More than a decade ago, filmmaker Lagueria Davis decided to spend the day visiting her aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell. As her aunt poured her a drink, she began telling Davis the story of how she started working for Mattel in 1959 and later played an influential role in the toy maker’s launch of Black Barbie in 1980.
Stunned by her aunt’s revelation, Davis listened as Mitchell explained how Kitty Black Perkins, the designer of the first Black Barbie, hired in 1976, and Stacey McBride-Irby, a Black Barbie designer who Perkins added to her team in 1996, turned the doll into a cultural star.
“I’m like, ‘This is a story. I want to tell this story,’” Davis tells TODAY.com in a joint interview with Perkins about her documentary “Black Barbie,” now streaming on Netflix.
Getting the Black Barbie team back together
That initial conversation led Davis to start making her film in 2011, one that puts Black Barbie in the spotlight and examines how her introduction changed the toy industry and society.
She knew she wanted to bring her aunt, Perkins, and McBride-Irby — three Black pioneers who navigated a corporate environment for decades while supporting each other — together again in one room again.
Despite her influential role in creating Black Barbie, Perkins reveals she initially wasn’t sure she wanted to participate in the documentary.
“Well, when you first called, I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ So it took your aunt to call me,” she says to Davis.
When Davis saw Mitchell, Perkins and McBride-Irby reunite, she realized she had the three anchors of her movie.
Davis says she also knew her film needed to be a celebration of Black Barbie’s legacy. But when she looked for more information about how Black Barbie came to be, the results were minimal.
“I didn’t find any text or anything mainstream that told her story,” she recalls.
What Davis did find were academic texts and papers, mainly written by Black women, describing the impact a Black Barbie or other Black dolls can have on young people’s self esteem.
But, she says, there was “nothing of this magnitude,” referring to her film, which chronicles the creation and lasting impact of Black Barbie.
More than a doll
The documentary is a retrospective of the rise of Black Barbie at Mattel, featuring interviews with Mitchell, Perkins and McBride-Irby.
But it also looks at how the doll impacted people, including some of today’s luminaries. Misty Copeland, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and writer and producer Shonda Rhimes all speak to the role Black Barbie played in their lives. Rhimes serves as one of the documentary’s executive producers, too.
Rhimes shares in a separate interview with TODAY.com that the film isn’t simply about a doll. She says it focuses on “the representation of women of color in culture in general. And it’s really also about the magic of play, what that means for children and how powerful it can be.”
The “Bridgerton” exec says she only played with dolls of color as a child, which helped her see herself as someone who could be anything and accomplish her dreams. As she mentions in the documentary, Mattel has designed two Barbies in her image.
“I was so excited the minute they asked me. It feels sort of magical,” she says. “I have dolls for each one of my children, too. So I got to watch my kids play with my doll, which was fascinating.”
Before 1980, it wouldn’t have been possible for Rhimes’ children to have that experience with a Black Barbie.
Mattel created Barbie in 1959, but it wasn’t until 1968 that the toy maker released a line of Black dolls called Francie and Christie. The duo were labeled as Barbie’s “babysitter” and “best friend,” but it wasn’t until Perkins arrived at the company that a lane was created for Black Barbie.
When Perkins was hired as a designer for Barbie in 1976, she noticed that the Francie and Christie dolls did not have Black features, but rather used the same head molds as the pre-existing dolls.
“There was a need for the little Black girl to really have something she could play with that looked like her,” Perkins says in the documentary. “I wanted her to reflect the total look of a Black woman.”
When Black Barbie was released in 1980, Perkins says in the movie that she knew something was “different” but didn’t fully grasp the “magnitude” of a Black doll stepping into the role of a heroine.
Looking back at Black Barbie’s launch, Perkins tells TODAY.com that Mattel did not anticipate the success of Black Barbie. “I think that Mattel didn’t really know what they had done in the beginning,” she says.
The company later released a line of Black dolls called Shani that Perkins also worked on.
With Shani, Perkins adds, “I think that they realized they didn’t put enough behind Black Barbie when she was started, so they corrected that mistake.”
How much did Black Barbie change things?
In recent years, Mattel has continued to release dolls that are more inclusive. The company announced in 2019 that a line of dolls would include wheelchairs, removable prosthetic legs and different body types. The following year, Mattel added dolls with vitiligo and no hair. In 2023, Mattel debuted a Barbie with Down syndrome.
Perkins says when she retired from Mattel in 2003 she would not have predicted the company’s recent shift.
“I do know that Black Barbie was really responsible for opening that door,” she says.
She mentions Mattel’s line of Black History Month dolls, including historical figures like Madam C.J. Walker, Bessie Coleman and Ida B. Wells dolls.
“I really think that that in itself is really a plus,” Perkins continues. “Because that allows the child to learn Black history as they are playing, and I think that it adds to their self-esteem. I think that it has a really positive effect on the Black community.”
But “Black Barbie” questions, in its third chapter, how effective the inclusive dolls actually have been for Black children. This section of the movie is filmed after the wave of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Davis shares that the impact of the movement helped her get more interest and funding for her film.
“All of a sudden the project had a relevancy that it didn’t have before, because of what was going on in the world at that time,” she says. “Then, after that we had the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and the black square and all of these things. And so I think, for me, DEI and the performative nature of that found its way into the documentary as well.”
Her film shows Black children participating in an experiment where they are asked to choose the “real” Barbie from a row of dolls with different races and ethnicities. Many of the children said the blonde “Malibu” Barbie was the authentic one.
A teenager named Kayden Jackson is interviewed with her mom, Nachelle Jackson, about the success of Black Barbie. Kayden says that she doesn’t believe Black Barbie will be as successful as a standalone character because the world is predominately white.
Davis is surprised by this response and reveals in a voiceover that the teenager is actually her niece.
Davis opens up more to TODAY.com about Kayden’s “shocking’ reply and its significance.
“There are kids who still are thinking this way — that the main character energy is not there because of what they’re seeing in the media, and who they’re seeing do things,” she says.
She hopes the movie inspires more “little boys and girls” to become Black designers, replicating what Perkins did with Black barbie.
“We’re not seeing a lot of that now,” she says.
Bill Greening, the principal designer on Barbie’s signature line, is interviewed for “Black Barbie” and confirms that Mattel does not currently have a Black designer on its team.
Perkins tells TODAY.com that she knows “for a fact” that the company has been searching for Black designers, but “nobody is really applying for the job.”
What’s next for Black Barbie?
“Black Barbie” highlights the 30th celebration of the doll that McBride-Irby oversaw in 2010.
Perkins is working with Greening for a new collector Black Barbie to be released in 2025 for the 45th anniversary. An additional message also says Mattel has launched a FLIP (Future Leaders In Play) program that gives internships to Black undergraduate students across the country and has provided other opportunities, like working with Black Student Union of OTIS College of Arts and Design, to increase diversity.
Perkins says that the company reached out to her and requested she return to work on the project with Greening.
“It’s actually done (and) it’s about to go into production now,” she shares.
She applauds Greening’s work with Black Barbie and has a message for designers who might be interested in applying to the company: “You don’t have to be Black to design Black.”
“Because if you look at it that way, when I started at Mattel, I was designing a white Barbie,” Perkins says. “So you really can’t look at it that way.”
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