An Interview With Myla Perkins Part 2 of 3

 

In an undated photograph, with dolls in the background and foreground, Myla stands holding Mina.

Continued from Part 1

During her UFDC membership, Myla attended every national and regional convention that followed the 1973 convention. For several years, Black UFDC conventioneers only included Myla Perkins and Lenon Hoyte. Perkins always took a Moss doll and a Moss doll always won 1st place. The only time one of her Moss dolls did not win 1st place was when someone else entered a Moss doll and the other doll placed first. The year that happened, her doll, a smaller Moss doll, won 2nd place. It did not matter to Myla that her doll placed second because another Moss doll still placed first. Nineteenth-century dolls made by a Black man described as a handyman from Macon, Georgia continue to intrigue and fascinate the doll community today. Myla eventually owned several.

Myla is seen in another undated photograph with Leo Moss dolls, Mina, Bobo, and Pansy.

Myla’s love for antique dolls continued. Once she realized there were Black dolls made during her childhood, she became interested in those. Upon learning that Myla collected dolls, one of her aunts, who was also born in Colorado, told Myla she had a Black doll in the 1930s that was ordered in a beauty shop. During that time, beauty shops offered brochures for ordering Black dolls. Myla could not recall which doll her aunt owned, but she knows it is documented in one of her books. After learning about her aunt’s doll, Myla began looking for other Black dolls from the 1930s, ‘40s, or ‘50s. By this time, she was obsessed with Black dolls—who they were made for, why they were made, and where they were distributed.

A lucky girl named Mabel Parchman posed with her doll from R. H. Boyd’s National Negro Doll Company in a photograph published in the Nashville Globe on April 11, 1913. 

            Myla’s vast doll collection included antique dolls by R. H. Boyd’s National Negro Doll Company, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1911 after recognizing the need for respectable Black dolls for his children and others. The former enslaved man's story fascinated Myla. “Boyd’s eyes were open wide,” she said. During her doll research, at one point she spoke with one of Boyd’s daughters, but the daughter was not receptive to Myla and did not want to talk to her. “Some of us get a little off track,” Myla said. According to Myla, the daughter almost tried to deny that Boyd’s early 1900s dolls existed, but Myla asserted that his dolls were in The Crisis magazine, as illustrated in the next image, and she could not deny what her father did. Several people closed doors in Myla’s face. “People are still doing it,” she said. “There are some people who still believe White folk’s ice is colder,” she added. 

"The Crisis magazine is the official publication of the NAACP. It was created in 1910 by renowned historian, civil rights activist, sociologist, and NAACP co-founder W. E. B. Du Bois (“History of the Crisis”).

In Black Dolls Book II, Myla included this National Negro Doll Company ad that was placed in The Crisis in November 1911.

During the years Myla collected dolls and purchased dolls for her children, she witnessed a slight improvement in the availability of modern Black dolls. In the 1960s, finding Black dolls in stores for her first daughter, who was born in 1962, was difficult. To combat this issue, Myla met with buyers for large department stores and put a lot of pressure on them because they did not carry Black dolls. By the mid-1970s, she did not experience as much difficulty finding Black dolls for her second daughter who was born in 1969. Black dolls were not as limited by then, but the scarcity remained. 

Myla’s daughter’s Baby Alive by Kenner, 1973, is featured in Black Dolls Book II.

“I remember when she was four, she wanted Baby Alive. I looked all over ahead of time and couldn’t find the Black Baby Alive. So, I wrote her a note addressed to Santa stating that by the time her birthday came in June, Santa would be able to find her Baby Alive. I had to play games with my kids,” Myla shared. When Cabbage Patch dolls first came out in the early 1980s, Myla said the dolls were in Detroit, but Black versions were the first ones to sell out. She had to rush to get Black Cabbage Patch dolls because the demand exceeded the supply. 

Perkins’ enthusiasm over Black dolls prompted her to actually begin writing the first Black Dolls book during the 1970s. The original manuscript included all the dolls made by 1975. Her husband photographed the antique dolls. One of her good friends, Susan Manos, had written a Barbie book published by Schroeder Publishing Company, and they also wanted to publish Myla’s book. By 1975, Myla was busy with family and work life as a teacher and co-owner of Sugar ‘n Spice day care center and private elementary school. She had four children who were born within seven years and life was hectic. Schroeder published another book on Black dolls around the same time, Collector’s Encyclopedia of Black Dolls by Patiki Gibbs. So, when that book was released, Myla reasoned, “There’s already a book on Black dolls, and I just let that go. Everything just sat in boxes.”

Published in 1991 and 1995, respectively, Black Dolls an Identification and Value Guide 1820-1991 and Black Dolls an Identification and Value Guide Book II are must-have resources for collectors of Black dolls and anyone with the slightest interest in them.

By 1987, Myla’s youngest child had graduated high school and had gone to college. She and her husband were empty nesters for the first time. In 1988 or 1989, she thought about her unpublished book and contacted the publisher. “They remembered me, still wanted me to write the book, and asked me to please send the information,” Myla recalled. At that point, she updated the manuscript with newer dolls from the 1980s and 1990s. 

 After writing and publishing her first book, in 1994, Perkins founded Motor City Doll Club (MCDC)—Detroit’s first Black-doll club. MCDC achieved charter membership in UFDC in 1995. Myla is no longer an MCDC or UFDC member. When she left the doll world, she closed that chapter of her life completely.

If she had the opportunity to restart her collecting/doll historian journey and do anything differently, she said would not. She enjoyed collecting, enjoyed the friends she met along the way, and she remembered talking to me during the late 1990s after the late Patricia Tyson (former owner of Cultural Accents in Detroit) encouraged me to call Myla. At that time, Myla was selling some of her dolls. Among a few others, I purchased some career-inspiring dolls called Wanna-Be created by the corporation of the same name.  Dolls in the series included male and female pilots, doctors, teachers, executives, firefighters, soldiers, a male football player, and a female cheerleader.

During the mid-1990s, I purchased Wanna-Be males from Myla that represent an executive, a doctor, a football player, and one female that represents a pilot.

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