Fabric of Hair Investigates: Afro Historyπ§
Why is an Afro called an Afro?
This hairstyle is so elegantly called the afro because most people who can grow an afro naturally have ancestors from Africa. So growing your hair into a afrocentric style is purposed. The afro became less popular in the middle of the 1970s through the late 1990s.Then it came back pride with the natural hair movement.
Facts :
At the end of the 1950s, a small number of young black female dancers and jazz singers broke with prevailing black community norms and wore unstraightened hair. The hairstyle they wore had no name and when noticed by the black press, was commonly referred to as wearing hair "close-cropped."
These dancers and musicians were sympathetic to or involved with the civil rights movement and felt that unstraightened hair expressed their feelings of racial pride. Around 1960, similarly motivated female student civil rights activists at Howard University and other historically black colleges stopped straightening their hair, had it cut short, and generally suffered ridicule from fellow students.
Over time the close-cropped style developed into a large round shape, worn by both sexes, and achieved by lifting longer unstraightened hair outward with a wide-toothed comb known as an Afro pick.
At the peak of its popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Afro epitomized the black is beautiful movement. In those years the style represented a celebration of black beauty and a repudiation of Eurocentric beauty standards.
It also created a sense of commonality among its wearers who saw the style as the mark of a person who was willing to take a defiant stand against racial injustice.
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