Mitchell started on the assembly line at Mattel, the company behind Barbie, in 1955. At the beginning of the ’60s, Mitchell proposed the idea of a Black doll to Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler.

As it turns out that aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell, was one of Mattel’s first Black employees starting in the Fifties — and a key impetus for the 1980 creation of Black Barbie.

Honestly, this doll is so impeccable. The quality is absolutely great, and her overall look is to die for. I am getting so obsessed with these dolls, and I cannot stop looking thru.

The concept of a Black Barbie doll was first floated at Mattel almost immediately after Barbie herself was created. The company responded in the late 1960s with a handful of Black dolls that were ...

Meghan Markle once wrote about how her dad used a Barbie set to help her celebrate being biracial. Writing for Elle in 2016, Meghan said her dad made a custom Barbie set with Black and white dolls.

The first black Barbie came in a box in a box that touted “She’s black! She’s beautiful! She’s dynamite!” Mattel Although Mattel had introduced the Christie doll as Barbie’s friend in ...

Barbie has unveiled their newest Blind Barbie Doll and Black Barbie Doll with Down syndrome as part of its fashionista collection. This, as the country recognizes July as Disability Pride Month.

“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 ...

As a young girl in segregated Spartanburg, South Carolina, Kitty Black Perkins took a brown crayon to white paper dolls so their skin would match hers. “I seldom saw white people, and so it was ...