The headwrap has undergone several iterations throughout American history. As a descendant of the cloths that adorned the heads of women in ancient Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa, it’s come to represent the cultural and historical lineage black Americans have maintained with the African continent. It’s also become a powerful shorthand for the kind of beauty that has been pitted as the antithesis of white femininity.
Initially, the headwrap wasn’t intended to be an expression of black resistance or beauty. Like an offensive slur birthed in racism and white supremacy, it was appropriated by the very black people whose humanity it sought to undermine. In her article “The African American Woman’s Headwrap: Unwinding the Symbols,” historian Helen Bradley Gabriel explains that both the symbolism and functions of the headwrap “acquired a paradox of meaning” that could have been created only in “the crucible of American slavery and its aftermath.” By looking at testimonials from slaves during that period, Griebel concludes that, while the headwrap adopted different meanings and purposes throughout time, it was ultimately the descendants of slaves who determined its significance and usage for future generations.
Before the American Revolution, European colonies enacted laws to distinguish African slaves from their burgeoning white populations. The purpose of this legislation was to entrench the superiority of Europeans and an economic system that exploited the labor of African slaves. Under British rule, South Carolina passed the Negro Act of 1735, which provided stipulations on the type of clothing black people were allowed to wear, outlawing anything more extravagant than “Negro cloth, duffels, kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen or coarse garlix, or calicoes, checked cottons, or Scotch plaids.” Governor Esteban Rodriguez Miró of Louisiana, which was still a Spanish colony, passed the “Edict of Good Government,” which required black women to wear “their hair bound in a kerchief” or a “tignon.” Additionally, black women were prevented from wearing the same “jewelry or plumes” as women of European descent.