Rose Morgan | |
---|---|
Born | Rose Meta Morgan August 9, 1912
Mississippi, U.S. |
Died | December 16, 2008 | (aged 96)
Nationality | American |
Spouse |
Joe Louis
(
m. 1955;
ann. 1957) |
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]
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 was raised in Chicago. [2]
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]
She married heavyweight boxer Joe Louis in 1955. The marriage was annulled two years later. [8]