A sign on the front door says ”Ring the Bell.” It takes a while for her to answer, for she moves very slowly these days, pushing along as support a battered green office chair on casters.
She owns a sure-enough, official aluminum walker that`s designed for people who have difficulty getting around, but she refuses to use it, believing it somehow makes her seem, well, feeble and infirm. And feeble and infirm she most decidedly is not. No, sir, not at all. It`s just that people tend to slow down a little when they get to be her age.
Her name is Marjorie Stewart Joyner, and she was a prominent figure in the growth of Chicago and its booming new black metropolis on the South Side during its renaissance in the `20s, `30s and `40s.
At age 90, this tiny dynamo still lives in the same house on South Wabash Avenue that she and her late husband bought 70 years ago and is still involved in a range of activities that would exhaust someone half her age.
She was, by occupation, a beautician; but describing her this way is inadequate and misleading, for she was, and is, much more. She was a teacher, a civic, religious and political leader, a businesswoman and executive in a day when there were few women in business or in management positions
–especially black women who were the granddaughters of slaves.
The DuSable Museum of African-American History recently honored her with an exhibit, ”Profiles of a Legend: A Historical Tribute to Marjorie Stewart Joyner,” which recounted her career and achievements through photographs.
And Thursday, as Black History Month begins, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington will unveil an exhibit that features a reconstruction of her first beauty shop.
Everybody who was anybody knew Marjorie Stewart Joyner.
As the premier black hair stylist in the city with a national reputation as the grande dame of black beauty-care instruction, she knew all the celebrities and entertainers who passed through town.
”When Billie Holliday sang in Chicago, Dr. Joyner did her hair. She gave gospel singer Marian Anderson her first haircut,” DuSable`s brochure notes.
(Since 1961, when she received an honorary doctorate from Bethune-Cookman College, everyone has called her Dr. Joyner.)
Dinah Washington, the blues singer, visited in her home. She knows singer Lena Horne. She knew actresses Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers. She knew musicians Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole. She knew actor Eddie Anderson, who played Rochester on the ”Jack Benny Show,” and she knew Benny, too.
She also knew mayors, congressmen and presidents. In 1929, she helped Robert S. Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender, to organize the first Bud Billiken Day Parade, the annual South Side observance that pays tribute to a mythological figure who protects black children; she continues today as director of the parade and as chairwoman of the newspaper`s Chicago Defender Charities.
Her life is a lens that focuses on those momentous days when a new society was emerging in the industrial cities of the North, fueled by an extraordinary exodus of black Americans from the rural South.
Tens of thousands would make their way to Chicago and would establish on the city`s South Side what the ”Almanac of American Politics” calls the nation`s first urban black community–”first in size, first in many ways in importance, first in 20th-Century history.”
It would become the home of the nation`s first black middle class, ”a center of black culture since before the jazz age,” whose black population
–now some 800,000–would become twice the size of New York`s Harlem.
Chicago`s city-within-a-city on the South Side will be commemorated in the Smithsonian`s year-long exhibit, at the National Museum of American History, which is entitled, ”Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration, 1915-1940.” Among the special guests at today`s press preview will be Marjorie Stewart Joyner.
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She opens the front door, then reaches through the steel bars of an outer door and hands a visitor a key ring. This outer door, which is where a screen door customarily goes, resembles the door of a jail cell; it is, of course, for protection.
”It`s the small gold key,” she says, then waits for the visitor to unlock the door`s heavy steel padlock and come inside.
She lives alone, and she is proud of her independence. She has been burglarized, which is why there now are those steel bars at the front door and on some windows, but she doesn`t want to talk about that. She wants to talk about how fine she feels and the good works she`s involved in and how thoughtful and helpful people have been to her.
”The nice part is I can take care of myself,” she says. ”I don`t pick things up, as you can see. But I don`t try.”
It`s true. The first floor is a study in cluttered disarray. A table is buried under a huge, disorderly pile of papers, clippings, pictures and scrapbooks, and there are huge heaps of clothing on her bed in the adjoining bedroom and on various chairs and in various corners of the living room.
Most of it is children`s clothing, which she collects for families in the Robert Taylor Homes.
