The Afro is a hairstyle that was popularized by African Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s, and signaled racial pride and the embrace of a new aesthetic. Characterized by stretching tightly coiled or kinky hair into a large round crown, the Afro is one of the most recognizable hairstyles in American culture. Alternately heralded for liberating African Americans from decades of self-hatred and torturous beauty regiments and vilified as a symbol of militancy and racial separatism, the Afro has been a part of some of the most important debates concerning black beauty and politics.
While the Afro was a style worn by African American men and women at the height of its popularity, it was seen as a greater departure from aesthetic norms for African American women. For decades leading up to the late 1960s, the only acceptable way for an African American woman to wear her hair was to have it straightened with a hot metal comb and then curled into style. Men, on the other hand, often wore their hair in its unstraightened state, but cut close to their heads, unlike the Afro which usually involved longer hair that was stretched, though not straightened, to reveal maximum height. Breaking with conventions that deemed that the only acceptable way for African American women to wear their hair was straightened, a small group of artistic women in urban areas began wearing what they called the natural, a shorter version of what would become the Afro, as early as 1952. However, the style did not become widely worn until disappointment with the failed promises of the modern black freedom struggle of the 1950s and early 1960s gave rise to a more nationalistic black politics that encouraged not only political engagement, but cultural markings in the form of clothing and hairstyles. While the style was popular among those who came of age during the civil rights movement, it was never fully embraced by older African Americans, who rejected it as radical and a reflection of poor grooming.
While the Afro gained in popularity throughout the late 1960s and 1970s as a hairstyle associated with those who were shifting away from integration and toward black self-determination, the style was also popular among those who did not share such politics. Some beauticians who originally eschewed the style because they thought it would cut into their profits soon began adopting the Afro as a fashion trend, promoting an extensive bevy of products designed to maintain the style, and even selling a line of wigs designed to mimic the fullness and roundness of the Afro.
By 1977, however, the Washington Post declared that the Afro was “doing a graceful fadeout,” making way for the increased popularity of hairstyles that relied on chemical hair straightening. However, even as the rise of a more conservative national politics rendered the nationalistic racial politics represented by the Afro virtually obsolete, African American beauty culture was forever changed by the style. While most African American women currently wear their hair straightened, the Afro introduced a new black aesthetic that celebrated the beauty of black hair in its natural state.
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