A few weeks ago, I went to the New York Historical to see the staging of its upcoming exhibit “Betye Saar’s Black Dolls.” The artist, who turns 100 in July, collected Black dolls throughout her artistic practice. During Covid, she began painting watercolors of them. The exhibit at the New York Historical is the result of Saar’s decision to donate her doll archive to the institution. In a room painted deep blue, dolls from the early and mid-20th century are displayed alongside Saar’s paintings.

 

When I was a child, we had only Black dolls in the house—a consideration that I am realizing was not universal. My mother was adamant about this decision, and she was also clear with us, as children, as to why. She based this part of her parenting on the famous “doll test” that was included as evidence in Brown v. Board of Education, the court decision that declared school segregation illegal. During the 1940s, the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark devised a psychological experiment to attempt to trace the effects of segregation on Black children’s psyches. They presented Black and white children with a white doll and a Black doll. Both groups of children overwhelmingly chose the white doll and gave that doll positive attributes while believing negative things about the Black doll. The doll experiment is a landmark, both for the crowning legal victory of the second Civil Rights era and because of its desire to understand the psychology of exclusion—to map how injustice curtails an inner life and even determines who and what a child might reach out to for comfort. 

 

The dolls on display at the New York Historical are rag dolls, rubber dolls, and one figure, titled Hoodoo Woman, that Saar made to perhaps represent herself. The doll that sticks with me, though, is a topsy-turvy: a doll with two faces, one on each side of its head, with one face white and one face Black. The museum has chosen to display the doll with a mirror at its back. The Black face stares out into the exhibition room; the white face is visible in the reflection behind it, when you peek over its shoulder. It reminds me of the saying “When you’re Black, you’re never alone,” meaning that Black existence is always interrupted by non-Black observers—sometimes with curiosity, often with hostility. I’m thinking a lot about this hypersurveillance as we enter into a second Reconstruction in earnest, with the decimation of the Voting Rights Act and the continued expulsion of Black professional workers from the federal and national workplace.

Saar believed that playing with dolls imbues them with spirit, that every figure contains part of the child who believed in it. If there were spirits with me in the exhibition room at the New York Historical, they were curious ones. They were peeking over my shoulder, or maybe second head, dreaming.

 

There’s an excellent new history out this summer that considers how the past lives in the present: They Stole a City, by New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins. The book is an account of the successful, violent coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. A white mob attacked the democratically elected, integrated government and installed an all-white slate of legislators. They burned the Black quarter in town, destroyed the town’s Black newspaper, and forcibly exiled Black political leaders. President McKinley refused to send troops to intervene, essentially sanctioning the violence and putting an end to the experiment of Reconstruction and Black political power in the South after the Civil War. It would take another 70 years and the passage of the Voting Rights Act before the Black political power that was lost in the coup would begin to return. And now, of course, our Supreme Court, led by a justice who was raised in a segregationists’ haven, has undermined Black political power all over again.

The story of Wilmington was obscured for decades, until 2016, when a local reporter, Christopher Everett, made a documentary about it. Collins, who was raised in Wilmington by white Northerner parents, didn’t learn about the history until she was an adult. The coup in Wilmington was “meticulously planned,” Everett tells Collins early on in the book. “But for years it was branded as something that just spontaneously happened.” 

Collins’s history is deeply researched and astonishing in its breadth. She is concerned with an accurate accounting of the coup, its participants, and its aftermath. But she also traces how the coup’s impact reverberated throughout the lives of Wilmington residents into the present day. By the time Collins reaches 2016, when Trump arrives in Wilmington, his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, a Wilmington native, brags to reporters, “There is Southern blood in the Trump family now.” It’s doubtful Trump knew the story of the Wilmington coup, but in an instance of history rhyming, he spent his appearance complaining about alleged voter fraud, claiming his supporters would never commit it but other “people will”—a dog whistle for the fantasy of the white supremacist right of the undeserving Black American grasping for the privileges of citizenship. 

 

“I consider myself an implicated subject,” Collins writes in the introduction. By this, she means she is “enmeshed and liable even though I don’t have a direct tie to the 1898 massacre and coup.” Collins writes that there is “no such thing as … ‘the mercy of late birth.’… If you’re a Wilmingtonian—an American, for that matter—you’re part of 1898.”

Collins’s remarkable book is an exploration of what that means exactly. Her willingness to explore how a great injustice reverberates in both the perpetrators’ and the victims’ lives, as well as the lives of their descendants, pushes past what many people imagine a history might be. For Collins, revisiting shameful events in the past is important not for the meaningless exercise of self-flagellation but because one cannot understand one’s present day without this understanding. Collins traces how the events of 1898 still determine where the people of Wilmington go to high school, where they shop, and even what type of job they may have. The book is a reminder that the sprawl of history reaches into the present day and affects what we can dream as possible. For me, reading the book, I think about the Wilmington described pre-coup: a town with a thriving Black professional class and newspaper, where political power was built in alliances between white and Black North Carolinians. The tragedy of Reconstruction is that the United States was briefly close to some sort of racial equanimity—a deeper goal than surface-level equality. They Stole a City reminds me that that outcome, too, is possible in America if we are willing to rigorously fight for it.  

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Ashley Farmer. Farmer is an associate professor of African American history at the University of Texas Austin. She is the author of Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era and Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore.

Ashley Farmer: “A research trip to New Iberia, Louisiana, the birthplace of Black Nationalist activist and leader Audley Moore, led me to Da Berry Fresh Market, a nonprofit farm stand and community grocery store serving the city’s West End. Red, black, and green Pan-African flags flapped above the market’s entrance, welcoming guests into a space filled with the fruits of local labor: crates of colorful vegetables, shelves stocked with preserves and handmade goods, and murals of Africa. Inside, a portrait of Moore herself hangs on the wall, an artistic rendering that reminds patrons of their legacy. Moore believed that Black self-determination and community self-sufficiency were the cornerstones of Black liberation, and these are principles Da Berry still puts into practice. Seeing her vision alive in that space sharpened my sense of what was at stake in writing her biography, the story of a Black woman who tirelessly fought for Black liberation through Black self-determination for nearly 100 years.”

As someone who sees Bazaar writer Camille Freestone's outfits in the office every day, I can attest that she loves to take preppy pieces and make them feel new with the addition of a surprising element. Lately, that surprising element has been athleisure—that is to say, sporty clothes that could work as well for the gym as the office. In the stort below, she explains how she discovered the unexpected joys of athleticwear for every day.

 

—Izzy Grinspan, digital director

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