On August 18, 1970, the Federal Bureau of Investigation added Angela Yvonne Davis to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. The wanted poster, distributed within hours to field offices and post offices across the country and reproduced in newspapers and on television by nightfall, showed a twenty-six-year-old former assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA, the third woman ever placed on the list, wanted on charges of murder and kidnapping in connection with an attempted courthouse escape in Marin County, California, eleven days earlier. The photograph used was a head-and-shoulders portrait taken some months before her flight. Davis is looking slightly off-camera. Her hair, parted in no visible direction, rises three inches above her scalp in every direction in a circle that looks almost geometric in its symmetry. The Bureau, attempting to alert the public to a dangerous fugitive, had inadvertently distributed what would become the most reproduced photograph of a Black woman with natural hair in American history.
Davis was arrested two months later at a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge at Eighth Avenue and 51st Street, room 702, wearing a short-haired wig she had used to alter her appearance during her time underground. By then the poster image had been printed in every major newspaper, reproduced on rally posters from Berkeley to Howard, silkscreened onto t-shirts, and adopted as the visual signature of a global Free Angela movement that would draw John Lennon, Yoko Ono, the Rolling Stones, and Aretha Franklin into open support. The Afro in that photograph was not just a haircut. It was the first hairstyle in American history that became a political position the moment you walked out of a salon, or refused to walk into one.
The Salon Question
To understand why the Afro was a refusal, you have to understand what it refused. For most of the twentieth century, Black women’s hair in America had been a salon business built on chemistry and heat. The earliest pillar of that industry was Sarah Breedlove, better known as Madam C. J. Walker, who in the early 1900s began selling a scalp treatment and a hot comb and within a decade was running the most successful Black-owned company in the country. Walker’s hot comb, heated on a stove and applied at high temperature, allowed Black women to wear straight hairstyles without the daily labor of pressing. By the 1920s, the Walker network of agents, salons, and beauty colleges had built the first national infrastructure of Black women’s beauty work. The salon was, by extension, one of the first stable middle-class job tracks open to Black women in the segregated South and the migrating North.
The second pillar was the lye relaxer, which entered the consumer market in the 1950s and dominated by the 1960s. Sodium hydroxide, the active ingredient, dissolves the disulfide bonds in tightly coiled hair and lets it lie flat. It also burns scalp, eyes, and skin. A relaxer appointment was a chemical procedure with a window measured in minutes; left on too long, the product could cause permanent damage. The men’s version, the conk, used a similar chemistry. Malcolm X devoted an entire passage in his autobiography to the first time he conked his own hair in a Roxbury apartment in the early 1940s, and to the moment, two decades later, when he came to understand the procedure as self-mutilation. By 1965, the conk was already retreating. The Black women’s market was not. The relaxer was the standard, and the salon was where you got it.
Johnson Products of Chicago, founded by George and Joan Johnson with a $250 loan in 1954, controlled most of that market. Their first product was a relaxer originally formulated for men. By 1960 the company had repositioned the formula as Ultra Sheen and held an estimated eighty percent of the Black women’s hair-care business in the United States. The salon was an economic engine, a community institution, and a chemical procedure. It was also, by the late 1960s, the thing a growing number of younger Black women were preparing to refuse.
From SNCC to Angela
The Afro did not begin as a hairstyle. It began as a slogan. Stokely Carmichael, then the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, used the phrase Black Power for the first time at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, during the Meredith March Against Fear. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded four months later in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, two students at Merritt College who had been carrying law books to police-brutality scenes and reading aloud from them. The Panther uniform settled quickly: black leather jacket, black beret, sometimes a holstered weapon, and natural hair. Kathleen Cleaver, the party’s Communications Secretary, sat for a television interview in 1968 and explained why members wore their hair the way they did. We wear our hair like this, she said, because it is beautiful and because it is ours.
That sentence, repeated through speeches and pamphlets and amplified by gallery photographers Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, who worked with Bay Area Panther access through the summer of 1968, became the slogan Black is Beautiful. It was not a beauty industry slogan. It was a political position that happened to manifest as a hairstyle. Two years later, Angela Davis, who had been close to several incarcerated Panther members and held her own membership in the Communist Party, ended up on the FBI poster with the same silhouette.
What this hair refused was specific. It refused the hot comb. It refused the relaxer. It refused the salon appointment as a precondition for being seen in public. It refused, in the language of the movement, the assimilationist premise that respectability required straight hair. The political content was carried in the engineering. You do not need a chemical procedure to wear an Afro. You need a comb pick and time. The barrier to entry was zero.
Soul Train, Coffy, Cicely
By the early 1970s, the political signal had crossed into commercial broadcast. Don Cornelius, a former insurance salesman and Chicago radio announcer, launched Soul Train on Chicago’s WCIU-TV on August 17, 1970, sponsored by Sears, Roebuck. The local show ran weekday afternoons, was filmed in black and white, and featured Jerry Butler, the Chi-Lites, and the Emotions on its first episode. When the show went into national syndication on October 2, 1971, George Johnson of Johnson Products signed on as the primary sponsor. Johnson Products had recently launched a new product line called Afro Sheen, aimed at the natural-hair market that the political movement had created. The same Chicago company that had built its business on the relaxer was now selling maintenance products for the haircut that was refusing relaxers. In January 1971, Johnson Products had become the first Black-owned company listed on the American Stock Exchange. Its sales would grow from ten million dollars in 1971 to seventy-five million dollars by 1975.
