Marjorie Joyner

Marjorie Stewart Joyner was born on the twenty-fourth of October 1896 at Monterey, Virginia, to George Emmanuel Stewart, a teacher, and Annie Daugherty Stewart. The family moved to Dayton, Ohio, and at sixteen she went on alone to Chicago, where in 1916 she became the first Black graduate of the A.B. Moler Beauty School, opened her own salon on South State Street, and married the podiatrist Robert E. Joyner — a marriage of fifty-seven years.

Meeting Madam C.J. Walker turned her path: she joined the Walker enterprise and by 1920 stood national supervisor — later vice president — over its two hundred beauty schools, teaching some fifteen thousand stylists across half a century. On the twenty-seventh of November 1928 she was granted United States Patent 1,693,515 for her permanent waving machine — a multi-curler improvement that waved a whole head at once and served Black and white clients alike — followed in 1929 by Patent 1,716,173 for a scalp protector. Both were assigned, as an employee's work, to the Walker company; she earned no royalties, and said so without bitterness.

Her city knew her as more than an inventor. A founding member of Mary McLeod Bethune's National Council of Negro Women, she co-founded with Bethune the United Beauty School Owners and Teachers Association in 1945 and the Alpha Chi Pi Omega order beside it, helped draft Illinois's first cosmetology laws, chaired the Chicago Defender Charities, and for roughly five decades ran the Bud Billiken Parade — the great back-to-school procession of Black Chicago. At seventy-seven she took her bachelor's degree in psychology from Bethune-Cookman College, and in 1987 the Smithsonian set her wave machine and a replica of her salon on national display.

She died in Chicago on the twenty-seventh of December 1994, at ninety-eight. Honored be Marjorie Stewart Joyner, who curled a nation's hair and straightened its books.