Madam Walker’s crowning glory

Series about first maker of ‘hair grower’ highlights that even a century later, black hair is still a topic

“HAIR can be freedom or bondage. The choice is yours,” Sarah Breedlove shouts to a growing crowd of black women as she shows off her homemade “hair grower” – palmsized tins of hope – in the Netflix limited series Self Made.

In the scene, Sarah isn’t yet Madam CJ Walker: the first female African-American millionaire who employed nearly 10 000 workers, owned bustling factories run by women and built a mansion next to John D Rockefeller’s.

But even without the fancy name, Sarah has vision and quickly emerges as the loudest voice in what we now know as the “great conversation” about black hair. Should it be straight? Natural? Judged? Touched? Left alone?

A century later, society is still trying to answer those questions.

Self Made, an earnest zip through Walker’s extraordinary life told in four episodes released on Friday, is part of a cultural groundswell about African American women’s hair that has been growing – like the Madam’s first miracle product – for some time.

“This conversation about hair has been going on five years, 10 years, 20,” said Jamyla Bennu, co-founder of Oyin Handmade, an organic product line for highly textured hair.

What makes this moment feel different, she said, is that the world – made smaller through the internet – might finally be catching on.

The CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act, a bill banning natural hair discrimination, became law in California in January. That same month, Democrat Ayanna Pressley, one-fourth of “the squad” who regularly showcased natural hairstyles on the national stage, revealed she has alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss. “You are not your hair.

And that’s true,” Pressley said in an emotional video. “But I still want it.”

“Lots of stories are being made about hair now, but it’s not really about hair. Not to me, at least,” actress Octavia Spencer, who portrays Walker in the series, told the Boston Globe in an interview.

That’s the thing: it’s about hair. But it’s never actually about hair.

Madam Walker’s great-greatgranddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles, on whose book the show is based, agreed: “This is about power,” she said. “The story has been on the desk of Hollywood executives for many, many years,” said Bundles, author of On Her Own Ground: The Life And Times of Madam CJ Walker.

Her relative’s great American tale – born four years after the Emancipation Proclamation, then journeying from washerwoman to head of her own cosmetics empire – has been on its way to a screen since the late ’80s. That’s when Alex Haley, author of the seminal saga Roots, first floated the idea. That fell through. Then in 2001, Columbia TriStar

(now Sony Pictures Television) optioned Bundles’s book. Tht deal fell through. Next came HBO. And…

What has changed recently seems to be Hollywood’s attitude toward movies centred on black characters.

The Butler, 12 Years a Slave and other films proved they could be sold domestically and overseas. “At that point,” Bundles said, “I started to get a lot of calls.”

But there’s something bigger going on, too. Bundles thinks “we are in a moment” – a moment in which the discourse around black hair has shifted (again) in such a way that perhaps this might be the last time we talk about it.

“This does feel different,” Bundles said. “When I was a senior in high school in 1969 going from a perm to an Afro, I thought we had won this battle. But that pendulum swung back with societal pressure. Now there are laws preventing people from sanctioning and policing us.”

Laws such as the CROWN Act. First introduced by California state Senator Holly Mitchell, a Democrat, who has been wearing her own hair in locs for decades, it bans discrimination against natural hairstyles associated with race.

Its passage was personal. For years, Mitchell had been answering letters from girls who were bullied about their natural hair. She regularly sent them her official California

State House photo in response, in which she is “in a suit looking all senatorial with my locs”, she said. She remembered those little girls and that image while drafting the very legislation that would protect them.

“This is deeper than hair,” Mitchell said. “This is an issue of culture, choice, perception and how we redefine the concept of what’s acceptable and what’s attractive.”

Black hair is personal, persistent and political. It always has been.

Walker encouraged her sales agents to be politically active – so much so it was practically a job requirement. At the close of one of her conventions in the early 20th century, she gathered her employees together to write a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson urging him to sign anti-lynching legislation.

She donated. She marched. She lobbied. Whether black women’s hair was bone-straight enough to simulate white hair wasn’t Walker’s real concern, but whether black women had access to income, education and independence was.

There’s a throughline between Walker’s first hair products – meant to provide for black women just one or two generations out of slavery – and the cultural hair acceptance now being codified into law.

Though it’s been nearly 101 years since Walker died, here we are, still grappling with the stuff that grows out of our heads. In 2020, is the power dynamic finally, irrevocably shifting?

For black women in particular, beauty shops – like the ones pioneered by Walker – have always been spaces where they feel safe, centred and, most importantly, seen. Walker was one of the first to hold up that mirror, and now it’s up to the culture writ large to finally take a good long look. | The Washington Post