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With The Doll Test: Choosing Equality, Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator David Elmo Cooper tell the true story of a psychological test that changed hearts, minds, and history. I talked with Carole about how she sees this book fitting into her impressive body of work for young readers.

Roger Sutton: What got you interested in turning the doll test, Mamie and Kenneth Clark's seminal experiment, into a book?

Carole Boston Weatherford: Well, we study the civil rights movement quite a bit in K–12 schools, and there's a lot of discussion outside of K–12 schools. But often we're focused on the grownups who were involved in the movement, with the exception of the Children's March in Birmingham. Most of the events that have been documented have been adult-driven. I wanted to look at how children were affected by segregation but also how they were involved in dismantling it. So even though these children were not consciously involved, not consciously activists, they were nevertheless agents of change. I wanted to give them their due and tell a story that perhaps had not yet been told for a child audience.

RS: I only knew the broadest details of the story, and it was fascinating to find out more about it.

CBW: That's been my mission as an author, to mine the past for hidden histories.

RS: What gave you the idea to tell the story from the point of view of the dolls? (Which I think is brilliant.)

CBW: I try to keep it fresh whenever and however I can, and telling the story from the perspective of the dolls was one way to do that. After I had written it that way, I received a suggestion to just tell it straight, put in more history, more details. So I did, and then when Carol Hinz at Lerner saw that version, she asked, “Can you rework it?” And I said, “Well, I just happen to have the original version.” She said, “I love it, and I was actually thinking about asking you to tell it from the dolls’ perspective, but I didn't see how it could be done.” But then she said, “Of course, you're Carole Weatherford, so you can do it.” So there it was. I'm primarily a poet, so the voice is an essential consideration in my creative process. Having the dolls tell the story also allowed me to keep the telling as simple as possible, as pared down as possible, so that kids as young as possible could understand it. Because dolls, they're cute but they're not too smart.

RS: I like that you kept them doll-like, if you know what I mean. The dolls were part of the experiment, but they didn't have feelings.

CBW: No, they were able to be objective and to be completely clueless at the same time.

RS: You really could have gone down a dangerous path and had one of the Black dolls saying, “Oh, I felt so terrible.”

CBW: Right, no. No, the dolls have no feelings.

RS: What did you know about the Clarks going in?

CBW: In the 1980s I worked at the National Bar Association, which is the professional organization for African American attorneys that was founded before the American Bar Association admitted Black attorneys. I learned about some of these hidden stories of the civil rights movement there because some of the people I was involved with at the National Bar Association were the attorneys who worked on Brown v. Board of Education; the attorneys who represented Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. I rubbed shoulders with these attorneys, and some of the stories rubbed off on me as well. I'm not sure if I heard about the doll test at that time or later, when I was teaching children’s literature. But when I was teaching children’s literature at Fayetteville State University, which I did for twenty-two years up until this past school year, I used the doll test in our unit about diversity to show why we need diverse books. Just like we need diverse schools, we need diverse books. And so I used the doll test to show how important representation is, how representation matters, and how it can affect kids either positively or negatively.

RS: And how do you think it's going for diverse representation in children’s books?

CBW: There's been growth, obviously. There's lots of new faces, new BIPOC faces on the scene. Both as creators and on the editorial and art direction side. But we still have a ways to go because there are still more children’s books about animals than there are about people of color. So until we start approaching 50/50 representation with animals...I’ll feel a bit better then, but we still have a way to go. And we have more and more diverse audiences to represent as our population becomes more diverse and as the population of our schools becomes more diverse. We have more and more voices that need to be represented. So we’re still playing catch-up. But I am nevertheless encouraged, because children are our hope for the future. They know how to interrogate injustice when they see it, and we need to trust them to do that. Of course that means answering some of their questions. We might not be comfortable, as adults, answering some of those questions, but we need to get out of our comfort zone and have these discussions with our children about past injustices, about racial prejudice, about all kinds of prejudice so that our kids can get past it. I think they would like to if we would let them, but we've got to have these conversations. We've got to talk about these issues and talk about the past in order to move forward.

RS: There's a scene in your book where a young Black girl bursts into tears during the experiment, and I wonder what conversations with those children who participated were like afterward.

