Vintage Chicago Tribune: Marjorie Stewart Joyner, an influential Black beautician and Bud Billiken Parade organizer

On Dec. 30, 1937, the conductor of the “Texas Rocket” escorted Marjorie Stewart Joyner through its passenger cars when she boarded the train in Houston. A Chicago businesswoman accustomed to going first class, Joyner assumed she would travel to Tulsa in a private compartment.

But southern railroad facilities were segregated, and Joyner was African American. Lacking a separate car for Black passengers, the train’s crew improvised, seating her in the baggage car. At one stop, a casket was loaded into the car.

“They talk about Rosa Parks having to sit on the back of the bus in Montgomery, Ala.,” Joyner recalled 50 years later, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. “Well, how would you like to ride all night in a baggage car with a corpse?”

Her point is worth considering during Black History month. Every February, the civil rights movement’s heroes — including Parks and Martin Luther King — are celebrated, and rightly so.

But myriad Black Americans anonymously pushing back also contributed to the struggle for equal rights. The discrimination Joyner faced, her commitment to helping others along with her great personal success formed the interwoven fabric of her life.

She sued the Burlington-Rock Island Railroad Co. after that train ride with a corpse for a traveling companion. It was a long shot, because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that separate but equal facilities were legal.

But the railroad settled out of court, conceding that being relegated to a baggage car hardly seemed equal to a white passenger’s accommodations. The financial terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed. But she turned down the first offer, forcing the railroad to put more money on the table.

Joyner was on her way to a speaking engagement with a class in beauty culture when she was forced to sit in a baggage car. She was an accomplished and widely known beautician who in 1926 had invented a machine to put waves in women’s hair.

“It all came to me in the kitchen when I was making a pot roast one day, looking at these long, thin rods that held the pot roast together and heated it up from the inside,” she recalled for a Tribune reporter in 1989. “I figured you could use them like hair rollers, then heat them up to cook a permanent curl into the hair.”

Installed in Marjorie’s Beauty Shop in the basement of her and husband’s home at 5607 S. Wabash Ave., the contraption was instantly popular.

“Black ladies loved it,” she recalled. “I guess what I didn’t realize then, though, was that I had done something more than just invent a way to do Black women’s hair.”

Indeed, Joyner’s success, first in the beauty business and then in a host of other endeavors, inspired others to sustain their dreams amid racism’s minefields.

Joyner was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her parents divorced when she was young and the family moved frequently before landing in Chicago in 1912. She met the man who became her husband, when he roller-skated by her home one day. He went on to become a podiatrist. She became the first Black graduate of the Moler Beauty School in Chicago.

But Joyner found that the techniques she learned at Moler were designed for white women and didn’t work when she tried them on her mother-in-law. “I washed her hair and it just shriveled up,” Joyner later recalled in a Chicago Defender story. “I didn’t know what to do.”

After that disaster, her mother-in-law paid for Joyner to attend a presentation by Madam C. J. Walker, who taught a technique for straightening Black hair and became a millionaire by marketing cosmetics designed for Black women. That led to a long relationship with Walker’s company. Joyner supervised its representatives’ training and preached the virtues of its products.

Among the many people she met along the way was Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator, with whom she served on The National Council of Negro Women. With most beauty schools still segregated in the U.S., Bethune encouraged Joyner to take young black women to a place where they could get proper training.

So in 1954, Joyner organized a tour group of about 195 African American women to go to Paris. She’d been assured by France’s ambassador that their French colleagues would be delighted to share the latest fashions in hair styling.

“It will give you the greatest educational advantage of a lifetime,” Joyner wrote in a Black beauticians newsletter.

Based on the response, she gave a deposit of $20,000 in cash on the group’s tickets to a clerk at a steamship company’s office, as the Tribune noted. “The man was so shocked,” she reports, “that I think he felt I was having a pipe dream.”

The trip was widely publicized and led to one unexpected consequence. “The white schools said that if they had known we had all of that money, they would have let us come and learn at night,” Joyner recalled. “If I couldn’t go to school in the day, they weren’t getting my money.”

She organized a Black beauticians’ association, and wrote a beauty column, “Irresistible Charm,” for the Chicago Defender. She offered practical advice on such questions as: “What Shall I Do To Keep My Husband?”

By World War II, she’d become the go-to contact for politicians reaching out to the Black community. Mayor Ed Kelly made her a member of Chicago Committee on National Defense. In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Joyner the director of the Democratic Women’s Campaign Committee.

In 1929, she became chairwoman of Chicago Defender’s Charities. She ran a Christmas Basket Program that brought toys, food and money to the poor. One of her first assignments was organizing a parade for a mythical character: Bud Billiken, the pen name of the paper’s youth columnist.

The column’s popularity led to the founding of Bud Billiken Clubs, whose raison d’etre was patented. Rule 1 was: “You must be a regular reader of the Chicago Defender to become a member of the Bud Billiken Club.”

But there was no questioning the character’s hold on children’s imaginations. Billiken regularly reported on fantasized trips through a world magically stripped of racism.

“New Orleans is a city of real genuine hospitality,” Billiken’s ghost writer claimed. Unsaid was that a Black visitor at that time would be riding in the back of a streetcar named Desire.

The Bud Billiken Day Parade was similarly designed to give “underprivileged children a chance to be in the limelight for one day by wearing costumes, marching in a parade and being seen,” the Defender explained.

For the inaugural parade, Joyner sent a few floats and a marching group down Michigan Avenue from 31st Street to Washington Park, where a picnic followed.

Over half a century, Joyner built the parade into a mass procession with upward of half a million participants and spectators, the second Saturday of August. But for many years, Joyner and others felt the parade received relatively scant attention from the city’s mainstream press. In 1979 singer Helen Reddy performed at ChicagoFest. “We drew nearly 500,000 people, and ChicagoFest drew only 15,000 and who do you think got all the exposure?” Joyner asked that year.

“It (the parade) means everything,” she told the Tribune in 1980. “Some of these people are so poor they wouldn’t ever be able to go to a picture show or see a band.”

She was an indefatigable fundraiser for the college her friend Mary McLeod Bethune founded in Florida, and at 77 earned a bachelor’s degree from what is now Bethune-Cookman University.

When she died at 98 in 1994 tributes poured in. But she’d essentially written her own epitaph.

“If I’ve set an example for other people — not just black people, not just poor people, not just women — I want it to be that you shouldn’t be limited in what you try to do,” she said. “If I can take pot roast rods and have a one-of-a-kind invention, believe me, people can do what they set their minds to do.”

Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at rgrossman@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.