Abstract
Chicago, early 1920s: African American businessman Mason Pryor places an advertisement in the national weekly, The Defender. Pryor was providing services that he believed would attract black city-dwellers, particularly those who had recently migrated to Chicago’s “Bronzeville” district, of which he was a resident. The text was simple and direct. Amid the clutter of print advertisements that hawked skin lightening creams, race records, and cheap household furnishings, Pryor offered concise, understated assurances to The Defender’s readers:
Good news for all men. Simply wash the hair. Oh boy. Dr. Pryor’s Japo Wonder Soap is the only preparation on the market that will straighten the hair without turning it red or injuring the scalp. The latest scientific discovery. Will not give the hard, porcupine effect, but makes the hair soft and wavy.1
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Notes
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1945) 477.
Milton Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977).
Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970) 175.
Hans Baer, Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984) 18.
George McCall, “Symbiosis: The Case of Hoodoo and the Numbers Racket,” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of African American Folklore edited by Alan Dundes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981) 419–27.
Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York, E.P. Dutton, 1940) 106
On the rise of Conjure in the context of black culture history, see Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: African American Religion and the Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, from Bondage to Freedom (Milwaukee, WI: Southside Printing Company, 1897) 108.
William Wells Brown, My Southern Home, or, the South and its People (Boston, MA: A.G. Brown and Co, 1880) 70
James Breeden, ed., Advice Among Masters: The Ideal of Slave Management in the Old South (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980) 170.
See Chireau, Black Magic; see also Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
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© 2006 Gayle T. Tate and Lewis A. Randolph
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Chireau, Y.P. (2006). Varieties of Spiritual Experience: Magic, Occultism, and Alternative Supernatural Traditions among African Americans in the Cities, 1915–39. In: The Black Urban Community. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73572-3_11
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