My mother’s currency was hair. Juanita Cagney remodeled elder’s naps and sweat flattened loops into bread, milk, cigarettes. On weekends, our kitchen was a revolving door of women getting press and curls, perms, cuts. Sparrows couldn’t match her solo of the curling iron. Breakfast would smell of shampoo and conditioner. She worked until her fingers chipped and blistered with poison after gallons of lye, ammonia, peroxide. Her personal record was some 25 heads in a day, her exhaustedly peeling off checks for me to run to the store. My mother was a cosmetologist and worked as a supervising instructor in beauty schools. Periodically, she tutored students at home, those who couldn’t do a simple S curl. After she retired same students would drop by just to say that they loved her. She kept a steady stream of clients in and out of our kitchen for years and often spoke of the place where she worked and where I visited a lot, Charm Beauty College.
I never thought much about Charm Beauty College, until a few years ago when I randomly flashed back to my childhood and wondered if there was any photos or anything on the internet about Charm. Could my mother still exist on line somewhere?
Nope. And oddly, neither was there much evidence of Charm ever having existed. I remember where the buildings once were, but there were no websites, memories, photographs. But eventually I found something, and was hugely surprised to learn the school was black owned:
Ambrosia Wysinger Jones was the first African American to own and operate a beauty school in Oakland, Charm Beauty College. She was also a realtor and founded Charm Travel Agency in the 1960’s. You might be familiar with the concept of the Green Book, making road travel for black motorists easier due to segregation and racism. Charm Travel was established for similar reasons, assisting black travelers to find safe vacations, and was Oakland’s first Black travel agency. Born in 1905 in Oakland, she was the oldest of four and graduated from Fremont High School then was the first Black to attend Mills College. Jones was the granddaughter of civil rights activist Edmond Wysinger who arrived in California during the gold rush and eventually helped desegregate California public schools in the 1890s.
Charm Beauty College existed for 14 years and helped thousands of Blacks in the bay area gain careers in cosmetology. Her beauty colleges were the forerunners to the current Laney College cosmetology school.
Ambrosia Jones must have taken Madame CJ Walker as a role model. Walker was entrepreneur, philanthropist, activist, and first self-made millionaire in America. She made her fortune by making a line of cosmetics and hair care products primarily for Black Women. A fine Netflix mini-series was made about her life in 2020 starring the always solid actor, Octavia Spencer.
DISCLOSURE: After retirement, my mother remained close friends with one of Ambrosia’s granddaughters, Rosita. Rosita was one of the first people I spoke with the day after learning I was adopted, and she told me she remembered when it happened, the day my mom was called out of work. I was never conscious of the connection between Jones and my mom until doing research for this history. I don’t recall meeting Ambrosia, but I must have.
The Dirty Rat 