Painting of a person standing straight on with a full rounded Afro and a patterned wax print shirt, against a flat marigold background.
The Black Is Beautiful movement was a deliberate 1960s campaign, run first through fashion shows and photography out of Harlem, that rejected the idea that lighter skin, straightened hair and European features were the measure of Black beauty. It did not start as a slogan somebody coined in a meeting. It started as a fashion show in a basement club, staged by a photographer and a modeling collective who had gotten tired of watching Black women get edited out of their own magazines. From there the idea moved through record covers, museum retrospectives, and eventually into how painters approach the Black figure at all.
This history gets flattened a lot. People treat "Black is beautiful" like a phrase that just floated into the culture sometime in the 1960s, decorative and a little vague. It wasn't vague. It was aimed at specific industries, specific magazines and a specific visual habit, and the people who built it left records of exactly what they were responding to.
What was the Black Is Beautiful movement, exactly?
At its center, the movement was a rejection of a beauty standard that had money behind it. Skin lighteners and hair straighteners weren't fringe products. They were a real industry, advertised for decades in Black newspapers and magazines, selling the idea that lighter and straighter got you further in a segregated country. Photographer Kwame Brathwaite and the collective he helped build, the African Jazz Art Society and Studios, decided the fix wasn't a slogan. It was a picture. If magazines wouldn't show dark skin and natural hair as beautiful, they'd build their own shows, their own models and their own cameras, and do it themselves.
Brathwaite put it plainly later in life. "There was lots of controversy because we were protesting how, in Ebony magazine, you couldn't find an ebony girl," he said, describing the specific gap the Grandassa Models were built to fill, according to Aperture's feature on Brathwaite's photographs of the movement. That's a narrow, checkable complaint about one publication's casting habits, not a mood. It's also why photography, not painting or poetry, ended up being the primary tool here. The argument was literally about who got to appear in pictures, and how.
When did the movement actually begin?
The commonly cited starting point is January 28, 1962, when the Grandassa Models staged "Naturally '62: The Original African Coiffure and Fashion Extravaganza Designed to Restore Our Racial Pride and Standards" at the Purple Manor in Harlem. The show sold out, and a second show ran that same night to handle the overflow crowd. It was organized under the African Jazz Art Society and Studios, known as AJASS, a Harlem collective of artists, designers and musicians that Brathwaite had founded with his brother Elombe Brath. The Grandassa Models, a collective of Black women modeling natural hair and dark skin on their own terms, grew directly out of that first show, according to the Studio Museum in Harlem's page on Brathwaite.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Harlem in the early 1960s had a dense overlap of jazz musicians, playwrights and visual artists, and AJASS sat right in the middle of it. Brathwaite photographed Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln backstage the same way he photographed the models on stage. The line between documenting a scene and building a movement got thin fast.
Who was Kwame Brathwaite, and why does his camera matter here?
Brathwaite spent more than six decades photographing Black musicians, models and public figures. He started young, after encountering images from Emmett Till's funeral as a teenager, an experience the Studio Museum's biography of him credits with pushing him toward photography as a form of witness. He went on to shoot concert work for James Brown and Miles Davis, but the AJASS fashion photography is what carried the political weight. He also developed darkroom techniques built specifically to render dark skin with real detail and depth, instead of the flattened, underexposed look it usually got in commercial photography of the era, per Aperture's account of his archive.
For decades Brathwaite worked without much recognition outside the communities he actually photographed. That changed in 2019, when Aperture published his first monograph, written by Tanisha C. Ford, under the title "Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite," and mounted a traveling exhibition under the same name, described as "the first ever dedicated to Brathwaite's remarkable career," according to Aperture's exhibition record. He died in April 2023, at eighty five, having lived to see a good part of that reassessment happen, according to Aperture's remembrance of him. The book and exhibition reframed him as a central figure of what's sometimes called the second Harlem Renaissance, not a footnote to it. If you want to see how that first Renaissance still gets handled in paint rather than in a photo archive, our collection of work from the Harlem Renaissance art movement is where to look.
Did "Black is beautiful" exist before the 1960s?
Some version of the idea did, though the record is messier than people want it to be. Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association spent the 1920s building what one historian's overview calls a "gospel of racial pride," countering the message that Black features and Black achievement were somehow lesser. Garvey has been described as "the progenitor of the modern 'black is beautiful' ideal" for exactly that reason, according to UCLA's overview of Garvey's movement. That's a real, documented throughline. Racial pride organizing predates the 1960s fashion shows by four decades and makes the same basic claim: Black people don't need to apologize for how they look.
