Style's Substance

Hair apparent: "It was upon the people within the community to fill voids," says Randleman, pictured in front of her museum's Walker exhibit.
Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Combing through history at the Philadelphia Beauty Showcase.

by Brian Howard

"If you go back far enough, just about everybody will be able to tell you that somebody, somewhere [in their family], did some hair," says Shirley Randleman. To the director of the Philadelphia Beauty Showcase, a quirky museum of barbering which opened in 2000 on 52nd Street, "hair is hair," but hairstyling is history.

The two-floor Beauty Showcase, situated in the hull of an abandoned candy factory, is packed with artifacts. Walking through the modest storefront/gift shop, visitors are greeted by a display detailing the gruesome history of the barber pole, accompanied by Randleman's enthusiastic explanation of its origins (which harken back to the days of "barber-surgeons"). There's an antique child's barber chair with a miniature carousel horse head; a barber's chart adopted by the U.S. Army when it needed to start coiffing African-Americans; metal tongs with cloth-insulated handles, which were heated to straighten hair; and the salon setup of a woman who did hair until she was 92, complete with still-operational dryers.

The walls are crammed with homages to Philadelphia hair icons past and present, from Gertrude Skidmore (who ran a school at 57th and Girard streets) to Berniece Calvin (who runs The Big Show Expo, a beauty trade show). But it's the first floor's back room, a small exhibit dedicated to Madame C.J. Walker, aka Sarah Breedlove, that makes Randleman beam. Walker, who became America's first African-American woman millionaire in the early 20th century, developed and marketed her own line of beauty products. The Walker System included a hair softener and a straightening comb.

"What Madame C.J. Walker represents," explains Randleman, is "a woman who was the daughter of ex-slaves, former slaves, who with $1.50 was able to transform that into millions."

And it's with Walker that we begin to understand what Randleman and her barber husband, Paul, see as their donation-founded and -funded museum's raison d'etre. Beauty runs more than skin deep. Styles and trends, especially within the African-American community, are barometers.

In Walker's time, with slavery all-too-near in the rear view, "we were not marketed to," says Randleman. "It was upon the people within the community to fill voids. And Madame C.J. Walker, as with many men and women of that era, were basically doing day work, menial tasks, and they wanted to have a better quality of life."

For some, that involved exerting new freedoms to express pride in appearance; for others, like Walker, it meant seizing a slice of the previously unattainable American dream.

Walker's legacy — which will be celebrated as part of the Beauty Showcase's hall of fame awards ceremony this weekend — serves as a springboard to the museum's second floor, part art gallery, part cultural study. There are African masks, wood carvings and a sculpture of afro picks — a winking nod to Willie Morrow, inventor of California Curl (later bought by Jheri Redding).

The weekend's festivities will include the unveiling of a new exhibit, curated by local artist Elaine Johnson-Spivey, composed of storyboards depicting the oral and pictographic histories of some of Philadelphia's enduring barbershops and beauty suppliers, including Mount Airy's House of Combs, Germantown's Aiken's Barbershop, Henry "Sly" Schley's Strawberry Mansion Sly's Processing Barber Shop and the shop of Thomas H. Montgomery, father of singer Tammi Terrell and brother/manager of boxer Robert "Bobcat" Montgomery.

Johnson-Spivey, herself a licensed cosmetology teacher, found that these places were magnets for "entertainers, boxers and luminaries," essentially places where history regularly strolled through the door.

This weekend, that hidden history will be given its due. Along with the awards ceremony on Sunday (4:30 p.m. at the City Line Holiday Inn, honoring Walker, Calvin, George Aiken and others; $60 donation), the Beauty Showcase will hold a VIP reception and book signing (June 25, 5-9 p.m.) by Walker's great-granddaughter A'Lelia Bundles, who has penned the Walker bio, On Her Own Ground, as well as an appearance by Charlie G. Haynes, author and proprietor of Reading's Charlie Haynes Barber School.

For Randleman, who can trace her own history through hairstyles — she admits that wearing her hair straight in the 1950s and 1960s helped her gain positions as the first African-American in numerous companies ("I can't tell you how many firsts"), and her decision to go natural in the late '60s brought countless sidelong looks on her way to work at a Northeast bolt and screw company — the weekend's events are something of a dream fulfilled.

"It's all about preserving their history and the history," she beams. "That's what we're saying about these hidden gems."

Philadelphia Beauty Showcase, 510-514 S. 52nd St., 215-474-7533.