The Afro arrived on prime-time television and in cinemas almost the same year. Pam Grier, who had been working as a receptionist at American International Pictures and taking small roles in women-in-prison films, starred in Jack Hill’s Coffy in 1973 as a nurse hunting the dealers who had hooked her sister on heroin. The character wore her hair in a deliberate full Afro and used it, in the most-cited scene of its sequel Foxy Brown (1974), as a holster: at the climax, she pulls a small pistol out of the hairstyle and fires it. Coffy and Foxy Brown were marketed as exploitation cinema and dismissed by most critics, but they did the work of moving a politically charged silhouette into the visual vocabulary of mainstream American action film. Cicely Tyson, working in a different register, had appeared in Sounder (1972) wearing her natural hair and went on to win an Emmy for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) without ever appearing on screen with straightened hair. By the middle of the decade, the natural silhouette was on Jet, Ebony, daytime television, and the cover of Time.
The Pick
The engineering that made the Afro possible was a comb. Specifically, the long-toothed wide-spaced pick designed to lift coiled hair from the scalp outward without compressing it. Picks had existed in some form in West African toolkits for centuries. The American mass-market version, often sold with a fist-shaped handle in homage to the Black Power salute, entered drugstores in the late 1960s and was selling in volume by 1972. The pick was the anti-tool: it required no electricity, no chemicals, no salon chair, and no professional certification. It was usually under a dollar.
The retail economy around the pick built quickly. Afro Sheen marketed itself through Soul Train as a maintenance product for natural hair rather than a treatment for straight hair. Its commercials featured Black models with full Afros being told that the product was for the hair they already had. This was the inverse of the Ultra Sheen sales pitch, which had spent fifteen years telling Black women that their hair needed to be straightened. Johnson Products was now running both campaigns simultaneously, selling the product line for the political haircut and the product line for the chemistry the political haircut was refusing.
In 1976, the Federal Trade Commission required Johnson Products to label its lye-based relaxers with a warning about possible burns and eye damage. The FTC did not impose the same requirement on Revlon, the white-owned cosmetics giant that had recently entered the Black hair-care market with its own competing relaxer line. Johnson Products was the one Black-owned company in the industry being made to disclose what its chemistry did to the body, while a larger white-owned competitor sold the same chemistry without the label. The salon did not disappear. Maintenance moved into the home, but tools and products were still bought and sold. The decade did not eliminate the Black women’s hair-care market. It expanded it, and rerouted some of its profits.
The Salon Was a Choice
The end of the decade brought the appropriation flashpoint. Bo Derek, a twenty-three-year-old white actress in her first major role, appeared in Blake Edwards’s 10 in October 1979 with her hair in beaded Fulani-style braids. The hairstyle, which two stylists took ten hours to install using Elmer’s glue at the roots, was treated by the film and the press as a novelty invented for the production. The braiding patterns were African in origin and had been worn by Black women in America for centuries. They had been particularly visible during the 1970s as a parallel statement to the Afro. The Derek braids became a beauty store category within a year. The phrase Bo Derek braids stuck. The Black women who had been wearing those braids for the entire decade were not credited.
By the time 10 was in theaters, the Afro was already retreating. Through the late 1970s, sales of Afro Sheen had begun to plateau. A softer chemistry called the Jheri curl, developed in Jheri Redding’s lab and commercialized by Comer Cottrell’s ProLine Corporation starting around 1980, gave Black salons a new procedure to sell. The Jheri curl was not a relaxer in the strict sense, but it was a chemical procedure, performed in a salon, applied to natural hair to change its texture and shape. Through the early 1980s, the Jheri curl spread quickly across Black men’s and women’s hair, and the relaxer category recovered behind it. The salon was back in business.
What the Afro left was the precedent. For roughly a decade, the question of whether to walk into a chemical salon at all had been put on the table as a public political choice, and many women had answered no. That answer would never disappear entirely. It would resurface in the natural-hair movement of the early 2000s, in the CROWN Act legislation of the 2010s, in the Black-owned hair retail boom of the 2020s. The decade was a refusal that did not stick at scale, but it recoded what refusal even looked like.
Sassoon’s geometric bob was a salon product. It required scissor work, planning, and a return appointment every six weeks. The Afro was the opposite engineering. It required nothing the wearer did not already own. The political content was carried in the absence of the salon, not the presence of a new technique. Sassoon built the cut. The Afro was the cut you got by not building one.
The Afro was not just a haircut. It was the moment American beauty industry chemistry was put on trial in public, by women, in the open, for ten years. The verdict was mixed. The trial mattered. When the Jheri curl arrived in 1980 the salon had its customer back, but the customer had spent a decade knowing that the salon was a choice. Disco inherited that knowledge. So has everything since.