Marjorie Stewart Joyner

1896 -1994   A true pillar of her Chicago South Side community, Marjorie Stewart Joyner affected the lives of many African Americans with her altruistic endeavors for most of her ninety-eight years. She worked with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to combat racial segregation and discrimination. Perhaps most famously, she was an important figure in the history of African American beauty culture and the inventor of a permanent-wave machine.

Joyner was born Marjorie Stewart in Virginia, the granddaughter of slaves. She grew up in poverty--only four of the thirteen Stewart children survived infancy.  Her father was a schoolteacher who had worked with the famous African American educator Booker T. Washington. The family moved to Dayton, Ohio, in 1904, where Joyner's father landed a teaching job in a white school. Becoming the first African American graduate of Chicago's A.B. Molar Beauty School, Joyner opened a salon of her own in 1916. Her first customers were white, but the turning point of her career came when she enrolled in a hair-styling class with Madame C. J. Walker.

Walker quickly recognized her student's intelligence and energy and signed her on as an instructor and agent. Joyner helped Walker spread her methods and products across the Midwest, and was instrumental in the Walker Company's rapid growth. By the time of Walker's death in 1919, Joyner was a national supervisor for more than 200 Madame C. J. Walker beauty schools. She helped write Illinois' first cosmetology laws in 1924, and four years later registered a patent on a permanent wave machine, a device that automated parts of Walker's hair straightening procedure. A noted hair stylist herself, Joyner did styling work for such African American celebrities as Billie Holliday, Ethel Waters, and opera star Marian Anderson.

Joyner remained with the Walker firm for more than fifty years, and always credited her hair styling experience with developing her imagination and her problem-solving abilities. She developed a host of other products, including the "Satin Tress" preparation, the predecessor of relaxerers. Later in life she broadened the scope of her energies to include more community-oriented and philanthropic endeavors.

Marjorie Stewart Joyner died of heart failure in Chicago  December 27, 1994, at the age of ninety-eight. Until her death she went every day to her office, and every Sunday to the Cosmopolitan Community Church, which she had helped to found. The Chicago Tribune noted that she had "touched the lives of millions of African Americans."