The battle for the souls of Black folks has been waged on many fronts. Hair has long been among the most contentious, from today’s braids and dreads all the way back to the intricate and symbolic styles that slave traders shaved off the heads of Africans. That fight goes on today, with Black students still facing discrimination for expressing themselves with their hair.
The most high-profile example involves Darryl George, a high school junior in Texas who has faced months of in-school suspension and a disciplinary alternative program for refusing to cut the long locs that he has grown and twisted into ropelike threads. The school says this violates their grooming policy, which restricts the length of its boys’ hair.
If the textures and styles of Black hair were not an unending source of tension, Black people—women in particular—would not be compelled to push for legislation at the state and federal level to protect themselves from discrimination. In the last half decade, the CROWN Act—which stands for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair—has been the main vehicle for this, and at least 24 states have passed some version of that law.
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And with the CROWN Act taking effect in Texas last September, George’s family filed suit against the school. In February, a Texas judge ruled in support of the school’s right to punish George because, according to the judge, while the state’s law prohibits discrimination against so-called protective styles like braids, twists and locs, it still allows bans on hair longer than two inches worn by male students.
The irony of this decision was not lost on the authors of the law. “Anyone familiar with braids, locs, twists knows it requires a certain amount of length,” State Rep. Ron Reynolds, who co-authored Texas’s CROWN Act, said during the February trial.
The exercise of this apparent loophole by the school district is disheartening for those of us who want to see Black people wear their hair in the styles that suit their natural textures. But wearing locs in direct violation of a grooming policy, in a way, further fulfills the reason George gave to reporters for wearing the style: “It’s how I feel closer to my ancestors.”
Discrimination against Black hairstyles, no matter how carefully couched by the closeted or unconscious heirs of Jim Crow, carry forward the most egregious aspects of the legacy of their forebearers and the Founding Fathers. But so too do people like the George family stand as the inheritors and torchbearers of the Black freedom struggle. The fight for the liberty of Black people to wear our hair as we choose, however symbolic it may seem, has always been part of that struggle, with some styles—like George’s locs—more representative of that resistance than others.
An Indian sadhu of Digamber Akhada adjusts his dreadlocks during the land allotment of the Kumbh Mela festival in 2018.
Credit: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP via Getty Images
Locs, or dreadlocks as they are more commonly known, have a long and complex history that twists together many cultural strands spanning centuries and civilizations. In their book Hair Story, journalists Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps point out that millennia ago, one of the earliest examples of locs wearers was found on the Indian subcontinent, where a group of Hindus wore their hair in locs as a testament to their devotion to Shiva. Locs were also found in New Zealand, in Japan and, of course, across Africa. “It is a hairstyle over which no group can claim ownership,” Byrd and Tharps conclude.
If locs have become a hairstyle to which Black people claim ownership, it’s because of how the style grew common among kinky-haired people in recent decades. With African hair treated with disdain since the dawn of the slave trade, a Black person wearing any style natural to their texture was an act of defiant courage. Perhaps none was more a symbol of this resistance than locs.
In our modern era, locs emerged at the tail end of the 1940s among the then-nascent Jamaican religion of Rastafarianism. The late anthropologist Barry Chevannes charts the Rastafari origins of the hairstyle in his 1994 book Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Chevannes ties the history to a small sect of Rastas called the Youth Black Faith. The zealous adherents of that faith saw locs as fulfilling two purposes. Since locs can form by simply ceasing to comb kinky hair, young Rastas could easily defy social norms by allowing their hair to become matted. Moreover, Chevannes writes: “[Locs] were also a way of witnessing to faith with the same kind of fanaticism for which the prophets and saints of old were famous, men gone mad with religion.”
Among the Youth Black Faith, this fanaticism led to the emergence of the term dreadlocks. Those who demonstrated a particular zeal and discipline in the practices of their faith were often called “Dreadful” by other members. “One who earned that name inspired dread in other brethren by the forthrightness and frankness of his critical remarks and the defense of the principles essential to the Youth Black Faith,” Chevannes writes. And it was these “Dreadfuls” who argued most fervently in favor of Rastas allowing their hair to lock. By the late 1960s, nearly all Rastafarians wore their hair in dreadlocks.
This etymology places the word dreadlocks in a far more affirmative light than the term’s typical history, which places its origins in slavery. In their history, Byrd and Tharps suggest the term was first muttered when enslaved Africans emerged in the Americas from below deck after enduring the horrors of the Middle Passage and onlooking white people called the hair that had matted during the journey “dreadful.”
Despite their etymological differences, Chevannes, Byrd and Tharps agree that modern dreadlocks originated in Jamaica among the Rastas. Then, largely thanks to the popularity of reggae artists like Bob Marley and his band the Wailers, locs were introduced to the U.S. Much like the Youth Black Faith in Jamaica, the earliest adopters of locs in America were those who wanted to express their disregard for the social and aesthetic conventions of their times.
Locs, therefore, bear the same legacy as other Black hairstyles like the Afro, which was fundamentally a symbol of resistance to oppression when it became popularized during the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. Another style symbolic of resistance are the tight braids of cornrows. The University of California, Los Angeles–affiliated public historian Yolanda Hester told me recently that, according to a myriad of oral traditions, these braids were patterned into maps that fugitive slaves could follow to freedom, and runaways would also stow seeds and flecks of gold inside the braids that they could use to thrive after their escape.
As recently as 2011, for example, a braider descended from Afro-Colombian Maroons attended the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate the intricate braiding patterns that she inherited, which she says enslaved women used to send messages and map out paths to freedom. And in 2017, an ethnobotanist visited a settlement established by the Maroons—a term used for the descendants of fugitive slaves—and recorded footage of a Saramaka woman demonstrating the braiding technique she says her ancestors used to hide seeds during the quest for freedom.
Despite the scant written evidence of this practice, “there's always those stories, as a part of the Black tradition of understanding liberation and freedom,” Hester says. “People find ways to make freedom possible for themselves.”
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.