I am extremely excited to have a dress releasing soon inspired by Black Panther. This dress was a collaborative design with two of our Black facebook mom group members, one of whom is now a paid employee of ours. The Taylor Joelle team strongly believes in representation. Before I founded Taylor Joelle, I was an educator. I also received my bachelors degree in Youth Leadership. My background has been about helping children learn and finding their place in the world. I know how important matters of representation, identity, and self esteem are to healthy development, and I’ve been striving to bring those lessons to my brand.

As part of our preorder launch, we will be donating $10 for every Black Panther inspired dress preorder, and $5 for every Black Panther inspired shirt preorder to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

When we first started working on the Black Panther-inspired dress, we believed very strongly that we should honor Chadwick Boseman’s legacy by supporting a pediatric cancer charity that benefitted Black children. Black pediatric cancer patients nationwide die at appalling rates disproportionate to all other groups. Across nine common cancers, Black children are between 38 and 95 percent more likely to die.  It’s a horrible and unjust truth, and we wanted to support a group actively working to dismantle the systemic barriers to equal treatment. There is one extraordinary place where Black pediatric cancer survivability rates are the same as white children’s, and it’s a place that was both very close to Chadwick Boseman’s heart and critical to desegregation in health care: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Some of you may know that as Chadwick Boseman was silently fighting his own cancer battle, he was also taking time to lift children’s spirits at St. Jude.  St. Jude was the first desegregated hospital in the south, and St. Jude’s founder personally forced hotels in the surrounding area to desegregate. While the south was still awash with the horror and injustice of segregation, St. Jude actively recruited and hired Black doctors and nurses, roomed Black and white patients together, had patients and families all dine together, and gave equal medical treatment to all races. From its inception, St. Jude emphasized that no child or family would ever be treated differently on the basis of race. St. Jude also notably opened its own patient family housing to guarantee that every family coming to St. Jude would be treated equally regardless of race or ability to pay. To this day, St. Jude still houses any family free of charge. 

St. Jude cared passionately about equal care and equal outcomes for Black pediatric cancer patients decades before its peers, and it remains an outlier even today in survival rates for Black children. We are confident that our donation to St. Jude will help save more Black lives— and we thank Chadwick Boseman for his powerful legacy that has given countless Black children inspiration and hope.

Donations to Saint Jude’s Research Hospital can be made HERE.