Wearing your hair natural is a positive statement about who you are. It's not a protest to somebody else. It's affirming you.
If you wear your hair straight or natural, it's all fine with me. It doesn't mean that you aren't politically conscious or that you don't have good thoughts about progress.
There are schools that have rules against afro puffs. They say it's distracting. But nobody is saying that about a little girl who has ponytails.
I've found that once people are introduced to Madam Walker's story, they are inspired but also perplexed about why she was omitted from their history lessons.
There are literally hundreds of stories about women of color that haven't been told that are amazing, fantastic, better than anything else.
We didn't sit around the dining table talking about Madam Walker, but the silverware that we used every day had her monogram on it and our china for special occasions had been Madam Walker's china... and the baby grand piano on which I learned to read music had been in A'Lelia Walker's apartment in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.
Madam Walker's name gets thrown out as either the savior of black women's hair or she's the evil devil.
There are five great ages of man - five moments when you need to reevaluate everything, clear out the cupboard and the wardrobe, and most importantly, your head. They are 13, 20, 30, 40 and 60. All men need to know this.
Only people who live outside cities realize the size of them. London turns out to be huge; there are great swaths, vast panoramas, a whole diaspora I'd never imagined. The place I live in tends to be manageably small, a few familiar journeys and destinations.
The one thing politicians will always vote for is more politics, so in 2000 they invented the post of mayor of London without ever really thinking what it was a mayor would do.
