Community organizers seeking to ban hair discrimination in West Virginia are continuing to make progress at the local level after the Charleston City Council’s unanimous approval the CROWN Act ordinance.
The council’s vote Monday will amend the city’s Human Rights code section to include protection for protective hairstyles, such as braids, locks or twists. The new code section will prevent employers, businesses, realtors, agencies, organizations, etc., from firing, denying services or discriminating against people solely for their hairstyle or hair texture.
In West Virginia, the CROWN Act movement — which stands for “Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair” — started about an hour’s drive from Charleston. In December 2019, a Woodrow Wilson High School basketball coach told a freshman player, Matthew Moore, 14, that his dreadlocks were not “neat” enough and needed to be cut off. Moore told a local reporter that, by the team’s second game, he was sitting in the locker room pulling out his own hair.
So, on Monday, Tiffany Wesley-Plear — who resigned as a City Council member during the meeting after accepting a job with the state — asked the council to pass the bill on behalf of community members facing similar threats.
“I’ve received phone calls, I’ve received text messages. In particular, a gentleman that works at a hospital sent me a text message to say, ‘I’m in fear of losing my job that I’ve been at, and I’m very good at, because of the texture of my hair and the way I choose to wear my natural hair,’” she said.
The former West Side council member said in a previous interview that, unless you personally deal with this issue, it can be hard to wrap your head around what exactly the problem is. Just know, Wesley-Plear said, that her teenage daughter has never even seen Wesley-Plear’s natural hair. That alone shows the importance of letting people wear their hair how they choose, she said.
“Whether my hair is locked, braided, twisted, puffed, in an afro, any of those textured styles, it doesn’t make me unprofessional … it doesn’t change my qualifications,” she said.
The CROWN Act protects all people from hair discrimination, but data shows that this problem disproportionately affects Black people, and primarily Black women.
“There’s no reason we should be in fear of or concerned about the way my hair grows out of my head,” Wesley-Plear said.
Charkera Ervin, a community organizer in Mercer County, is one of the original drivers behind West Virginia’s CROWN Act movement. After Moore’s incident in Beckley, Ervin and other activists turned to the West Virginia Legislature for a statewide fix. Supporters drafted a bill and turned to lawmakers to ensure it got to the governor’s desk.
In the 2020 session, it was Sen. Mike Azinger, R-Wood, who told Moore’s mother that she was trying to “undercut authority” and trying to pick the rules for herself. A Republican-led committee killed the bill. This past session, it was Sen. Rollan Roberts, R-Raleigh, who killed the bill. He said CROWN Act supporters were “narrow-minded” and were disrespectful during phone calls. Roberts said they also should educate themselves on the time-consuming bill-vetting process, even though the bill was two sentences long.
So Ervin and company decided to hit the road this summer, speaking to local officials across West Virginia about the importance of protecting their constituents from hair discrimination.
“The importance of us doing it at the local level is that, you know, people on the local level can be so much more reasonable,” she said. “Obviously, everything at the Statehouse gets politicized.”
Hair has not been politicized thus far in Morgantown, which adopted a CROWN Act ordinance April 20, or in Beckley, where a bill passed into law last month. Charleston was the third city to adopt the bill’s language.
Jennifer Wells, a community activist in Cabell County, said the work is ongoing to adopt the ordinance in Huntington. Organizers began working in West Virginia cities with sizable Black populations where there already was an understanding of the issue, she said, so people uninformed of the problems created by hair discrimination could hear them directly from neighbors.
Wells said city officials, community members in the local NAACP chapter, Pride organization, Marshall University and other groups have come together to raise awareness of the CROWN Act.
“We just sat down and said, ‘This is a real issue. We need to at least solve it on the books so that we can begin to build [the reputation] that Huntington is a welcome-for-all community and city,’” Wells said.
The long-held stereotype that Black hair is not professional creates both subtle and overt racism in the workplace, Wells said.
“People are given a certain perspective about certain hairstyles or hairdos, and they’re able to use that as a means to deny an economic pathway for folks,” she said. “The education piece around this issue is opening eyes. Folks that, again, through no harm or fault of their own, just didn’t really have to consider hair as a problem, and are now getting to understand the breadth of discrimination and how deep it goes.”
Repeated heating and chemical treatment, as required to straighten hair, can create significant health problems, a 2019 study showed. Cancer rates in people who used these products were notably higher for Black women.
Delegate Danielle Walker, D-Monogalia, has introduced the CROWN Act in the Legislature in the previous two sessions. Serving as West Virginia’s only Black female lawmaker, Walker said to expect the bill back as many times as it takes.
“The CROWN Act will be introduced every year until it is passed in the state of West Virginia,” Walker said. “It is a real discrimination that many West Virginians face each and every day.”
Walker said she was “really, really disgruntled” by Roberts’ explanation for killing the bill.
But if Roberts did do one thing for people, Wells said, he lit a fire underneath those not so familiar with the policy process but outraged by the bill’s demise.
“Folks are not always aware of how policy is passed, or how policy moves,” Wells said. “And when [Roberts] blocks something as simple as this, we’re able to show this is how they work when they really don’t want something that benefits you as a community or as an organizer to pass.”
Ervin said the CROWN Act has brought a lot of people together in the past few months. Those conversations often showed people can be fighting the same battles, and they don’t know they’re not alone.
“When you get people together in a room, and they’re talking about grievances, it kind of opens up the door for other people to tell their story,” Ervin said. “There was this sort of effect where people were experiencing hair discrimination, and you could not — no one else knew anybody else was going through it.”
The work to protect against hair discrimination will continue at the local level until things change at the state level, Ervin said.
Walker called on state lawmakers to stop dismissing people’s concerns.
“Let us finally have peace with our hair,” Walker said, “because it is a big deal.”
