The Black Woman’s Forgotten Fight against the Laws that Banned her Hair

There are many reasons why it’s not “just hair” for Black women. Before the “Black is Beautiful” and natural hair movement emerged during the 1960s, anti-Black hair sentiment in Western society existed for centuries, most contentiously in colonial Louisiana when a series of laws actually banned Creole women from displaying their hair in public. Introduced…

Into the Woods with Green Thumbed Activist, Indy Srinath

Almost a decade ago, Indy Srinath made herself a pretty ambitious promise. “It was like having a sudden awakening,” she tells Messy Nessy Chic about her decision to learn the name of every single plant she discovered, “where you feel like you’ve been living with a crowd of people who serve you your entire life,…

The All-Black Utopian Ghost City that Lost its Soul

In the heart of what was North Carolina’s old tobacco and cotton-field industry, lies the remains of Soul City, an unrealised utopia born in the midst of America’s 1970s urban crisis, intended to encourage black empowerment in a new all-African American planned community. Bankrolled by Nixon’s Republican government, “built by black people and for black people”, Soul City was projected to…

The First Man to Reach the North Pole was an African American Desk Clerk the World Forgot

“I think I’m the first man to sit on top of the world,” is not something many people can boast, especially if they lead perfectly normal lives, say, working a desk job in the city in relative anonymity. But for many years, that was the truth of Matthew Henson. In 1908, the unsung African American…

Lessons in Historical Male Peacocking, from Lord Gaga to the King of Afrofuturism

They’re performers. Dandies. Men with a streak of the mad poet. Writers, dancers, and professional party boys. Though these eccentrics span across generations, all share a brazen commitment to being themselves that’s made for some of the most memorable menswear moments in the 19th and 20th centuries. Long before fashion was giving the middle finger…

So a Glamazon, a Snake Charmer, and a Calypso Queen Walk into a Bar

It took more than a pretty face to make it big in burlesque – it took fearlessness and a strong dose of je ne sais quoi to make America take notice during the golden age of showgirl entertainment. Five women in particular have caught our attention more than a century later, so put up your…

Morse Code Mine Dancing: A Language Born in the Darkness

Born in the darkness of South African gold mines during Apartheid, “gumboot dancing” sprung from the basic need for exploited miners to communicate in what was a harrowing environment, where they were forbidden to even speak to one another. Workers decided to let their boots do the talking for them, and developed a kind of “morse…

Freedom Riding on a Harley: The 1950s All-Black Biker Gang

“While Rosa Parks took her historic bus ride, and as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton and the Black Panthers stood bravely for equal rights, the East Bay Dragons MC risked life and limb during days when a black man riding a Harley chopper was a revolutionary act.” The East Bay…

Daguerreotypes of Anonymous African Americans

Simply because we don’t see enough of this– material record of black history, that is. I came across the Randolph Linsly Simpson Collection in Yale’s online archives at the Beinecke Library, which includes letters, prints, film clips and formal studio portraits of African Americans. For more than 25 years, Randolph Linsly Simpson, a white man whose…

A Dedication to Vintage Black Glamour

The internet spawns another exciting book, in this case, a Tumblr dedicated entirely to Vintage Black Glamour. From Josephine Baker getting a pedicure to an anonymous snapshot of a style icon that never was, author Nichelle Gainer has been unearthing a treasure trove of iconic images from rarely accessed photographic archives ever since she began…