The walls are covered with plaques, awards, diplomas, citations–she has received more than 300 of them–and with nailheads where some of them once hung. ”The DuSable people and the people from the Smithsonian took some of my things,” she explains, gesturing toward the empty spaces. ”For those exhibitions about me they`re having.”
She looks terrific. Her dark eyes are bright and clear, and there is almost always a twinkle in them. She is obviously vigorous, alert and quite feisty.
”I`ve got a good mind,” she says, responding to a compliment. ”I don`t forget anything. I only need my glasses to read the little print, and I`ve got a right attitude.”
She is wearing a black knit dress, a tan windbreaker and high-topped black slippers. Her skin is brown, and her hair is white, as white as cotton, and very fine, and this morning it is festooned with plastic curlers in pastel blues, yellows and pinks. She has purposely delayed combing it out so that she can demonstrate her technique and give a lecture in hair care to her visitor. But at the moment, she wants to talk about her hopes for better relations between blacks and whites. ”I wish we could get rid of all racial animosity in this city and everywhere,” she says. ”We must love everybody, whether we like it or not. God made all men of one blood, and He wants us to stop this race hatred, or we`ll kill each other.”
She has felt the effects of racism all her life.
”They talk about Rosa Parks having to sit on the back of the bus in Montgomery, Ala. Well, how would you like to ride all night in a baggage car with a corpse?”
She chuckles. ”Now let me tell you what I mean,” she says. ”I was on my way to speak to a group of students in a town called Teague, Tex., and I was catching this train in Dallas. Well, this train didn`t have a Jim Crow car –a Jim Crow car was one of those segregated cars for black people–and they wouldn`t let me on. I told them I had to get on because I was speaking the next day.
”So they told me I could ride in the baggage car. Well, that was all right with me. I sat on some boxes, but when I tried to sleep that night, I got stiff and so I stretched my legs and I hit this box.”
She pauses, cultivating some suspense. ”But it wasn`t just a box. It was a casket.”
She nods and winks and launches into another story. ”I`ve been hungry, and I`ve been turned away so many times from restaurants that didn`t serve black people, even though I could afford it. But I`m a staunch believer in God, and I practice what I preach. There`s not an ounce of hatred or animosity in my heart.”
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She was born in 1896 in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her parents were George Stewart, a school teacher, and Annie Daugherty, whose mother was an African slave and whose father was a white slave owner.
The family moved north across the Mason-Dixon line to Dayton, Ohio, when Marjorie was 6 years old, and when her parents were divorced several years later, she moved to Chicago with her mother, who became a day worker, a maid for white people.
After graduation from Chicago Christian High School, Marjorie decided she wanted to be a hairdresser, and because there were no black beauty schools, she tried to enroll in several white schools. ”One told me they only took Americans, and I said, `I`m an American! I was born in America!` ”
Through persistence, she was accepted at Molar Beauty School, one of the three largest in the city. ”I had the money, so they finally let me in, but I was–what`s that word?” She pauses. ”Token. I was a token.”
While attending beauty school, she was being courted by Dr. Robert Joyner, a young podiatrist, and after receiving her beauty-care diploma in 1916, they were married. Then came a fortuitous mistake.
”I was so eager to show off what I knew to my mother-in-law,” she says, ”but when I washed her hair, it went back.” Which means her hair went back to the tight curls she had before her hair was straightened.
”My mother-in-law said, `Oh, my Lord! You`ve ruined my hair!` The problem was I had only worked on white women`s hair,” she says. ”I didn`t know there was any difference.”
Many black women took pains to straighten their hair. Consciously or unconsciously, it was, probably for the most part, an effort to be assimilated into the dominant culture. Just as most immigrants who come here from non-English speaking countries learn the language and adopt the dress and customs of their new country, many black women wanted to emulate the hair of the white majority.
”Also,” Joyner says, ”our hair was unruly; it`s kinky. It`s so hard to comb and to take care of. It`s funny, though. We wanted our hair to be straight like the white women`s hair, and they wanted their hair to be curly, like ours.”
Her mother-in-law was forgiving and helpful. ”She said she had heard of this black woman who would be teaching how to straighten hair, and she gave me $17 to take the course.”
