More Than Child's Play: North Carolina Professor Explores the History of Dolls and Their Sociological Impact

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For Dr. Sabrina Thomas, dolls are not just child's play. In fact, they are the subject of her research, which recently landed her a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thomas, an assistant professor of family and consumer sciences at North Carolina Central University, was awarded the grant to write a book on the history of Black dolls as a sociology of Black childhood.

Thomas, who graduated with a psychology degree from Tuskegee University delved into dolls for her master's thesis at the University of Rochester. Her focus was reexamining Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark's famous 1940s study which showed that most Black children preferred to play with White dolls rather than Black ones because they considered White dolls finer

"I was curious about those findings ant their …