Bottleneckers. William Mellor
travel for their hairstyling. Melony knew she was on to something. The next step was moving her business outside of her home.111
To work as a hair braider in a salon, Melony needed to earn a license. Regulations required 1,200 hours of classes to obtain a cosmetology license. She had neither the time nor the resources to complete so many hours, but she soon discovered that Mississippi also had a largely moribund “wigology” license that required only three hundred hours of training. None of the training covered braiding, but for Melony it was a less costly means to an end.112 Melony obtained her wigology license and, to prepare herself for her own venture, began working at someone else’s salon on Mondays, when she didn’t conduct her own cosmetology services. This enabled her to work in a salon setting, which otherwise would not have been possible for her. But she soon tired of walking into someone else’s postweekend mess and, with her husband’s expertise in construction, started her own salon at a small shop where she also sold natural hair products. She named her business Naturally Speaking and steadily built up a clientele.113
Opening her own business was an important first step, but Melony wanted to do more. She felt she had a calling to teach other women not only about the hair-braiding trade but also about how to run a business, so that they could take what they learned from her and go out and support themselves. But, as she quickly realized, to fulfill that calling would require a battle with the bottleneckers.114 Before allowing her to teach others how to braid hair, the state cosmetology board required that Melony obtain a cosmetology license, then a cosmetology instructor’s license (another two thousand hours of class), and finally a school license—none of which would actually teach her anything about braiding. Paradoxically, the state awarded cosmetology instructors who had no experience in braiding licenses to teach braiding, even as it forbade experienced braiders from teaching their craft—unless they were willing to sacrifice three years and thousands of dollars to take a class teaching unrelated skills to earn the license. The result was that students of braiding had no skilled and legal instructors from whom to learn.115
For Melony, the injustice was too much. On August 5, 2004, she sued the state of Mississippi to free hair braiding from the cosmetology stranglehold. To protect its bottleneck, the state board introduced a bill in the 2005 legislative session designed to encompass hair braiding under the cosmetology law. Melony responded quickly, finding a sponsor for a bill of her own to exempt braiders from cosmetology regulations. The fight was on.
Throughout the first months of 2005, Melony made weekly seven-hour round-trips to the state capital of Jackson to convince legislators to change the law. She also organized potential braiders to contact lawmakers, responded to opposition from traditional cosmetologists, and engaged in other grassroots efforts, all of which meant spending countless hours away from her family and her business.116
In response, the bottleneckers flooded the capitol building, lobbying legislators aggressively for their cause. “The cosmetology industry is very powerful in this state, and they dictated the policy when it came to that industry,” explained Senator Hillman Frazier.117
“Literally for, I’m going to say, at least a week, maybe 10 days of that 90-day session, the Capitol was consumed by cosmetologists,” recalled Representative Steve Holland.118
And it was not just fully licensed cosmetologists; cosmetology students, too, were among the crowd, sent there by their schools. “Cosmetology students . . . were actually told, ‘In order to receive your hours for today, be at the Capitol.’ Some of them had no idea why they were even there,” Melony reported.119
The showdown finally occurred in a hearing before the House Public Health and Human Services Committee, chaired by Representative Holland, in which the cosmetologists’ bill to regulate hair braiders was considered. “I bet a thousand cosmetologists showed up, and they were not nice, let’s just leave it at that,” said Holland.120 Committee members heard all interested parties throughout the contentious meeting, but it became clear that the need to regulate hair braiders as cosmetologists was illusory. Instead, the bottleneckers were working to maintain their monopoly on hair care. Nevertheless, pressure on Holland to pass the bill out of committee continued.
“In the end, the Senate chairman even came down pretty hard on me,” remembered Holland, who then said,
Look, it’s just real simple, I do not give a damn whether there is a cosmetology law in the state of Mississippi or not, so don’t you come back to my office. It is over, do you understand? I will not put braiding in the law.121
And that was the end of it.
Meanwhile, Melony’s bill made it through the House but ran into trouble in the Senate, where the Public Health Committee voted almost along racial lines to maintain the licensing requirement for braiding. Most of the committee’s white senators voted to sustain the license.122 The only crossover was one white senator, Hob Bryan, who voted with the five black senators to deregulate braiding. The bill was eventually sent to a conference committee, and on April 19, 2005, all of Melony’s efforts paid off: Mississippi governor Haley Barbour signed legislation enabling hair braiders to practice their occupation without being required to take 1,200 hours of class to get a cosmetology license or 300 hours of class to get a wigology license. Currently, the only requirements are that hair braiders pay a small fee to register with the state and abide by all relevant health and hygiene codes.123
It is the latter requirement, in fact, that represents the one thing all parties have agreed on—at least rhetorically—during the decades-long hair wars. When Taalib’s story made national news on ABC’s 20/20, William Raspberry asked, “Why couldn’t [the cosmetology board] just make sure the place was kept safe, clean and sanitary for its customers?”124 In response, Taalib agreed: “I don’t have any problem with government wanting to protect public health and safety.”125 And when Dr. Cornwell sued the state of California, she argued from the beginning that braiding salons should be subject to applicable health standards,126 something even many braiders believe might be justified to include in mandatory training.127
Courts have come to the same conclusion. In April 2005, Lillian Anderson, an immigrant from Cameroon, sued the state of Minnesota over its requirement that braiders earn a cosmetology license to practice. Lillian first learned to braid in a local school in Buea, Cameroon. When she was a teenager, Lillian and her two sisters would sit in a circle and braid one another’s hair to practice their skills.128 After arriving in the United States in 1993, Lillian began braiding to support herself. By 1998, she was operating her own salon that served a loyal clientele of men and women of all races.129 But in doing so without a license, she was subject to up to $1,000 in fines and ninety days in jail, not to mention the stigma associated with breaking the law.130
It was the latter she found most vexing. She wanted to make an honest living, but she simply could not agree to complete irrelevant training. “Why should I have to pay when they don’t even teach this craft?” asked Lillian. “I learned everything I know as a little girl, sitting with my sisters, braiding in a circle.”131 In a judgment made on June 6, 2005, Judge Isabel Gomez vindicated her. In the thirty-two-page decree, the judge described in detail the content of cosmetology schooling and noted that none of it included training related to hair braiding. She also noted that if at some point in the future the state board were to enact genuine health and safety standards relevant to braiders, the court would deem these appropriate.132
Although leaders in the cosmetology industry similarly point to a need for training to protect public health and safety, they do so for strategic reasons. As Judge Brewster’s ruling illustrates, courts evaluate laws such as these based, in part, on intention and effect. Laws that are intended to protect public health and safety, and that are successful in doing so, are often upheld. On the other hand, laws whose primary purpose is or appears to be using state power for the purpose of giving one group an economic advantage are more likely to be struck down.
To fulfill the court’s criteria, industry leaders justify training requirements by rolling out the aforementioned parade of horribles. Where cosmetology bottleneckers diverge from others