Betye Saar
By Kaitlyn Greenidge
An exhibit of Betye Saar’s doll collection, the Schomburg Centennial, and the new book They Stole A City point to a changing America.
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, almost always with hostility. I’m thinking a lot about this hypersurveillance as we enter into a second Reconstruction in earnest. Not long before I toured the doll exhibit, the Supreme Court had effectively gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This loss of Black political power is coupled with the continued expulsion of Black professional workers from the federal and national workforce and Black intellectuals from American academic life. Combined, it is an effort designed, with surgical precision, to diminish Black public life to whatever white supremacists imagine it to be.
Saar believed that playing with dolls imbues them with spirit, that every figure contains part of the child who believed in it. “They each have a history, and I feel some even have an energy of their past life, of the little child who loved them,” Saar said in a written statement to Harper’s Bazaar. 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.
A few days before I went to tour the new exhibition, I attended the Schomburg Center’s centennial gala, held at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman main branch—the one with the iconic stone lions. I had expected the evening to feel surreal. Instead, it felt like a reminder of what is possible. I walked up the main steps of the library surrounded by the triumphant sounds of a Black chorale singing spirituals. A crowd of tourists had formed, unaware of the particular celebration that night but drawn by the sounds of the music. Inside, nearly every Black intellectual or artist of the last few decades had gathered. I huddled close to Lynn Nottage out of intimidation but found the courage to tell Nell Painter how formative her work is to so many. The Gala was honoring the work of Edwidge Danticat, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Angela Bassett, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Solange Knowles. But over the course of the night, I was reminded that the Schomburg exists only because of the strength of Black imagination. It was founded by the Afro-Puerto Rican librarian Arturo Schomburg, who began collecting Black books and Black cultural artifacts in the early 1900s, when the entire cultural world insisted that Africans, and certainly people of the African diaspora, did not have a history or a culture or an understanding of language. To champion these things in the face of colossal institutional indifference and active political violence took extraordinary courage. To understand that these things were worth preserving took foresight. And to believe that Black people ourselves could be adequate stewards of it all took a deep faith in Blackness that is rare in American culture life, even among people who claim to be ardently pro-Black.
The Schomburg Center was founded in 1925, during the feverish mania for African American culture that fueled and funded the Harlem Renaissance. White intellectuals and artists were enamored with Black culture, and the Schomburg funneled this interest into developing an institution. The fact that this institution has endured despite numerous cultural backlashes against Black people over the past 100 years is astonishing.
Living now, in 2026, means holding this history together with the knowledge that we are entering a new era of Blackness in America, one where the current generation is being asked to fight the same battles its ancestors did. Sometimes I despair. The people who helped Arturo Schomburg build his library had, to their advantage, a populace that valued books and reading, that held on to an objective truth, that did not have to contend with the intense and highly effective propaganda campaigns of today. Are we actually at a disadvantage, compared to our ancestors?
There’s an excellent new history out this summer that considers this question: 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 has 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.