Perkins was also responsible for hiring another Mattel change-artist: doll designer Stacey McBride-Irby. It took nearly two decades for that advocacy to arrive in the person of designer Kitty Black Perkins, who had Diana Ross in mind when she designed Mattel’s first Black Barbie and dressed her in a red gown, with a little back and a little leg showing. Mitchell was among the employees who started advocating for a Black Barbie in the early ’60s. And she proves game as her niece gently grills her about dolls in general and Mattel specifically. Mitchell’s memories of the toy company and particularly Ruth Handler (who founded the company with her husband, Harold) are fond. “Black Barbie” offers an impressive cache of newspaper photographs, newsreels and more that augment the repressed record of Black life in the United States. Archival photos of Mitchell as a “spinner” - a person who tested the crank on a Jack in the Box - is just one of the documentary’s many archival photos that delights and instructs. In 1953, Legueria’s aunt Beulah Mae Mitchell made her way from Forth Worth, Texas, to Los Angeles.
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