About the Book

Africa is a continent of beautiful hair designs, laced with gold, diamonds, brass bells, and beads arranged in intricate patterns and styles. The illustrious beauty of men, women, and children wearing artistic designs is breathtaking. European explorers traveled Africa witnessing the beauty of African crowns. Images and tales of this beauty were taken back to Europe, and the story of the Crown was stolen. Hair to Africans is virtually sacred, and for those ripped from the Continent and brought here, the preservation of any self-identity was forever lost.

The Crown of these people – the glory of their natural hair - had been stolen. Over 400 years ago the Atlantic slave trade route was extended to the eastern shores of what would become the United States. European slave traders and those who kidnapped, bought, sold, whipped, raped, and committed other atrocities upon these proud people of Alkebulan (“Africa”), not only ripped them from their culture but sought to steal the very essence of their humanity, self-identity. Being Black and Proud to a conscious black man or woman means identifying with everything that is African about themselves.

Beginning in the early 1960s, younger black Americans began wearing their hair in many ways, adorning their hair in braids, twists, and locs, and adding cowrie shells, colorful beads, and semi-precious stones.

It was at that time that Isis Brantley, one of today’s matriarchs in the natural hair care industry, also found her personal African consciousness and began to braid and adorn her hair, and then the heads of her newfound customers and community. Harvesting more than 40 years of experience as a social entrepreneur in the natural hair care business, and decades of teaching natural hair care to apprentices and students, in this book Brantley presents the reader a complete, incisive, and persuasive assessment of black hair and its history.