Entry · catalog no. 1135
Afro
/ /ˈæf.roʊ/ /AF-roh
noun · United States, nationwide; the naming and organizing that produced it are traceable to Harlem and to Black college and arts circles · 1960s
✓ Verified
1.
A hairstyle in which tightly coiled Black hair is left unstraightened, allowed to grow out, and combed or picked away from the scalp into a rounded shape around the head. The word names both the physical style and the political posture that came with it: to wear an Afro in the middle and late 1960s was to publicly decline the hot comb and the relaxer, and to say something about beauty, lineage, and self-ownership without saying anything at all. Size varied enormously and carried meaning — a close-cropped version read as understated, a large picked-out one read as declarative. The term also worked attributively, giving Afro pick, Afro comb, and Afro wig, and it shortened in everyday speech to fro. Over the 1970s the word broadened past the head to describe a whole register of Black style, and by the 1980s it had partly cooled into a period marker; it revived as plain description in the 2000s natural hair movement, where it now sits alongside more granular terms like twist-out and wash-and-go rather than standing alone.
“She had been pressing her hair since she was nine, and the summer she stopped, her Afro came in thicker than anybody predicted.”
Origin & Attribution
The style is older than the name. Unstraightened hair was worn by Black singers, dancers, and artists in bohemian and jazz circles through the 1950s, and the first organized public assertion of it came in Harlem in January 1962, when the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios staged "Naturally '62" at the Purple Manor with the Grandassa Models — dark-skinned women in unstraightened hair, presented as a beauty standard rather than an exception. Through the early and middle 1960s the community name for this was natural or au naturel, not Afro; Ebony's June 1966 cover story was headlined "The Natural Look: New Mode for Negro Women." Afro comes from the Afro- element already long established in Black self-naming — Afro-American is attested in Black print from 1853 — and it took over as the dominant label in the second half of the 1960s, with the slang record catching it in 1967. The word is not a white media coinage, and the style is not an invention of the Black Power movement; Black Power adopted and amplified something Black women and artists had already been building for a decade.
1938
Chester Himes writes of hair as an "Afro plume" — earliest recorded use of the word for hair
1962
AJASS stages "Naturally '62" in Harlem with the Grandassa Models, asserting unstraightened hair as a beauty standard
1966
Ebony runs "The Natural Look: New Mode for Negro Women" as its June cover story — still "natural," not yet "Afro"
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
United States, nationwide; the naming and organizing that produced it are traceable to Harlem and to Black college and arts circles · 1960s
Spoken by
Black Americans across all regions; adopted broadly into general American English by the 1970s
$AFROThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady88 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
95/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1938
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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By region — how it actually sounds
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Green's Dictionary of Slang, entry "afro, n." — hairstyle sense first cited 1967 (Current Slang I:4); attributive sense cited 1938 from Chester Himes, "Pork Chop Paradise," in Collected Stories (1990), p. 264
reference · lexicographic
■
Ebony, Vol. XXI, No. 8, June 1966, cover article "The Natural Look: New Mode for Negro Women" (Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago); held by the Smithsonian NMAAHC, object 2011.12.53.5
magazine · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceMaxine Leeds Craig, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2002)
book · scholarly
See also