Do you collect or know someone who collects black dolls?

Barbara Whiteman was a little fuzzy about the dolls she had as a child. I understood; so am I. I’m sure I played with dolls, but I don’t remember any special dolls.

One thing I know for sure is that they were not black dolls. Growing up in the South, I wonder if I would’ve rejected a black doll even if my mother could have found one available to purchase.

“You didn’t ask for a doll,” said Whiteman, a child of the 1940s. “It just came to you. I remember having a black doll, (but) it’s like a fading memory. There were black magazines where you could see dolls. My mother might have seen dolls in Ebony. My mother loved ‘True Romance’ (where she may have seen that dolls were) available in colored.”

Today, Whiteman is surrounded by brown and black dolls when she walks into the museum she founded in 1988 to hold the hundreds of African American dolls she had accumulated. The public gallery at the Philadelphia Doll Museum displays 300 of her dolls in tall glass cases while hundreds more are stored in another space.

While I have no doll memories, many folks do recall their experiences. A friend told me of having a doll named Penelope. She didn’t know how to say the doll’s name, so she pronounced it like cantaloupe. I wrote a blog post a few years ago about a woman who saw a Bester doll on a rocking horse in a San Francisco museum and just fell in love with it – so much so that when a broken-down one came up for auction on eBay, she snapped it up.

I don’t have a menagerie of black dolls, either, but I have picked up a few at doll auctions, which I attend quite often to see what new black dolls I’ll discover. And I’ve been introduced to several: Like the 3-foot-tall Patti Playpal – one of which my auction buddy Janet was sure she had as a child (not) – or the Amos and Andy Amosandra doll or the small German Armand Marseille doll – whose bisque head looks like a white-doll mold painted brown – or the Shindana dolls.

 

I’ve written about black folk dolls, black doll manufacturers, and Leo Moss, Ginny and Terri Lee dolls. Readers have written me to help them identify black dolls.

Starting today, I will be writing about African American dolls and their collectors. If you collect dolls or know someone who does, I’d love to tell their story as part of a series of blog posts. Please contact me and allow me to share your collection with others who love black dolls just as much as you and cherish the memories of their childhood playmates.

If you don’t collect but have doll memories, I’d like to hear those, too.

Walking into Whiteman’s museum can spark if not memories then a feeling of awe. It’s a smorgasbord of some of the earliest European and African-made dolls, historical figures as dolls and more recent dolls, among others. The museum is an African American cultural history seen through the dolls that lived it.

That’s what inspired Whiteman, an effusive storyteller who readily admits that she became addicted just like other collectors. “I was having a ball. There was no stop to me.”

“I didn’t want the cutesy dolls or dolls with curly hair,” she said. “All of my dolls had a relationship with a part of history.” She took her dolls to schools and churches, using them to tell the story of African Americans.

Whiteman started going to the conventions of the United Federation of Doll Clubs, where she found she was perhaps the only black collector present. But it was there where people kept asking her “Do you know Aunt Len?”

They were referring to Lenon Holder Hoyte, the first black member of the federation and the owner of Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum. Aunt Len “was an old black woman in Harlem, an educator, who collected dolls,” Whiteman said. “She bought any doll she wanted. Eventually, her dolls outlived her.”

I was obviously intrigued by Aunt Len and went looking to find out more about her. She had been a teacher in the New York public schools for 41 years, and began collecting dolls in 1962. Twelve years later, she opened a doll museum in her home.

Hoyte had a collection of 5,000 dolls that she displayed in cases in her living room, dining room and basement, according to a 1987 story in the New York Times. The most valuable were early bisque, papier-mache and wooden dolls, and rare black dolls. She even had Lillian and Leo, rare black dolls with teardrops made by an African American man named Leo Moss of Macon, GA, at the turn of the 20th century.

She closed the museum in 1990s, and Sotheby’s sold dolls from her collection – along with a catalog – in 1994. Hoyte died in 1999 at age 94.

For years, very few African American dolls were made, especially those that resembled black children. So today, they can be hard to find, the rarest are treasured and many are not seen publicly until a woman dies and the family sells them off. Many of these collections have dolls that tell us about the country’s cultural history and its relationship with its African American citizens. That perception of who black people were also extended to dolls made abroad.

Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark used dolls in a test with black children in the 1940s. Using identical black and white dolls, they showed how racial prejudice had taught black children to hate themselves.

With black dolls at a premium during this time, where did they buy them? A Washington Post obituary on Kenneth Clark mentioned that they were purchased for 50 cents at a Woolworth’s in Harlem (there was no indication of where the dolls originally came from, though).

One of the black dolls said to have been used in the experiment was donated this year to the National Park Service’s Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, KS. Kenneth Clark apparently gave the doll to one of his college students who passed it on to a friend.

There were some black doll manufacturers around at the turn of the 20th century: The National Negro Doll Co. of Nashville, TN, in 1911 and Berry & Ross Doll Company of Harlem in 1919. I came across an ad for the Berry company’s dolls in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine in 1919: “Colored Dolls. These Unbreakable Brown Skin Dolls Are Made and Designed By Colored Girls In A Factory Owned and Controlled By Colored People.”

A 1908 National company ad in an Albany, GA, newspaper offered dolls that could be purchased at a local drug store: “black, white and all intermediate shades. Buy a doll the color of your child.”

It apparently would be the “I’m Black and I’m Proud” decade of the 1960s before other such companies were founded. B. Wright Toy Co. and Shindana Toys made dolls that looked like black children. By the 1960s, even white doll companies were making vinyl black dolls.

Before she opened the museum, Whiteman’s home was a “museum without walls,” she said. She converted her daughter’s old room into a doll room, and when word of her collection got out, “strangers would come to my house wanting to see my black dolls.” So she took early retirement from the VA Medical Center with the support of her husband, and “I prayed. I said ‘Lord, make a way.’ It was an act of faith.”

Whiteman’s dream had been to staff the museum with a few more people than herself, but she hasn’t reached that goal yet. The museum is more a labor of love; the grants she once relied on have dried up.

Hers is not the only museum: Several sisters opened the National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture in Mansfield, MA., and Phyllis Hunter started the Black Like Me Doll Museum in Sugar Land, TX.

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If you are a doll collector or know someone who is, please contact me. I’d love to share your story and your lovely dolls. If you don’t collect but have doll memories, I’d like to hear those, too.

Other blog posts in the series:

Barbara Whiteman and the Philadelphia Doll Museum

Aunt Sarah’s Dolls  

Memories of a special doll and a love for baby dolls

My chance meeting of a black doll collector

A surprising mix of black dolls at convention

When black dolls talk, Debbie Garrett listens