My unintended collection of black dolls

On Sunday, the Paul Robeson House & Museum in Philadelphia will host Barbara Whiteman, founder of the Philadelphia Doll Museum, which houses her collection of hundreds of black dolls. The museum, which opened in 1988, has been closed for several years, but Whiteman is still full of the history culled from years of collecting and researching black dolls.

I met Whiteman some years ago and had the opportunity to visit the museum – an experience any doll lover or history buff would find fascinating. Her collection consisted of both antique and contemporary dolls, but I was more drawn to those with some age on them.

Around the same time, I began to seriously look for African American dolls at auction, and picked up a few here and there. At one point, I began interviewing black-doll collectors, and wrote about them and their collections.

Whiteman’s presentation at the Robeson House is part of a series that I conceived called “Arts in the Parlor,” which brings artists of all types for presentations and performances in the space where the talented singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson lived and sang along with an accompanist during the final 10 years of his life. Whiteman’s will be second in the series (the first was by a keyboardist named Glenn Bryan).

As I thought about the doll presentation, I began to wonder about the dolls I had bought at auction. I really didn’t have a full accounting of what I had assembled. I’d just buy dolls when I saw them and placed them among the others I’d laid out on a sofa in my den. I don’t have the hundreds (and thousands) that some diehard collectors have, but I have more than five, which makes me a collector, I suppose.

Like Whiteman, I purchased my dolls for the history they held. I have at least one that was made by the German company Armand Marseille that looks like a 19-century white bisque doll painted brown, and some 20^th-century black dolls made of composition and vinyl. Most of my dolls were made by white companies, except for four from Shindana Toys, which was founded in 1968 in wake of the Watts riots.

In the early 20^th century, at least two African American-owned companies made dolls that were advertised with “brown” skin. The National Negro Doll Co. of Nashville, TN, was formed in 1911 by Richard Henry Boyd who had started three years earlier distributing German-made black dolls whose sales took off. The company – whose slogan was “Negro Dolls for Negro Children” – shipped dolls all over the country. The black National Baptist Convention endorsed and assisted in manufacture of the dolls.

A November 1908 ad in the Albany, GA, newspaper showed dolls made by National could be purchased at a local drugstore: “black, white and all intermediate shades. Buy a doll the color of your child.”

Two African American women incorporated Berry & Ross Inc. of New York in 1918 to manufacture and sell dolls. In a 1919 ad in Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, the company noted that their “Berry’s Famous Brown Skin Dolls” were “designed and made by Colored Girls In A Factory Owned and Controlled By Colored People.” The dolls were sold in large department stores for 29 cents to $3.50 (for a 16-inch Doris with “long flowing curls”).The company also sold dolls in Africa.

“These are not the old time, black face, red lip aunt Jemima colored dolls but dolls well made and truly representative of the race in hair and features, stated a Berry & Ross ad in Crisis in 1917.

Another female black-owned company was said to be the National Colored Doll & Toy Co. of Chicago, owned by a woman named Theresa Cassell. I could find little information about the company.

By the 1950s more white companies were making black dolls with humane features. Blacks also continued to manufacture the dolls: The B. Wright Toy Co. was owned by a black woman named Beatrice Wright Brewington. In 1968, Louis S. Smith II and Robert Hall founded Shindana, a community-based toy company in Los Angeles with backing from Mattel and other companies.

Here are the dolls in my collection: