08/27/2026
BLACK HISTORY STORIES ON NOMSA https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1061552216585530&set=a.385531067520985
A Harlem teenager told her mother she was never straightening her hair again, so her mother sent for a war veteran to talk sense into her. Nomsa Brath told him the same thing. Sixty years later she had forced New York City to close schools full of asbestos, a senator had called her the original whistleblower, and she still would not call herself a fighter until she had survived several strokes. You have seen the picture, and nobody ever told you the name.
There is a photograph in the National Gallery of Art in Washington of a young Black woman wearing a pair of enormous earrings.
The museum catalogues it under her name and the name of the woman who designed the earrings. Almost nobody who walks past it knows either one.
Her name is Nomsa Brath, and before she ever stood in front of a camera she stood in a kitchen in Harlem and told her mother no.
She was born Helene White on March 15, 1942, to Hurline and James Foster White, and somewhere in her teens she announced in that kitchen that she was not going to straighten her hair anymore.
Her mother did not argue with her. Her mother did something more effective, which was to send for a man.
Harry was a war veteran, and the theory was that he would talk some sense into the girl.
He sat down with her. She told him exactly what she had told her mother.
One teenager in a Harlem apartment, refusing twice in one afternoon, with no organization behind her and no word yet for what she was doing.
What came out of it is a phrase you have said out loud, a movement you have seen in a hundred photographs, and a fight that reached the New York City Board of Education and the front page of four newspapers. What it cost everybody else was on display every August 17 in Harlem, on Marcus Garvey Day.
Since 1942 the celebration had carried a Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest, run out of the Garveyite tradition that Carlos Cooks kept alive after Garvey's death.
The rules were not like any beauty contest in America. Contestants came with no makeup at all.
They had to wash every chemical out of their hair so it stood in its own texture. Then they were asked questions about racial history and about their own people, and they were judged on the answers.
In 1961 a young woman named Clara Lewis won it.
The prize was one hundred dollars, handed over at the next Sunday night meeting.
When she came to collect it, her hair was straightened again.
She was not ashamed of the crown. She simply did not believe she could walk into a school or a job the way she had walked across that stage.
She was not the first winner to do it, and the men from a Harlem arts collective called the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios had been watching it happen for years.
A woman would stand up in front of her own community, dark and natural and applauded, and within days the pressing comb would come back out, because her rent did not care about the crown.
A hundred dollars, one week, and a comb.
In the fall of 1961 AJASS stopped watching.
Elombe Brath and the men around him went looking for women who would keep their hair natural not for one night but permanently, in public, in front of employers who could fire them for it and legally would.
They were not looking for models, because there were no models to find. They were looking for teachers and mothers and organizers from the neighborhood who already believed it.
Nomsa Brath was nineteen years old and she had been saying it since she was a girl.
A young model and drummer named Jimmy Abu volunteered to teach them how to walk. There is a photograph of him doing it in Elombe Brath and Kwame Brathwaite's own apartment, because that is where the rehearsals happened.
They took a name from Grandassaland, the word Carlos Cooks used for the African continent, and became the Grandassa Models.
The first eight were Clara Lewis, Black Rose, Nomsa Brath, Priscilla Bardonille, Mari Toussaint, Esther Davenport, Wanda Sims and Beatrice Cramston.
The show they built had a title so long it reads today like a mission statement, which is exactly what it was.
Naturally '62: The Original African Coiffure and Fashion Extravaganza Designed to Restore Our Racial Pride and Standards.
On January 28, 1962, in a basement room at the Purple Manor on East 125th Street, the actor Gus Williams opened the night by reciting Marcus Garvey's poem "Black Woman" while the eight women came out behind him.
Abbey Lincoln sang and worked the microphone as commentator. Max Roach played.
African dancers performed, and the club's own house band held the room.
The Grandassa Models came across a makeshift catwalk in dresses and skirts and blouses cut from fabrics with heavy, intricate prints.
Large hoop earrings and chunky bracelets, kitten-heeled mules and sandals.
Every single piece of that was a sentence, and every person in that basement could read it.
The room filled past capacity. People who could not get in stayed out on 125th Street in January and would not go home.
When the show ended and the organizers looked outside, the crowd was still standing there.
So they cleaned the room and ran the entire show again the same day. Bob Gumbs, who was in it, said afterward that they had never planned a second show, and that from there history was made.
Harlem did not agree with itself about that show. Some of the neighborhood's own beauticians were angry, and said openly that if natural hair caught on it would take a great deal of business away from them.
They were not wrong about the money. Straightening was a livelihood, and Black women's hair was one of the few things in that economy that Black women themselves owned.
And the models paid for it. Bob Gumbs put it plainly decades later, saying that many of them lost their jobs, because there were no laws that protected them.
No federal law in 1962 stopped an employer from firing a Black woman over the hair growing out of her own head.
So they employed themselves. They sewed their own garments, and they made their own accessories and jewelry, and they sold them.
Black Rose said they were able to employ themselves and manufacture for themselves.
That is what the earrings on that catwalk actually were. Not a look, and not a vibe, but the output of women who had been put out of work for their hair and went into business rather than take it back.
By the summer of 1963 the argument had moved onto the sidewalk.
A white-owned shop called Wigs Parisian opened on 125th Street near the Apollo Theater, selling straight-haired wigs to Black women. Organizers heard that two white men intended to sell Black women a dream of European beauty, and they set up a picket.
Nomsa Brath walked that line in a cropped Afro and heels, carrying an A-frame sign that read Natural Yes, Wigs No.
Behind her, another woman's sign read, Don't Be a Jackass Be Natural.
