Lagueria Davis has been working on her documentary, , since 2011. The idea came that year, when the filmmaker left Oklahoma—where she’d been studying—for Los Angeles. Once in California, she moved in with her aunt Beulah Mae Mitchell, who she soon learned started working for Mattel in 1955.
“This documentary all started from a conversation with my aunt,” Davis says. “I’d only met her a couple of times before I moved in. Over a drink she told me her life story and how she worked on the first Barbie line in 1959.
” Davis says her aunt mentioned asking Mattel, “Why not make a Black Barbie?” In that moment, as a burgeoning young filmmaker, Davis immediately saw the potential to tell the history of Black dolls. Not just the struggle to get them made, but also why representation is so important when it comes to toys. Telling that history came to fruition this Juneteenth, when Netflix premiered .
It took Mattel until 1980 to debut its first Black , which was designed by trailblazer Kitty Black Perkins, who appears throughout the film. “Getting a Black Barbie was a very important moment in mainstream doll history,” says Crystal Marie Moten, a historian and scholar of 20th-century African American women’s history, and a former curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “But it was not the starting point.
” Thirteen years earlier, Mattel had released a Black version of Francie, Barbie’s cousin. In 1968, Christie, Barbie’s best fr.