• Introduction
• Protesting Pictures
• W. E. B. Du Bois
  and The Crisis
• The Golden Age
  of the Black Pictorial
• Portraiture
• The Need for Heroes
• Sports Heroes
• The Doll as Metaphor

Throughout the modern civil rights movement, the doll was a central metaphor of the negative effects of visual stereotypes. In the historic Brown v. Board of Education case, the NAACP offered testimony by an African American psychologist, Dr. Kenneth Clark, on a pioneering study he conducted in the late 1940s. African American grade-schoolers were shown separate drawings of black and white dolls, identical in every way except color. Individually, the children were asked which doll they preferred. The majority, viewing the black doll as "bad," preferred the white doll and considered it "nice."

Clark’s study confirmed that black children readily internalized the disapproving image of blackness then prevalent in all aspects of public life. Yet the toy industry, slow to recognize or acknowledge this problem, mostly ignored African American children. "Black dolls," a tiny part of the market, were usually conventional white dolls fabricated in dark plastic. It was not until 1969 that the first mass-produced doll made specifically for black children was marketed. By contrast, the first "Black Barbie" doll was marketed in 1979, as the civil rights movement was drawing to an end.