How Dolls Helped Win Brown v. Board of Education

credit for this story ERIN BLAKEMORE JAN 11, 2022 & MARCH 27, 2018

https://www.history.com/.../brown-v-board-of-education...

This headline and story caught my eye. Dolls are for kids. So why were they in front of the most esteemed judges in the United States? The Justices were considering the impact of this experiment in 1953-54 around the same time I received my Black baby doll. Her name was Amosandra, and she was the first mass-produced rubber doll with black skin.

The doll which was a promotional product for “Amos’ n’ Andy”, a popular radio series that featured white actors portraying African American characters. The program employed racial stereotyping and exaggerated dialect, and the actors wore blackface when posing for publicity photos. I’ll never know what wisdom was gifted to my mother when she bought me that doll. It left an impact on me and I included that memory in my book FREEDOM LESSONS – A NOVEL.

It is also an example of Lesson #3 from my book: Family provides security, identity, and values.

The article by Erin Blakemore explained that the Clarks had to paint a white baby doll for the tests since Black baby dolls weren’t manufactured at the time. That surprised me since I, a four-year-old white girl, had a Black baby doll. I searched to find that The Sun Rubber Co. of Barberton announced the birth of Amosandra in 1949 that changed the complexion of the U.S. toy industry.

In the Clark’s research, the children were asked which doll they wanted to play with, which one looked white, “colored”, “good” or “bad” and finally, which looked most like them. Most children preferred the white doll and some cried when asked to choose the one that looked like them. The results upset the Clarks so much that they delayed publishing their conclusions.

Historians debate the importance of the Clark’s work and testimony. But here’s one woman that is glad to know the resistance didn’t stop Thurgood Marshall. Yet, we are still moving too slowly, fifty years after I had my Amosandra Baby doll, I wanted to buy our first granddaughter, who is biracial, the family tradition of Bitty Baby, A Madame Alexander doll, I had to search hard for a dark-skinned version. I was traveling when I did find one in a toy shop in New Orleans. I live in NJ.

She’s seventeen now so maybe some things have finally changed. The internet helped me to find this version which has hair like she had. I wanted to get her a baby doll that looked like her. This would be my choice.

Supreme Court Justices contemplated oral arguments and pored over case transcripts. But they also considered baby dolls—unexpected weapons in the plaintiffs’ fight against racial discrimination. I like to say that we need laws to protect our civil rights, but laws don’t change people’s opinions, people do. Be the change you want to see.