Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training during Segregation.

Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training during Segregation. By Julia Kirk Blackwelder. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 183. $29.95, ISBN 1-58544-244-5.)

This book presents the complex economic, social, and political institution that was the African American beauty industry before the civil rights era. It focuses on Majorie Steward Joyner of the Madam C. J. Walker Company and James H. Jemison, who founded the Franklin School of Beauty.

Segregation guaranteed a captive market and enterprising women like Annie Turnbo Malone and Sara Breedlove Walker established companies that exploited the opportunity with missionary zeal, spreading a message along with the cosmetics. Using homemade beauty aids that had been passed down and refined over generations, these highly competitive businesses provided a nexus between black pride and self help.

Julia Kirk Blackwelder presents a nuanced perspective on the civil rights era by presenting the mundane and overlooked world of beauticians. In so doing, she skillfully reveals the depth of the movement. Networking through self-help organizations and churches, agents recruited customers and trainees while precariously treading a minefield of segregation. In a business that was profoundly intimate and personal, beauty agents were more than traveling salespersons; they were like extended family. Like everyone else, they understood the roadblocks of segregated society, but they represented the possibilities of economic independence.

Beauty agents were role models and the embodiment of refinement, striving to mold trainees into responsible middle-class women. The Jemisons took the role of in loco parentis seriously, involving themselves in their students' personal lives. The Jemisons' legacy cannot be measured in the financial success of their skilled beauticians but in the hope that they inspired in these young people.

Thus political issues and beauty culture merged. The sales network of beauticians encouraged voter registration in beauty shops, in their schools, and at conventions; they held workshops on voting procedures. Although segregation ensured them of a clientele, they strove to destroy that very system. Blackwelder's work also hints at cracks in the Jim Crow system. State cosmetology laws regulated beauty schools, establishing different requirements by race. However, both black and white schools united to fight laws that infringed on their businesses.

Using an extensive array of photos, intimate detail, and personal letters, this work effectively reveals a part of African American society deeply rooted in the American dream of propriety, middle-class values, and initiative. The many details personalize this story and bring it to life. The complexities and contradictions of an African American industry based on dominant standards of beauty are skillfully woven throughout the text. This book presents the Jim Crow era from a fresh perspective, offering new revelations of opportunity, industry, and struggle.

BARBARA ANN MOSS

Clark Atlanta University