Topsy-turvy doll, mixed fabrics, paint, 1890-1905 (photo by Glenn Castellano)

BLACK DOLLS
New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West at Seventy-Seventh St.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 5, $6-$22
www.nyhistory.org

The New-York Historical Society explores the sociocultural history of black dolls, particularly in regard to slavery and racism, in the revelatory exhibit “Black Dolls,” on view through June 5. The show features more than two hundred items, including more than a hundred handmade dolls dating back to the 1840s. Cynthia Walker Hill’s “Doll representing an enslaved man” depicts a fugitive slave with a slave collar still around his neck. There are several dolls crafted by Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, for the children of white author Nathaniel Parker Willis. There are several topsy-turvy dolls, a Black figure on one side, a white figure on the other; an old advertisement makes a clear distinction between the two.

A row of Black dolls forming a family are lined up in front of photographs of girls with dolls of a different color. Disturbed at seeing two Black girls playing with a white doll, Sara Lee Creech worked with Eleanor Roosevelt and Zora Neale Hurston on a line of Black dolls with positive images, not stereotypes, but they didn’t sell well. In 1908, Richard Henry Boyd and his National Negro Doll Company began manufacturing “Negro Dolls for Negro Children.” In the 1990s, American Girl introduced Addy Walker, a Black doll with her own, smaller Black doll.

“While the names of the women who created these dolls are largely unknown, every stitch that they sewed into place is invaluable evidence of their lived experience, as well as a reflection of the larger historical forces of slavery and its legacy,” New-York Historical Society president and CEO Dr. Louise Mirrer said in a statement. There’s a folk-art quality to the dolls, reminiscent of story quilts, each one forming its own narrative.

In its landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court cited Dr. Kenneth Clark’s doll tests, in which he asked questions of Black and white children between the ages of three and seven to find out which doll they felt represented them and which were the good ones. The results were a window into how kids viewed racial stereotypes and their own self-esteem; most of the children preferred the white dolls. “To separate [Black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the opinion. The exhibit demonstrates more than a century and a half of quiet efforts to resist that damage and the resilience of the Black community and a few allies in the ongoing fight to represent themselves.

There will be guided gallery tours on May 29 and June 1 at 1:00. While at the museum, be sure to check out such other exhibits as “Title IX: Activism On and Off the Field,” “Picture the Dream: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Children’s Books,” and “Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection.”