For many years,decades, billions of years,even now, hair has been a big important part of African American culture. We have used our hair for titles and royalty even using it to keep us alive. One of the fascinating things we used for our hair is how we used it to escape slave plantations and in the slave trades. We would braid our hair into cornrows to replicate the plantation field to use it as a map and store gold,rice,beans, etc in our hair to escape. We also use the braids as a source of direction. Long before colonization hairstyles in west africa showed a person's wealth,age,material status,and social rank. In pre-colonial African societies dating back to 3500 B.C, hairstyles like cornrows, bantu knots, and locs communicated a person's age,religion, Today's generation wears box braids,locks,cornrows,afros and many more and we still wear these hairstyles to this day. We express ourselves through our hair and we have so much history through it. Black hair is profound symbols of identity, history,resistance,and cultural pride. The Natural Hair Movement Eras like the Civil Rights Movement popularized the Afro as a powerful political statement against Eurocentric beauty standards, Many Black individuals still face race-based hair discrimination in schools and workplaces for wearing natural or protective styles like locs and twists. And so that's whyI'm thankful for my mother for teaching me my history about my hair and why it's so important today.
 

– GS

Relationship:  Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more