Good Hair and Worst Hair

Hello, all! I’m back after a week-long hiatus due to spring break at Northeastern. No, I didn’t do anything interesting.

But anyways! If you’ve kept up with my blog at all, you might recall this piece I wrote a few weeks ago about vegetarianism in the HistoryMakers Digital Archive, which was inspired by the fact that March of this year marked the five-year anniversary of me being on a vegetarian diet. In a similar vein, February 2022 marked the two-year anniversary of when I started dreadlocks—and I’d like to write a bit about this hairstyle and how it and other ways of wearing Afro-textured hair are portrayed in the HistoryMakers Digital Archive.

But first, I feel compelled to get a minor quibble out of the way, because any discussion of this hairstyle is bound to cause this myth to crop up, eventually. Contrary to frustratingly persistent popular belief (even among people who are otherwise excellent sources about caring for your hair in this style), the term “dreadlocks” has no negative connotation, and the term did not come into use because white people found our hair “dreadful” or some such ahistorical crock. No reliable historical source exists for this origin of the term. Much like the many, many, fanciful stories of Cherokee princess grandmothers, it’s basically something that we Black Americans have made up. For a scholarly source containing a repudiation of this folk etymology, I recommend a book called Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, by my former professor Bert Ashe. That said, in this blog post I will use the terms “dreadlocks” and “locs” interchangeably, because they occupy exactly the same status in my mind.

In February 2020, I went to a loctician in my hometown of Chesapeake, Virginia, and got me some starter locs, or dreadlocks. It was very odd, and difficult, caring for them that year. Less than a month after I got them, the United States effectively shut down, and I had to maintain it all by myself. But I managed to take care of them for two years so far—and I think they’ve turned out looking pretty nice. My hair journey has meant a lot to me, partly because I was limited in my self-expression with my hair because my mom was relatively conservative when it came to how a young Black boy’s hair should look.

The author on the same day he had his afro twisted into starter dreadlocks.

The author in Boston a few weeks ago. Please take a moment to appreciate this picture as the author had to face in the direction of the sun to take it, and his eyesight has probably suffered due to the pursuit of beautiful photography. (Wink.)

“Good Hair”

So, what did people in the Digital Archive have to say about dreadlocks, and about Black hair more broadly? Well, a great deal! Bear in mind that we have 2,701 HistoryMakers in the archive—and consider that almost all of them have hair, or at least did at some point in their life. That said, in seeking stories that investigated the deeper meanings of living with Afro-textured hair, I started by searching the term “good hair.”

If you don’t know, the term “good hair” is sometimes used by Black people to describe, well, the kind of hair that most of us do not have. It’s a term that stems from white supremacy and a Eurocentric beauty standard. So, kinky curls are “bad” hair, and loose curls and straight hair are “good” hair. Some Black people have what is (mistakenly) called “good hair.” This is partly because Africa is the world’s most diverse continent, so you’ll naturally find more than one hair texture there. Another reason is because Black people—especially in the Americas—often have some European ancestry, thanks to the systemic sexual abuse of Black women by white men, which led to mixed-race babies.

This phenomenon is exhibited excellently in an anecdote told by HistoryMaker Marcia Sturdivant, who learned that all hair is “good hair” from her father:

“Sometimes I would cut his [her father’s] hair, you know, when I got older, and I remember, you know, touching his hair and running and I says, ‘Daddy,’ and I'm so ashamed of this, I says, ‘Daddy, your hair, you have such pretty hair. It's so good." Oh my goodness, and I can count the number of times my dad yelled at me 'cause he was, he was real quiet but he grabbed my hand, I remember, and he turned me around and he said, ‘Don't you ever say that.’ And he said, ‘All hair is good hair. If you got some hair, you have good hair.’ (Laughter) and he said, "do you know why my hair is like this?" And he went on to explain. He says, ‘My mother's mother didn't have a choice.’”

Melba Moore, a noted singer of partial Louisiana Creole descent, said in her interview with the HistoryMakers that her mother was seemingly influenced by the same white supremacist pressures that allowed terms like “good hair” to flourish. She said this about the pressure put on her to act “proper” as a child, including straightening her hair:

“She [Moore’s mother] was a beautiful singer and very passionate about that, and explaining to us--oh, one of the things that kind of sticks out, but I think most of them are from the Creole side, was her teaching us how to have manners and how to have some kind of class, you know. And part of that was: don't be too Negroid. That means, you know, ‘Straighten your hair.’ And, ‘Try to be white.’ Well, that's the era, too, and it's also reflecting the racism we have within our race of the fairer you were, the better you were; and if you had straight hair, you had good hair. Mama had good hair. My hair was nappy, so (laughter) I had to try to be white--well, not white, but you know, ‘Straighten your hair, act nice,’ you know, ‘Don't talk colored," you know, ‘Don't talk that Ebonics," what we call Ebonics now. Speak the King's English. Have some class about you.”

But Olive Benson, a personal care entrepreneur and salon owner affiliated with the National Cosmetology Association—known now as the Professional Beauty Association—had this short and sweet thing to say about the term “good hair” (which I wholeheartedly agree with):

“There's no such thing as good hair or bad hair. Hair is hair. It's a texture. And every texture has an origin.”

