Today In Black History: Rose Meta Morgan
Founder and Owner of the largest beauty parlor and personal development empire.
Issue #840 Today In Black History, Monday, April 14, 2025
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Born on August 9, 1912, in Edward, Mississippi, Rose Meta Morgan was raised in Chicago. She owned and operated the largest beauty parlor for African American women and was among the founders of New York's only black-owned commercial bank, Freedom National Bank.
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 months later opened her salon, Rose Meta’s House of Beauty, in an old mansion.
By 1946, the House of Beauty 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. She started selling her own cosmetics and putting on fashion shows.
It was a revolutionary establishment that became the largest African American beauty parlor in the world at the time. This 20,000-square-foot salon was more than just a place for hairstyling; it was an empire that offered cosmetology courses, charm classes, and even a diet clinic—a comprehensive hub for the beauty and personal development of African American women.
Morgan wrote a column for the New Pittsburgh Courier from the 1960s until her retirement in the 1970s. Over her career, Morgan trained 3,000 hairdressers in her beauty institutions.
Morgan was one of the founders of Freedom National Bank, New York’s sole Black-owned commercial bank, in 1965.
She retired in the 1970s and died in 2008 at 96.
Today In Black History
In 1775, the Abolitionist Society, the first abolitionist society in the United States was organized by the Pennsylvania Quakers in Philadelphia.
In 1789, Benjamin Banneker, a Black inventor, surveyor, mathematician, astronomer, and planner of Washington, D.C., accurately predicted a solar eclipse would occur on this date.
In 1858, abolitionist John Brown met Harriet Tubman at a Constitutional Convention convened in Chatham, Ontario.
In 1865, actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln in the head at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. Lincoln died the next day.
In 1873, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the Slaughterhouse cases that the 14th Amendment only protected federal civil rights but not state civil rights.
In 1955, catcher/outfielder Elston Howard became the first African American to play for the NY Yankees.
In 1960, Berry Gordy, Jr. founded and incorporated Motown Record Corporation in Detroit, Michigan.
In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld busing to achieve racial desegregation.
In 1986, Rev. Desmond Tutu was elected the Anglican Bishop of Capetown, South Africa.
In 2018, Nina Simone and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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