Pleasant Company’s mission was to make history accessible to young girls, using dolls. Each American Girl character had a series of books, and corresponding dolls, that explored her story in a particular time throughout history. The company started in 1986, and by the early 1990s, American Girl was everywhere. There were full spreads in catalogs, commercials on TV, and copies of the books in school libraries everywhere. Addy Walker was American Girl’s first Black doll, and for many, she is a cultural icon. Everything about her creation, story, and appearance was intentional, and her dress was one of the most powerful statements of them all.
When Addy debuted in 1993, there were already four American Girl dolls on the scene. All were white and represented various periods between the Revolutionary War and post-WWII. Pleasant Company spent $3 million developing Addy, an enslaved African American girl, as the first Black doll. There was initially a ton of backlash around her introduction.
According to the series author, Connie Porter, Addy’s debut caused much debate in the Black community, due to her family being enslaved. Many argued that the first Black doll should have represented more uplifting times in African American history, such as the Harlem Renaissance or the Civil Rights Movement. But Porter says if you were to paint a picture of either of these iconic time periods, you’d have to begin with segregation, the fight for basic rights, and the Great Migration. “So, we knew we had to take it all the way back to the root of all these things,” she says. “And that is why when we meet Addy, she’s enslaved.”
To bring Addy to life, Pleasant Company assembled an advisory board, making Addy the first character to have a board of people involved in her creation. It consisted of seven African American consultants, whose expertise ranged from museum curation to children’s literature. Each consultant had an immense amount of knowledge about African American history, several of them in specialized fields of study, like the lives of enslaved children.
Dr. Janet Sims Wood, a retired Howard University librarian and original member of the advisory board, recalls that they met with Ms. Porter many times in Washington, DC, spending several days each time discussing proposed plotlines, ideas, dialogue, etc. “A couple of the people on the board had a thorough knowledge of artifacts. Wilma King and Lonnie Bunch knew all about what young Addy would have had access to. It had to be as historically accurate as possible, even though it was fiction. From her lunch pail to her bundle, to her outfit, we put a great deal of thought, research, and discussion into everything.”
And dressing Addy was no small accomplishment. Ms. Porter and the board knew that enslaved children like Addy would have likely worn a shapeless shift dress, issued to her without much thought. However, they wanted Addy to be presented with the dignity she deserved, so Ms. Porter had to find a historically plausible way for Addy to get a nice dress. “We did not want her on the cover of the book in a slave shift,” she says. “So, the way she’s presented was a major part of each book, especially the first.”
For the “Meet Addy” book cover and doll, which is the first in the series, Addy is wearing a pink and white striped dress, boots, and a straw hat tied under her chin. In the book, the dress is given to her by a white woman who helps her and her mother escape slavery on the Underground Railroad. Ms. Porter says that parallels from that outfit can be drawn to modern times, in more ways than one.
“The dress is symbolic of what had to happen in America in order for slavery to end. Black people stood up, of course, but white people had to stand up, too. Whether part of the abolitionist movement, or those conscripted into the army in the North, many people, Black and white, had to say, ‘This is the country we want, and this is the price that we have to pay to get it.’ Just like with the situation we’re in now as a country, where we will also have to make those decisions,” Ms. Porter said.
Aside from Pleasant Company’s mission to make history more accessible to young girls, the company was also a marketing machine. In each new book that came out in her series, each character got a new dress and a full new set of accessories. This helped build the hype around American Girl, as young girls wanted all the newly-released items, but it presented a major challenge for Ms. Porter: “I had to come up with clever ways for Addy to get a new dress in each book.” Historically speaking, it would not have been easy for Addy, an enslaved, later free, African American girl, to get a nice new dress each season of the year. Most people had very few items of clothing in general at that time.
So, how was Addy going to get her new dress in each book? To reach that goal, historical accuracy had to be built into every stage of the plotline. Ms. Porter and the board presented ideas for marketable skills that Addy’s parents would have needed to have in order to build a life in freedom. They needed to have skills that would translate to jobs they could realistically hold in Philadelphia at that time, skills that could help them earn enough money to make or buy Addy a new dress.
Addy’s mother, Ruth Walker, is a remarkable seamstress. She makes Addy a few dresses for books that came later, and those dresses symbolize the exquisite skills of African American dressmakers and tailors, both enslaved and free. We get to see Ruth’s talent and ingenuity shine, and we also see the love she has for her daughter and her family, something that could not be broken by the inhumanity of slavery.
“If you think about where most African Americans lived, and what their condition was during that period, they were enslaved,” says Dr. Spencer Crew, a history professor at George Mason University, and original member of the advisory board. “But what’s important to remember is that Addy wants her freedom, and she takes her freedom. It’s a success story in many ways, even in the way she’s dressed. We wanted to make sure that other Black girls could identify with the way she looked, her hair texture, her facial features. They needed to see themselves in her.”
Addy’s first dress pays homage to the Underground Railroad, to resistance and hope, to the willingness to demand better and put everything on the line for it. The dresses she wore in later books symbolize the promise and perils of the new life she’s navigating in freedom. In that way, her dress is always a significant part of Addy’s story, a story that, while fictional, represents the stories of many African Americans born into slavery, who refused to accept that condition.
“It’s particularly important in our world today to make sure our stories are available and accessible to people so we can remember, not only what things were like, but what our community was like,” Dr. Crew says. “Our community has always been loving and gifted, and we need to always remember that.”