Meet Melody, American Girl's newest BeForever doll, now available nationwide

After her debut in Detroit on Saturday, Melody Ellison, American Girl's newest historical BeForever doll, is now available for purchase across the nation.

Melody's character is a 9-year-old Detroit girl and aspiring singer who finds her voice in Motown sound amid the civil rights movement in the 1960s, according to the company.

Gloria House, professor emerita of African-American studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, told the Detroit Free Press that it's fitting for American Girl to define the mid-1960s with a story based in Detroit.

"Why not have her be a little Detroit girl?" House, who was active during the civil rights movement, told the Detroit Free Press. "Detroit was so much the mecca of civil rights and movement activities during that period from the '60s right until the '80s."

Say hello to Detroit's American Girl doll

Detroit was progressive in that it had one of the nation's largest NAACP branches and it had the most black-owned businesses in the country along with a growing black middle class, but "there were still these significant issues around race and discrimination, even in Detroit, with all of that progressiveness that was happening here," Juanita Moore, president and CEO of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, told the Detroit Free Press.

According to Moore, Melody's story highlights that discrimination also existed in the northern part of the country and wasn't just a southern problem in the 1960s.

"The truth about the civil rights movement is that all of those individuals, they were not rich, they were not powerful, but they created change that changed the way every single person in this country lives today, and impacted human rights movements worldwide," Moore said. "Just to think about that young girl Melody, although a fictional character, it says any one of us can do that, even a young girl."

The Melody doll and her first full-length novel, No Ordinary Sound, are available for purchase together for $115, according to the American Girl website. Additional accessories are $24 and the book completion pack—which includes the second volume in the series Never Stop Singing and Music in My Heart: My Journey with Melody, a multiple-ending story—is $20.

American Girl spokeswoman Julie Parks told the Detroit Free Press that the company donated $100,000 in two paperback volumes, No Ordinary Sound and Never Stop Singing, to Detroit's 22 public library branches. Any child who visits the library can get either book until the end of the year, and the library branches are stocking copies to loan to library card-holders.

Several dolls were also given out at a kick-off even held on Saturday at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library.

 Follow Samantha Nelson on Twitter: @samm1son