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• 1 2019-03-12T23:56:44+00:00 January - Archived Posts 22 plain published 2019-09-10T23:36:24+00:00
  Click on date to view post:
  January 1, 1938: New Opportunities on New Year’s Day in Pittsburgh Courier.

  January 2, 1947: Royal Crown Cola advertisement featuring actress and singer Etta Moten in Los Angeles Sentinel.

  January 3, 1935: Atlanta Daily World columnist I.P. Reynolds on his code of ethics for 1935.

  January 4, 1936: Baltimore Afro-American announces wedding of Temple University junior.

  January 5, 1957: “Jocko” Henderson’s rock ’n’ roll radio show advertised in New York Amsterdam News.

  January 6, 1940: Norfolk Journal and Guide mourns the passing of Howard University’s Kelly Miller, mathematician, sociologist, and author.

  January 7, 1972: Advertisement for Soul Solider, a black Western about Buffalo Soldiers, in Atlanta Daily World.

  January 8, 1916: Teenage amateur radio enthusiast featured in Chicago Defender.

  January 9, 1971: Free exams to detect breast and uterine cancer given by Bronx Women’s Liberation Health Committee, reported in New York Amsterdam News.

  January 10, 1935: Los Angeles Sentinel profile of businesswoman Lela Rideout, owner of Spotless Cleaners.

  January 11, 1975: Politician and professor Zoe Barbee mourned in Norfolk Journal and Guide after tragic car accident.

  January 12, 1952: Cleveland Call and Post on murder of civil rights activists Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette Vyda Simms Moore.

  January 13, 1938:Thomas Jefferson Flanagan’s poetry column, “Up From Georgia With My Banjo” in the Atlanta Daily World.

  January 14, 1956: “Our People: Pages from History” illustration by cartoonist Melvin Tapley in New York Amsterdam News.

  January 15, 1927: Vaudeville producer Leonard Harper in Pittsburgh Courier.

  January 16, 1936: “Sin syndicate” led by Queenie Parker, described in Philadelphia Tribune.

  January 17, 1953: Debutante ball hosted by Royal Coterie of Snakes, photos in Chicago Defender.

  January 18, 1969: Articles related to first posthumous commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

  January 19, 1957: Baltimore Afro-American articles on founding of Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Non-Violent Integration and Sidney Poitier’s Edge of the City.

  January 20, 1943: Atlanta Daily World “Society Swirl” article on farewell party for a “popular matron” who was going to work at a defense plant in Mobile, Alabama.

  January 21, 1911: Chicago Defender subscription advertisement featuring The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

  January 22, 1966: Cleveland Call and Post columnist Daisy Craggett raises concerns over urban renewal plans in the Hough community.

  January 23, 1947: Los Angeles Sentinel promotes Harlem Globetrotters exhibition game.

  January 24, 1963: Gospel legend James Cleveland in the Los Angeles Sentinel.

  January 25, 1913: Hair care advertisements in Philadelphia Tribune, featuring Madame T.D. Perkins, “Scientific Scalp Specialist.”

  January 26, 1935: Fan Tan skin bleach advertisement in Norfolk Journal and Guide.

  January 27, 1955: California Eagle editorial cartoon regarding segregated shore leave for black U.S. Navy sailors in South Africa.

  January 28, 1922: St. Paul Appeal article on controversy over burial of former Louisiana governor P.B.S. Pinchback.

  January 29, 1972: “Madame President?: Our Shirley [Chisholm] First Black Woman to Run,” in New York Amsterdam News.

  January 30, 1928: “Woman Kills Man” stories in Chicago Defender.

  January 31, 1942: Black press coverage of Red Cross/military ban on black blood donors.
• 1 2019-03-12T23:56:19+00:00 January 25, 1913 11 plain published 2019-11-04T18:52:21+00:00 On January 25, 1913, like most days in most newspapers, the Philadelphia Tribune ran dozens of advertisements, including a page featuring advertisements for women’s hair care products and hair dressing services (click to view PDF). The largest advertisement is from Madame T. D. Perkins, a “Scientific Scalp Specialist” based in Denver, Colorado. Perkins’ advertisement featured pictures of her own long hair and cited the Bible in direct address to readers: “Women, Stop, Wait, Listen, Read. If a Woman have long hair, it is a Glory to Her: I Cor., 11–15. Every Woman Can Have that Glory If She Wishes It. This is for you. No more ironed hair, but soft, long, beautiful hair that need not be put on the dresser on retiring. Do you want this kind of hair? If so, write for particulars to Madam T. D. Perkins, the Scientific Scalp Specialist of Denver, Colo., who is astonishing the world with her wonderful art of growing hair...I am the only women of the race growing hair to-day who can show the public the real length my hair was when I first began treating it. Send for booklet if you mean business.”  Elsewhere, Perkins assured readers that her treatments would work for every black woman. “No matter how dark your skin is, Madam Perkins’ matchless scalp preparations and scientific method of treatment for cultivating, beautifying and growing the hair will grow your hair if there is no physical ailment to prevent.”  While this language resembles ads for skin whitening cream (which I’ll post about tomorrow), scholar Noliwe Rooks notes that rather than promising “to fundamentally change the lives as well as the facial structure of African American women, Perkins merely promises to grow hair.”⁵⁹  Rooks locates Perkins among a group of early twentieth-century black cosmetic entrepreneurs who, while not as well known as Annie Turnbo Malone or C. J. Walker, “challenged dominant ideologies and constructions of African American women. By using rhetorical strategies from within African American culture, these women contested the popular construction of African American women as ‘other’ and addressed them in ways that indicated kinship and acceptance. In the process, they shifted the significance of African American women’s bodies in advertising discourses from concerns with the dominant culture’s ideologies of beauty, upward mobility, and social acceptance and toward concerns with health, versatility of styling, hair length, and economic well-being.”⁶⁰
  
  The other advertisements on this page highlight a number of local African-American women who operated small hair care businesses. Miss Beatrice Smith’s Hair Shop on 1717 South St. offered a selection of “wigs, transformations, pomps, braids, puffs, bangs, etc.”;  Mrs. P. Hasborough Owens promoted Owen’s Ethiopian Scalp Food; and Miss Virginia Reed promised Hair Culture and Scalp Treatment with “All modern improvements for the comfort of patrons.”
  
  On the historical, cultural, and economic aspects of African-American women’s hair practices, see Noliwe Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (1996); Ingrid Banks, Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (2000), and Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (2014). On the history of the cosmetics industry, see Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (1998) and A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (2002).