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Rose Morgan
Beauty parlor owner and operator From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Rose Meta Morgan (August 9, 1912 – December 16, 2008) was the owner and operator of the largest beauty parlor for African American women. She was also among the founders of New York's only black-owned commercial bank, the Freedom National Bank.[1]
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Early life
Morgan was one of nine children, the daughter of Chaptle Morgan, a former sharecropper turned businessman, and Winnie Robinson, a homemaker. She was born in Mississippi and raised in Chicago.[2]
Career
She attended the Morris School of Beauty. After she styled Ethel Waters’s hair in 1938, the performer invited her to New York City. She rented a booth in Sugar Hill salons and six month’s later opened her salon, Rose Meta’s House of Beauty, in an old mansion.[2]
By 1946, the salon had 29 employees including stylists, masseurs, and nurses. In 1955, the facility relocated and reopened under a new name, Rose Morgan’s House of Beauty, with additional departments including dressmaking and charm school spread over five floors.[3] A wig salon was added in 1960.[4] A 1946 Ebony article named it the “biggest negro beauty parlor in the world.”[5]
Throughout the 1960s until her retirement in the 1970s, Morgan wrote a column for the New Pittsburgh Courier.[3] Over her career, Morgan trained 3,000 hairdressers in her beauty institutions.[6]
She founded Freedom National Bank, the only commercial bank for African Americans in New York.[7]
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Personal life
She married heavyweight boxer Joe Louis in 1955. The marriage was annulled two years later.[8]
References
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