CBW: Because that's traumatizing, I think. You’re talking about the moment in the book when after being asked which doll is the nice doll, which is the bad doll, and having attributed all the negative attributes or negative traits to the Black doll, a girl is asked which doll looks like her. And the girl bursts out crying because she realizes that she has essentially condemned herself in condemning the Black doll. But had she not been involved in the doll test, she would have confronted that anyway. Maybe not in a classroom setting, but as people of color we are confronted with images and advertising and in the media and in the marketplace that tell us that we're less-than, so we have to grapple with those issues either way. They may not bring us to tears, we may not realize that we're being confronted with those issues until we are more mature and can understand a little better, but nevertheless the impact is the same. I don't know what kind of, if any, support was provided for the children who participated in the doll test. Ideally that would be the way we approach it nowadays. To give the test and then have some kind of debriefing or aftercare for the kids, but I'm not aware that that took place.

RS: We’re so much more conscious now about when we involve human beings or even animals in a study.

CBW: Right, and definitely for children. You may even have to be fingerprinted or go through a background check. We are a lot more vigilant nowadays about how children are used in research. And I'm not saying that the Clarks abused any kind of professional practice that existed at the time, but we certainly have more resources at our disposal now.

RS: And our understanding is greater. And a lot of it, of course, is partly due to experiments like the one the Clarks did.

CBW: Do you remember when you heard about it?

RS: Maybe in library school? But I didn't know that it was a husband-and-wife couple. I didn’t know that it was her work that began it.

CBW: Nor did I.

RS: So there's another kind of prejudice we need to overcome.

CBW: He became the spokesperson for the project although the project, the research itself, was her brainchild and they did the work together.

RS: What do you think of David Elmo Cooper’s art for The Doll Test?

CBW: I think the pictures are wonderful. I love the way David used some halftone screens very effectively for the dolls. I think that gives a feeling of the history. That we’re documenting something.

RS: It's also done in a sophisticated style that is going to help keep your audience and broaden your audience.  You don't look at the pictures and think, Oh, this is a book for little kids. It's very serious—those dolls are very serious about their work. Now The Doll Test is straightforward nonfiction. How's that different from writing the poetry you're so justly lauded for — as you will be at the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards ceremony soon.

CBW: You're referring to Kin: Rooted in Hope, which won a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Poetry and was illustrated by my son Jeffery. We're over the moon about that because of the collaboration and the family history in the book. But I had to confabulate a lot more for Kin than for The Doll Test. The events in the latter book are well documented, but when I'm working on a project like Kin, where there are a lot of holes in the story, in the history, I engage in critical fabulation, which means I take the existing facts and make some suppositions or some assumptions. I take creative license to fill in the holes in the name of reclaiming a lost narrative.

RS: And you can do that because it’s your story. And I don’t mean just that it’s your story from your family. I mean, you're the poet, you're the creator. In The Doll Test you have a responsibility to history.

CBW: Yes, and I was faithful to history. The only fictionalization is the fact that the dolls are narrating the story. But who knows, maybe on some other plane, in some other reality, the dolls can talk, so maybe there's a little bit of magical realism in there.

RS: How much straightforward nonfiction have you published?

CBW: That's a tough question. I started to say Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom was straightforward, but no. Any time I'm re-creating the voice of a character, that is no longer straightforward — it's narrative nonfiction. Most of my work is narrative nonfiction. Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre was not — that was entirely straightforward.

RS: But isn't that also poetry?

CBW: It is poetry, but that doesn’t make the nonfiction any less nonfiction.

RS: Well, let’s talk about that.

CBW: Just because it’s poetry doesn't mean it can't also be something else. Poetry can be a nursery rhyme, but it can also be an elegy. It can bring you into the world with “Humpty Dumpty” and take you out of it with an elegy. Poetry can be fictional. Poetry can be lyrical and emotional. It can be about a flower, but it can also be about how that flower grows — it can be true to science. So poetry can not only cross the curriculum, it can mix with other genres of literature. A verse novel, for example. I've written many biographies and most of those are poetry. Box and Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement and Outspoken: Paul Robeson, Ahead of His Time: A One-Man Show — that's got to be my longest title ever. And Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library. So again, poetry can be a lot of things. I don’t think we need to say that if it’s poetry, it’s not nonfiction. Although that does create a challenge for librarians about where to shelve my books. Do you shelve them with poetry? Do you shelve them with biographies? Does Unspeakable get shelved with picture books? Or does it get shelved with history? Or does it get shelved with poetry — probably not, but it could be. Or buy three copies, or six.

RS: Writer’s dream.

CW: Two in each place. Rather than creating a cataloguing conundrum, just buy multiple copies and stick them different places, different sections where kids can find them.