On the other hand, some people in the archive, like Otis L. Story, Sr. and Dori Wilson used the term “good hair” uncritically to describe people in their family who had straight hair or hair with looser curls than other Black people. When watching these interviews, it didn’t seem to me as if these HistoryMakers used the term with any malice toward those of us with kinkier hair—”good hair” was just a term used when they were coming up to describe straighter hair. I think this just shows the sheer pervasiveness of the term among Black communities. Story, for example, said this about his father:

So, my dad was, he was a very handsome man. They say he was a sporting man. He had good hair, and real keen Indian features.

“Worst Hair”

I connect the term “good hair” with dreadlocks thusly: If “good hair” refers to straight or more loosely curled hair, would not dreadlocks—which occur when hair is left on its own to become so twisted together that the hair is effectively matted into different sections. If you want dreadlocks, you do the opposite of what you would do in order to have straight, “good hair.” You don’t comb it at all, and you wash it every couple of weeks as opposed to every day. Are not “good hair” and dreadlocks polar opposites, then? In any case, this is just my excuse to pivot my blog toward locs now.

The interesting thing about dreadlocks in the Digital Archive is that everyone seemed to have different reasons for growing their hair in this style, and everyone else seems to have had something to say about their hair. I’m not sure if there is a single HistoryMaker with dreadlocks whose hair did not come up at least once in their interview. Let’s explore what some of them had to say about locs. (Bear in mind that some people had dreads at some point in their lives but not all of them did at the time of their interview.)

I would say that the most iconic set of locs in the HistoryMakers Digital Archive belongs to MaVynne “Beach Lady” Betsch, a historian from Florida. In one clip from her interview, she describes the spiritual significance of her hair like this:

This is seven feet. Why seven? Look at this, dreadlocks. It took me twenty years. That's why I can't get a husband, takes up all the bed (laughter). . . .Why seven? What does Florida look like? A seven. So, I'm the historian at American Beach from Florida. The only black beach. So, even my hair is history.

Artist Ras Ammar Nsoroma had an interesting reason for growing freeform dreadlocks: He wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be hired for a corporate job so he could spend more time working on his art:

From there I just decided to concentrate on my art career and I was growing locs at the time. And I thought you know my locs would help me, help me in my drive and determination to continue this career because you know I didn't think anybody would try to hire me with locs. Locs weren't very popular then like the early '90s.

Nsoroma goes on to talk about how the desire to keep his dreadlocks as well as his vegetarian diet were part of the reason he eventually decided to leave the Islamic faith. While undoubtedly #NotAllMuslims are against dreadlocks, the spiritual leaders in Nsoroma’s community certainly seemed to have strong feelings against them:

“I also started growing my hair in locs [dreadlocks] and those things were kind of like frowned upon by--with the people I was practicing in Islam with and you know they would tell me things like there was a hadith. You know hadith is a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, a saying or things that other Muslim scholars said about Muhammad. They said there was a hadith that said you had to comb your hair or there was a hadith you can't go to extremes in your faith or that you can't, you can't go through extremes in your diet or, or that a vegetarian diet will make you passive like a cow you know things like that.”

Perhaps the most interesting interview I found was that of Ayoka Chenzira, who made a short animated film called Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People in 1984. This film explored the pressures faced by Black women regarding their hair, and was apparently groundbreaking for its time. I was unable to find the film itself, but I did find a short video in which Chenzira herself talks about the making of it. (See below). In any case, here’s what Chenzira had to say about the film and how it related to natural hairstyles like locs:

“Well, it, it opened up a lot of discussion, I think about black women and our aesthetic choices around our physical self. And as part of that discussion, what emerged were conversations around, ‘It's not okay to look a particular way and work in Corporate America if you are black.’ It brought up discussions around black people working for the airlines and what was considered standard, the standard, the standard airline uniform, which includes hair, earrings, et cetera. And how things like braids and locs [dreadlocks], and the afro don't fit into that world. And it brought up, when some women looked at the piece and talked about it, they remembered being burned as children, you know, with the hot comb in order to get their hair straight and what that feels like, having to look forward to that every Saturday.”

In a humorous anecdote, Michelle Boone said that when she was serving with the Peace Corps in the central African nation of Chad, some people assumed that she was affiliated with a rebel separatist army because the leader of that army had dreadlocks, just as she did:

“And then on top of that, I had at the time dreadlocks and Chad, as it is now, had a lot of political strife and in the region where I was there was a rebel who was, you know kind of building up a little mini army to try to overthrow the government and the, the head rebel guy had dreadlocks and they would say, ‘Ah Michelle she’s a rebel (laughter).’

Famed violinist Karen "Lady in Red" Briggs said that she was pressured by actress Linda Evans (who you might know about, ‘cause I sure didn’t) to cut/cover up her dreads while performing with composer Yanni in Greece. I told you, everyone seems to always have something to say about this hairstyle:

“And Linda [Evans] was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be just wonderful. And we're going to have you here--.’ And I remember they were saying, ‘And we're going to cut your dreadlocks.’ And I was like, "No, you're not.’ ‘Well, we're going to cover them.’ And I said, ‘No, we're not.’”

Overall, I think the people in the Digital Archive had a lot of interesting things to say about hair and specifically dreadlocks. Unfortunately, I’m painfully aware that I’ve only scratched the surface of this topic, because quite frankly there is too much to write about hair from this incredibly extensive archive. But, I hope this has been a fascinating glimpse of what the archive has to offer on this topic!

The HistoryMonuments

First Generation Politicians in the Reconstruction Era