Black Baptists deliberately manufactured black dolls to build healthy race identity in children.

Evidence

The NBC’s race consciousness found expression in various forms—in its organ of publicity, The National Baptist Magazine, and its other newspapers; its schools and central publishing house; its requirement for the use of black history textbooks; and its formation of a doll factory. In the last case, the National Baptist Convention advertised in the pages of the NAACP’s Crisis and other black newspapers: “Your child would be happy if it had a Negro doll. .. . The Negro doll is calculated to help in the Christian development of our race.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 763

Categorization

• DEFINE: The doll factory concretizes what racial self-determination meant operationally, before the term politics of respectability is introduced.
• XREF: Parallels the Clark doll experiments’ later finding that black children preferred white dolls; this was the proactive institutional answer three decades prior. — connects to: Black Baptists formed a racially bounded imagined community claiming sovereign autonomy from white control — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1076; Maternal imagination was believed capable of birthing black, Moor-like infants. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 311; Antillean children write fantasies that deny their own black identity. (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Black subjects internalized anti-Black bias by preferring white dolls and straight hair #complicates (0.85) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 883
• Black Baptists formed a racially bounded imagined community claiming sovereign autonomy from white control #expands (0.82) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1076
• Antillean children write fantasies that deny their own black identity. #complicates (0.72)
• Maternal imagination was believed capable of birthing black, Moor-like infants. #complicates (0.71) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 311