# Majestie Varnado: 2023 Junior Fellows Program Display Day

Heavy is the Hair: Evolution of African Hair in America from the 17th c. to the 20th c. is a curatorial guide to African haircare/hairstyling in the Americas over the course of 400 years. This guide will chronicle the ways in which Africans adapted hair expression amidst legal and discriminatory policing, barriers to haircare products and tools, assimilation, and resistance. This guide is intended to benefit creatives in media, historians, and individuals with an interest in Black hair by creating a more robust understanding of African-American hair throughout 400 years of history. 2023 CCDI Junior Fellow Majestie Varnado incorporated materials from LOC digital collections including the "Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs, the Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers" Project collection, the African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition collection, and the Images of African American Slavery and Freedom collection - as well as other items found throughout the library, the American Folklife center, and more. This project intended to help create a timeline of Black hairstyling and haircare while investigating the perspectives of African-American hair history available in tandem with perspectives not included or lost to time. African-American hair has historically been a topic of political and cultural intrigue, and this project examined the ways in which scholarship and anecdotal history collide.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2023
- By: Library Of Congress
- Archive: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2025661481/)
- Licence or status: Rights statement at the Library of Congress (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Library of Congress
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/loc/2025661481?play=1)