Beauty empire builder, Black bank founder, and star of Harlem's high society: Remembering Rose Morgan

Who today has ever heard of Rose Meta Morgan?

- MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS

Rose Morgan in her salon with singer Margaret Tynes, ca. 1960. (Public domain photo)

If, thanks to groundbreaking work by Stanley Nelson and A'Lelia Bundles, many are aware of the triumphant, if brief, lives of Madam Walker and her daughter, no biographer has come forward for their successor in the sphere of Black beauty.

Born in Edward, Mississippi, in 1912, this curious brown-skinned girl grew up in Chicago. By 1942, she owned and operated the largest African American beauty parlor in the world. Emulating the enterprise of the Walkers and the business acumen of her father, industrious onetime sharecropper Chaptle Morgan, Rose Meta Morgan got her start, while a schoolgirl, making artificial flowers.

Her big opportunity came in 1938, when Morgan styled the hair of the great Ethel Waters. Impressed by Morgan's deft touch, Waters invited her to New York City as her guest. Impressed by Walters' glamour and by New York's sophistication, Morgan moved to Harlem and, within six months, attracted enough customers to open her own beauty shop. Soon, she hired five stylists and signed a 10-year lease on a vacant mansion owned by Dr. Charles Ford. This savvy adaptive use of an existing structure has a direct correlation with Madam Walker's practice.

By 1946, the Rose Meta House of Beauty at 401 West 148th Street had a staff 29 strong, including 20 hairstylists, three licensed masseurs, and a registered nurse. In partnership with Olivia Lee Dilworth Stanford (another transplanted Harlemite, born in the Deep South), Morgan operated up-to-date beauty procedures, offering rubdowns, hairdressing, facials, manicures, bodybuilding, and health-food lunches.

Stanford and Morgan not only created their own line of beauty products, expressly formulated for African American women, but they expanded their business into shops around the city and across the country.