And on the same block, Black women picketed against the picket.
Their signs said Beauty Is Personal, Decide for Yourself. One of them read, if it looks good wear it, try a wig and see.
Two lines of Black women on one Harlem sidewalk, arguing about who got to decide what a Black woman's own head was for.
The counter-protest did not last long, and the shop eventually closed.
But whatever else that week was, it was not a community peacefully discovering pride together, and anybody who tells it that way is selling you something.
The man photographing it was Kwame Brathwaite, twenty-five, working a medium-format Hasselblad. He was not press, he was one of the organizers with a camera.
He had spent years in a small darkroom working out how to expose and develop film so dark skin came out rich instead of lost, and he put his hands into the chemicals so many thousand times that the ridges of his fingertips wore smooth.
Within a few months of that picket line, Nomsa Brath was walking a runway inside Stern's department store in Congolese fabrics, with Brathwaite's camera on her again.
Her face had already gone onto the cover of Lou Donaldson's 1962 album The Natural Soul, and it went onto more jazz sleeves after that, and onto magazine covers in Britain, Nigeria and what was then Rhodesia.
Then the phrase went out on its own.
Black is Beautiful got printed on posters and T-shirts. It sold hair products, liquor and ci******es.
It became a thing everybody said and nobody had to have earned.
And the woman in the photographs went and did something else entirely.
Nomsa Brath was raising six children, and roughly one in five New York City school buildings contained asbestos.
She did not write a letter about it. She went and learned the material, the exposure pathways, and the risk of mesothelioma in small children, and then she took it to the superintendent and did not leave.
She pushed to close the buildings. She pushed to have children bused to schools that were clean.
She appeared at congressional hearings and at Senate hearings.
Senator Claiborne Pell called her the original whistleblower.
She became national spokesperson for Partners for Reform in Science and Math. The United Federation of Teachers credited her with saving lives by forcing the Board of Education to accept research it did not want, which closed schools and got others rebuilt.
She pulled her own fifth child out of that school system and taught him at home. He went back in, scored very high on the SAT and got into Bronx High School of Science.
She homeschooled the sixth as well, and then taught neighborhood children for free.
In April 1989, five other people's children were arrested in Harlem.
Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson and Yusef Salaam were fifteen. Raymond Santana was fourteen and Korey Wise was sixteen.
They were held for hours before anyone called their parents, and were worked over by homicide detectives until statements came out that contradicted each other, the DNA and every eyewitness.
New York wanted a conviction fast. In May 1989 a real estate developer named Donald Trump paid for full-page ads in the Times, the Daily News, the Post and Newsday under the headline Bring Back The Death Penalty.
Nomsa Brath founded a group called Mother Love, mothers and women organizers who said in public that the boys were innocent while almost nobody else would.
They ran a press campaign. Her husband put it on television and radio.
The five served their sentences in full, between six and thirteen years, before another man confessed in 2002 and the DNA matched him.
Her own paper wrote later that her role in that case is still understated, and that she did not care, because what she wanted was the boys exonerated and paid.
That is the same answer she gave her mother in the kitchen, thirty years apart.
A stroke in 2008 took her activism and her painting away from her.
Elombe Brath died on May 19, 2014, after fifty years of marriage. Kwame Brathwaite's first museum retrospective did not open until 2019, when he was eighty-one, and he died on April 1, 2023.
At her eightieth birthday in 2022, Nomsa Brath laughed that she had not expected to still be here.
Her obituary says that only after several strokes and multiple aneurysms did she finally accept that she was a fighter for civil and human rights.
She had been one since she was a teenager and she would not say the words for sixty years.
She died on October 30, 2023, at eighty-one.
On April 6, 2026, a resolution honoring the Grandassa Models was introduced in the House of Representatives. It went to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and that is where it is sitting.
Thirty states now ban hair discrimination. The federal bill was introduced in both chambers in February 2025 and has never been given a vote.
So the next time one of these photographs comes across your feed under a caption about timeless style and effortless beauty, you know what is actually in the frame.
You are looking at a uniform. You are looking at eight names that belong under that picture and are almost never there.
Clara Lewis, Black Rose, Nomsa Brath, Priscilla Bardonille, Mari Toussaint, Esther Davenport, Wanda Sims, Beatrice Cramston.
Put the names back before you press share. That is the whole ask, and it takes eleven seconds.
Because the photograph of those earrings hangs in the National Gallery of Art now, and the woman wearing them shut down poisoned schools and stood between five children and a city that had already made up its mind.
And she started with none of that.
She started in a kitchen in Harlem, a girl telling her mother she was not straightening her hair anymore, and then telling the man they sent for the same thing, and never once taking it back.
Sources for this piece include the New York Amsterdam News obituary of Helene Nomsa Brath published November 7, 2023 by Herb Boyd and Cinque Brath; Tanisha C. Ford's reporting and interviews with Kwame Brathwaite for Aperture magazine and for the book Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful published by Aperture in 2019; Los Angeles Times coverage of the 1963 Wigs Parisian protest photograph; interviews with original Grandassa Models Black Rose and Barbara Adzua Solomon and with AJASS founding member Bob Gumbs published by Our Time Press and the Center for Brooklyn History; the firsthand AJASS account of the 1961 Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest; collection records at the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of African American History and Culture; the Manhattan Community Board 10 resolution on the Exonerated Five; House Resolution 1154 of the 119th Congress introduced April 6, 2026; and Economic Policy Institute reporting on the current status of CROWN Act legislation.
NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about the Grandassa Models and the origins of the Black is Beautiful movement, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.
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