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Doll Making A Lost Art? Not at Ile Omode!
 Friday, January 21, 2022 
Ile Omode Middle School Girls (6th - 8th grades) got the opportunity during our “Spirit Week” in December to experience the fun and exciting creativity of doll making. Many thanks to Wo’se Councilmember and Legend in Ile Omode, Mama Akanke Peyton. We got the distinct honor to make dolls with Mama Karen Oyekanmi, the founder of the American Black Beauty Doll Association. Beginning with “I don’t play with dolls” ending with “This was a great experience and I had a lot of fun”.
Black dolls have played a critical role in building a diverse American society and rich African American culture. They help tell the stories of African-American history, of enslaved Africans captured and relocated to a strange land and yet bravely asserting their own cultures—and of everyone who came after.
In 1909, A Black Nashville business owner named Richard Henry Boyd started the National Negro Doll Company. According to the Tennessee National Historical Society, the company wanted to fight the racist imagery of Black people post-slavery. The company looked to give little Black girls a true reflection of themselves.
Boyd distributed black dolls that he had purchased from a European manufacturer until he launched his own company. An advertisement for the dolls, which ran in the Nashville Globe, other newspapers, and Boyd’s Sunday-school publications, illustrates how Boyd marketed them to instill racial pride and self-respect. ‘These Toys,’ the advertisement proclaimed, ‘are not made of that disgraceful and humiliating type that we have been accustomed to seeing. . . They represent the intelligent and refined Negro of today, rather than that type of toy that is usually given to the children, and as a rule, used as a scarecrow.’ The dolls, Boyd explained, were to ‘teach the people that they may teach their children how to look upon their people.’ ”
In 1984 Karen Oyekanmi founded the American Black Beauty Doll Club, now known as the American Black Beauty Doll Association. This 501(c)3 organization is the oldest Black doll-making organization in America.
Ile Omode girls made dolls from plastic spoons, popsicle sticks, hot glue, an ample supply of feathers, flowers, colored pencils, and other art goodies that Mama Karen brought for the girls to build with. An amazing experience was had. Their creative genius was “popp’n. The conversations they were having with each other and the joy of imagination was on full display.
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