It's no secret that during the Civil Rights Movement, anti-Blackness stopped at nothing to keep us from voting. Bernice Robinson, a hairdresser from Charleston, South Carolina, had plans for her salon that no one could've guessed.
When Robinson closed her shop for the night, she rarely left and went straight home. Her salon became an underground school. The lesson plan? Voter education.
According to Tiffany Gill, author of "Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry,” Robinson created a secret space to prepare women secretly for voter registration literacy tests. Since Black women owned their salons, they could create a safe space for their Black clients, away from white people’s prying eyes.
Observers noted that Robinson would wash one client’s hair while walking someone else through elaborate registration hurdles. Sometimes she'd put one woman under the dryer and run another woman down to the courthouse to get her registered to vote. Robinson’s work didn't stop at the salon door, either. She organized other beauticians and showed them how they could do the same thing.
Not everything we do needs to be out in the open. How can you use your skills and knowledge to educate and organize our people in the privacy and safety of our own spaces? We still need this, especially right now.