RS: Where is The Doll Test going to go? You could put it in picture books because it looks like a picture book. You could put it in psychology because it’s about a famous experiment in the history of psychological research. You could put it with your other books about integration and about civil rights. You have one copy, Carole, where would you put it?

CBW: You know how school libraries often have window displays outside the library where they showcase books? I’ll put it there and maybe we’ll have some sort of drawing to determine who gets to read it first. Because it won’t be on the shelves where kids can take it down, not right away. We’ll put it behind the glass first. Or at least on top of the bookshelf where it can be displayed cover out.

RS: Well, it's an interesting conundrum in librarianship, because you want to put books where the people who want to read them will find them. But you can't always know why someone wants to read a book. One kid might want to read your book just because it's about dolls and another kid might want to know about the history of the civil rights movement. You don’t know where that book is going to have the best chance.

CBW: And there might even be some adult who wants to read this book because they collect dolls and they want to know this bit of history.

RS: What about kids who look at the book and think, Oh, it’s a picture book, I'm too old for that?

CBW: My books are used in secondary schools as well. I tend to deal with so-called "tough topics." The sweet spot for my books is generally ages eight through twelve, but the books can be used in middle and high schools. I like to think of my books, particularly the ones like The Doll Test that are about so-called tough topics, as illustrated short stories. I don’t want educators to juvenilize the book just because it’s a picture book. I want the book to be shared with younger kids, but I don’t want it kept away from older kids. The Doll Test can be used to introduce kids to a unit about separate but equal education, or about Brown v. Board of Education and how this test helped sway the judges and was a key part of Thurgood Marshall’s legal argument. I think picture books definitely have a place in secondary classrooms, especially picture books that tie into the curriculum. Picture books that can be studied not just as literature and as art but also as social studies or as science or as music — I've got a few picture books that are about musical topics. I was once introduced at a conference by a librarian who said, “Carole Boston Weatherford doesn't write picture books for children, she writes illustrated books for adults.” So I take that as part of my mission as well. After I wrote Voice of Freedom, I was traveling and I was down in Shreveport, Louisiana. I was at a church where the book was featured as a book club selection for both children and adults. The pastor asked, “How many people have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer?” I was sitting near the front so I couldn’t turn around, but later I asked how many of the people at this service — which had attracted about 300 people — how many people raised their hands? How many people do you think raised their hands, Roger? How many people knew about Fannie Lou Hamer?

RS: Not many?

CBW: Three. Three people. And that’s down in the Black Belt. That was Fannie Lou Hamer’s turf. The Mississippi Delta region. When I wrote that book I did not expect that adults wouldn't know who she was. I certainly knew that children wouldn't recognize her name because she died in the 1970s, and she's been gone a long time. But I was shocked when adults didn't know who she was. Particularly educated adults. We think we're culturally literate. but we're only culturally literate to the extent that we've been taught or have taken the initiative to learn. I realized at that moment that my books were doing double-duty. They were not only teaching children, the intended audience, but they were teaching adults who had not been taught these hidden histories in school. It was at that point I realized how important my books really were, because they're not only teaching the children, they're teaching the adults in those children's lives, and most importantly the teachers. Because they can go on to teach students year after year after year about these issues. In fact, when I present my books like The Doll Test and Unspeakable, one of the first questions adults often ask is, “Why wasn't I taught that in school? Why didn't I learn about this? Why didn't I know about this?”

RS: I think picture-book biography has for a lot of people opened up insight into the lives of important people, but people who may have been left out of the main narrative.

CBW: Most definitely, and I think that's very important and especially important for teachers, because you can't teach what you don't know. One thing I hope that teachers are doing in this era where Black history is under attack, where books about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals are being censored, challenged, and banned from schools, I hope teachers will at least continue to read these materials themselves, even if it’s too risky to read them to your class. At least get the information yourself because the occasion will present itself for you to share that information with a young person, whether you have the book in your hands to do a story time with it or not, the time will come for you to share that. When books are being banned there are a lot of things we have to do, but one thing we can do is: we can become the book.

RS: So make it a story you can tell.

CBW: Exactly, we have to become the book. There is a line in Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: A Life in Poems, which is a book that opened up a whole new world for me about what poetry could be...

RS: Also a BGHB Award winner.

CBW: One of my favorite lines is — and this was George Washington Carver's own belief — “Your life may be the only Bible that some people ever see.” Well, your life may be the only history book some kids will get to read, so we've got to become these books and become the messengers. Even if we can't open the book in class, we've got to at least open our mouths.

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