Beyond that, the trail gets thin fast. A popular version of this story credits a nineteenth century Black abolitionist with saying the exact phrase in an 1858 speech, and you'll see that claim repeated often enough that it sounds settled. It isn't. No surviving transcript actually contains those words, and the attribution looks like folklore that got repeated until it hardened into something people cite as fact. Worth knowing, if only so you don't repeat it yourself.
What was the movement actually pushing against?
Two things, mainly, and they were connected. The first was a cosmetics and haircare industry that had spent decades marketing skin lighteners and chemical straighteners specifically to Black consumers, often with ad copy that promised better jobs, better marriages and better treatment for lighter, straighter results. The second was the visual media that ran those ads and, more quietly, cast its models and cover subjects the same way, treating lighter skin as an unspoken editorial default.
That's what makes the Ebony magazine complaint from Brathwaite so specific. He wasn't objecting to an abstraction. He was naming a publication's casting habit and organizing a fashion show to counter it directly, using dark skinned models in natural hairstyles and African fabric, photographed in a way that made the skin the point rather than something to correct. The natural hair on display at Naturally '62 mattered just as much as the clothes. Hairstyles that Black women were routinely told to chemically alter became, in that room, the thing being celebrated. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture frames this shift as part of a broader affirmation of natural hairstyles and the full range of skin tones found in Black communities, in its own overview of the era, according to the museum's account. If that argument, that natural texture and dark skin are simply beautiful rather than something to fix, is one you want reflected on your own walls, it's built into the bold, graphic Black wall street art and Afrocentric pieces we carry.
How does this connect to the natural hair movement?
Directly, and not just as a coincidence of timing. The Afro became the visual shorthand for the whole movement almost immediately, worn by the Grandassa Models on stage and adopted well beyond Harlem within a few years. Wearing your hair unstraightened stopped being a practical choice and became a stated position, readable from across a room. That's a different thing than a hairstyle trend. It's closer to what a lapel pin does, except it's attached to your head and can't be taken off before a job interview, which was exactly the point for a lot of the women who wore one anyway.
Today's natural hair movement traces its roots back to this same period, and it's worth being honest that the two aren't identical. The 1960s version was tied tightly to a specific political program and a specific set of organizers. Today's version is broader, more commercial in places, and a lot less centralized. But the basic claim, that Black hair in its unaltered state doesn't need fixing, is the same one Naturally '62 put on a Harlem stage in January 1962.
How does it connect to the Black Arts Movement?
The two ran on parallel tracks through the same decade and shared plenty of the same people. The Black Arts Movement is generally dated to February 1965, right after Malcolm X's assassination, when the poet LeRoi Jones, soon to rename himself Amiri Baraka, left downtown Manhattan for Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School. Poet Larry Neal, who gave the movement its name, described it as a cultural revolution running alongside Black Power politics, focused on self-determination in art the same way Black Power argued for it in policy, according to the National Gallery of Art's overview of the movement.
Where Black Is Beautiful worked mainly through fashion and photography, the Black Arts Movement worked through poetry, theater and painting. The underlying claim was identical. Black life didn't need translation or apology to be treated as worthy subject matter. A poem didn't need a white reader in mind to be legitimate. A photograph of a dark skinned model didn't need to be softened to be beautiful. Painters working in portraiture right now, the kind of work you'll find in our own gallery from Black man wall art to portraits of women and children, are still working from that same premise, whether they trace their own lineage back that far or not.
Where does this history live now?
By the time Brathwaite died, the reassessment of his work was well underway. The 2019 Aperture book and exhibition did the heavy lifting, moving him from a photographer known mostly within the communities he documented to a figure institutions actively collect and study. That's a slow correction, decades after the fact. It's also a pattern that shows up again and again in Black art history: the work gets made, goes under-recognized for a generation, then gets rediscovered by an institution that finally catches up.
None of that history is decorative. It's the reason a painting that centers dark skin, natural texture or an unapologetic Black face isn't just a design choice today. It's a continuation of an actual argument that specific people fought out in specific rooms starting in 1962. That argument runs straight into our melanin wall art, original work built around the same premise Brathwaite's cameras were built around: that Black features don't need correcting to be worth looking at. It shows up across the rest of what we sell too, right down to the African American kitchen wall art people hang in the room where they actually spend their mornings.
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Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.