at this online Postcard and Greeting Card Museum. The site also contains samples of other types of vintage cards.
Today, new black mothers – and Hispanic mothers and other ethnic mothers – can receive all kinds of cards heralding the birth of their new baby and hope for what the child’s future can be. And the faces on these cards do look like the babies they hold in their arms. Last week, I wrote a post about greeting cards produced by Ebony Magazine in collaboration with American Greetings.
Isn’t progress wonderful?
I am sixty one years old and have my baby book containing a few of the cards sent to my parents upon my birth. My parents received the exact card above picturing the baby and stork. I will have to pull them out to see if any portray black babies. I also have the bill for my delivery; $17.00 (seventeen dollars) !!!!
Katrina