12/9/2023 0 Comments Gladys natural hair salon![]() ![]() After King’s death in 1968, Jackson’s hair grew into iconic status. Jackson was in 1988 when he brought his Democratic presidential campaign to campus. Who wanted to look like Peabo Bryson when you could look like Big Daddy Kane? Besides, Tito’s brother, Michael, wasn’t even wearing an Afro anymore.īut there were some holdovers from the previous decade. Hi-top fades, shaved heads and even Jheri curls came with it. It was the Reagan Era and rap music had replaced soul music, at least for our generation. and Philadelphia were on some other stuff. That is how I walked onto the campus of North Carolina Central University in the fall of 1985.īut my classmates from places like New York, D.C. In barbershop vernacular, “A Number One.” My mother moved us to her hometown of Rocky Mount in 1980.Īs I got older and more in control of my self-presentation, my hair got shorter and shorter. Maybe that is why my mother, a single mother who raised her two sons in Brooklyn in a tiny apartment filled with books by Gordon Parks and James Baldwin, and Gladys Knight records, always wore one. Even James Brown took out his conk for a while to sport an Afro. On men, the Afro meant seriousness, depth and a full embrace of Black manhood. “At that moment,” Rooks said, “hair becomes political.” A form of beauty that did not require white validation like a perm or conk. The Afro was not tolerant and compromising. Newton and Bobby Seale - who each wore towering Afros - helped give the style its political weight. Organizations like the Black Panthers, a nationalist group founded by Huey P. They believed in taking what they wanted through Black Power. They didn’t believe in King’s way anymore, which they called too accommodating. It was just considered “unkempt.”īut Jackson was never as radical as the group of activists in King’s wake, like Stokely Carmichael, who had grown tired of the respectability politics that King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were preaching.Ĭarmichael had already wrested power away from John Lewis by taking over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Longer hair wasn’t considered an Afro or even a hairstyle for that matter. Of all the ways that white people were going to come at you sideways, you didn’t want to give them that one.”ĭuring that period, “respectable” Black women were straightening their hair to look more like Rita Hayworth than Louise Beavers.īlack men, particularly after World War II, as jobs began to open up, kept their hair acceptably short, aside from the daring brother who still “conked” his hair with a volatile mix of lye, eggs and potatoes. And to not scare them,” said Noliwe Rooks, a professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University and author of the book “Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women.” “Always put on (nice) clothes. “The way to access power and authority in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s was to attire yourself in ways that showed you were equal to them. Credit: Cornell University Marketing Group ![]()
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