Rose Morgan

Rose Meta Morgan was born on the ninth of August 1912 in Shelby, Mississippi, into a Black sharecropping family of the post-Reconstruction Mississippi Delta. Her father, Chaptle Morgan, a hard-driving one-time sharecropper turned businessman, moved his large family north to Chicago while Rose was still a small child, and it was in Chicago that she was raised and came of age.

Drawn early to the craft of hairdressing, she trained at the Morris School of Beauty and began styling hair as a girl. Her gift carried her outward: after she dressed the hair of the singer Ethel Waters in 1938, Waters invited her to New York City. There, working first from a rented booth in the Sugar Hill salons of Harlem, Morgan quickly built a following of her own.

In the early 1940s she opened the Rose Meta House of Beauty in a converted Harlem mansion, and within a few years it had become the largest African American beauty parlor in the world. By 1946 her flagship on West 148th Street employed a staff of some twenty-nine — hairstylists, masseurs, and a registered nurse — and Ebony hailed it as the foremost establishment of its kind. In 1955 she reopened, grander still, as Rose Morgan's House of Beauty, and over her career she trained roughly three thousand hairdressers.

Her reach extended beyond the salon: in 1964–65 she was among the founders of Freedom National Bank, New York's Black-owned commercial bank. Briefly married to the boxer Joe Louis, she remained a doyenne of Harlem's high society until her return to Chicago, where she died on the sixteenth of December 2008. We honor Rose Morgan, who turned a booth into an empire and lifted a people's beauty into pride.