It would be a turning point for the new bride. The teacher was Madame C.J. Walker, who was then 47 and known as the first black female millionaire. She had been born Sarah McWilliams in 1869 in Louisiana, the daughter of former slaves. She would marry C.J. Walker, adopt his name and develop a process to straighten black hair, using heated metal combs and curling irons and Glossine, an oiling compound she invented.
Joyner finds a 1946 issue of Color magazine and turns to an article about the Walker beauty-care empire headlined ”From Cabin to Castle.” There are photos of the sharecropper`s shack where Madame Walker was born and the mansion she later owned on the Hudson River in New York. There also was a picture of the four-story factory in Indianapolis that made the many Walker products–”The House That Revolutionized Negro Personality.”
”Madame Walker taught me how to press hair,” Joyner says. ”It was amazing for me to see. But then I showed her how to put a marcel curl in it, and that amazed her. `Oh, wouldn`t you like to travel with me?` she said. I told her I couldn`t because I had just gotten married. But later I would.”
First, however, at age 20, she would open her own beauty salon, at 5448 S. State St. It was the beginning. ”Black beauty culture began in the early 1900s as a door-to-door cottage industry,” the DuSable brochure states. ”It grew out of black women`s desire to have economic means and beauty, too,”
Joyner would represent the Madame Walker products and begin teaching black women across the country about hair and beauty care–in homes and beauty salons and schools. Eventually she would teach in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Africa and Europe.
When Madame Walker died in 1919 at age 50, Joyner became vice president and national supervisor for the company`s chain of beauty colleges, starting new schools, training instructors and recruiting and training ”Walker Agents,” some 15,000 women who sold Walker products from their homes or door to door.
”She trained thousands of beauticians and instructors, wrote two books on beauty culture and was one of the authors of Illinois` beauty-culture law, the first in the country,” the DuSable brochure continues. ”She began the first beauty culture classes in vocational high schools throughout the country and created several original hair styles and products. She helped found several national beauty culture organizations.”
In 1929, she moved her salon and the Walker beauty school to the South Center department store at 47th Street and South Park Boulevard (now King Drive), in the heart of the prospering black business community, the first black beauty shop in a department store in Chicago.
She would form a life-long friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune, the famed black educator who founded Bethune-Cookman College, of Daytona Beach, Fla.
They met one Sunday morning in 1918 as they waited their turns to speak at a church service; Joyner would become founder of the Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation and a trustee of the college; over the years she has helped to raise more than $1 million for it, and there is a residence hall on campus that is named for her.
She is a member of the board of the Cosmopolitan Community Church, although many years ago she found herself in hot water with a pastor for being seen one night in a local night club.
During World War II she was honored by the U.S. Treasury Department for her performance in selling war bonds and by the Chicago Commission on National Defense for her efforts as director of a servicemen`s center at 49th Street and Wabash Avenue.
In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named her director of a national Democratic Women`s Campaign Committee, and she traveled widely on behalf of his re-election campaign, often appearing with his wife, Eleanor.
The DuSable exhibit featured photos of her with Chicago Mayors Edward Kelly and Richard Daley and with Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.
In 1954, she took 195 black student-beauticians on a voyage to Paris, where they were taught how to style the hair of white women. The trip, which was covered by Ebony magazine, underscored the discrimination against blacks by white beauty-care businesses.
When she was 77, she earned a bachelor`s degree from Bethune-Cookman College, completing her final 30 hours as a student there.
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She turns the pages of a scrapbook, stopping at a photo of her with a group of black women in a Southern town. ”That was a history-making time,”
she says. ”I traveled all over. There was no radio or TV then, and you sold by personality, word of mouth and foot leather.”
She retired 20 years ago; her husband died 15 years ago, and one of their two daughters is also deceased. She lives close to the financial edge, supported, she says, only by Social Security. ”The Walker company gave me a small pension–it was about $100 a month–but later they took it away from me. ”I never made much money. The most I ever made, I guess, was $100 a month. That was a lot because I was black and because I was a woman and because no one else was making very much then. These days, I don`t have a quarter, but I don`t need a dime. People ask me how I get by and I say, `God is my program.` ”