World Afro Day
Throughout the history of slavery, African Americans’ hair was constantly being referred to as “nappy”, “cottony”, or “wooly”. They styled their hair to mimic that of their white counterparts in an attempt to reduce the ridicule.
Relaxers were invented in the early 1900s by Garrett Augustus Morgan with the intention to straighten kinky hair and make it more manageable and presentable. (We know now how much damage this process continuously causes black hair.)
It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the first natural hair movement began.
The Civil Rights Movement brought new life to black hair and the black identity as a whole. Thus, Black people in America decided to stop treating their hair and returned to more natural hairstyles.
“Don’t remove the kinks from your hair, remove them from your brain. ”
The Afro’s surge was infringed on when hairstylist Jheri Redding invented the Jheri curl in the late 1980s. It was a rearranging cream that softened the texture of natural hair, but did not make the hair as straight as relaxers do. By softening your natural hair, you’d be able to have looser curls that were then made permanent by the two-part chemical solution.
The Afro gained resurgence again in the late 1990s and early 2000s once Jheri curl-wearers realized the damage that the chemicals had caused their hair. Afros in the early 2000s were often styled together with Black hairstyles, such as cornrows. This made the afro stylish again and was often sported by non-Black individuals in movies and television.
“Who should wear the natural look? All those who want to be Black, beautiful, and true.”
The Afro initially signified the rejection of white beauty standards by Black people and their defiance against what was deemed acceptable—not only by white people, but Black elders. Black elders had become so succumb to their creamy crack (chemical relaxers) that once young Black people decided to embrace their natural selves, they served a rebuttal to their very own. Black elders saw sleek hairstyles as being crucial to their character.
There are still plenty of individuals, young and old, within today’s natural hair movement that have been conditioned to believe that wigs, weaves, and silk presses are the prerequisite to respect.
On July 3, 2019, California became the first U.S. state to prohibit discrimination over natural hair. This meant that employers and schools would not be able to discriminate against an individual for hairstyles such as the afro, braids, twists, and locs.
The Afro remains one of the most prolific unstraightened African American hairstyles.
