Did you know in 1997 an arrest of a local hairbraider led to legislative change?
That’s the story of Isis Brantley, the South Dallas native who currently runs Naturally Isis in Far North Dallas and is the longtime hairstylist of Erykah Badu. In the ’90s, she ran the Institute of Ancestral Braiding on South Beckley Avenue.
“I had been braiding 10 years before my troubles with the state,” she says. “So the community made me ‘the queen of braids, the mother of braids,’ because most of the beauty schools did not teach braiding, wasn’t something that they taught, so they would recommend people to me.”
On the day of her arrest in 1997, an undercover cop came in requesting services, claiming her sister had her hair done by Brantley and she would like to do the same.
“(I) never ever got suspicious about her, even her stance, how she was standing,” she says. “Now that I look back on it, it was intimidating or authoritative or something, but I didn’t penetrate it because I was thrown off by the fact that these were people in my community that were saying that their families were coming to me, so that’s how I looked at it.”
Brantley says before she went to respond that the woman needed an appointment, multiple police officers in full regalia were standing in her salon. That’s when the undercover cop told Brantley that she would be going to jail for braiding hair, specially for operating a salon without a license.
“I was dehumanized. I was very much so traumatized. I was humiliated, and it was a shock to me and my entire community … so I did everything she told me to do,” she says. “They took me and threw me (in jail) after fingerprinting me, strip-searching me, making me take my clothes off, putting on something different. And that was something that should have never happened, whether it happened for three hours or whether it happened for 30 years. It was wrong, and so I had to go and get help.”
While the state arrested her for not having the proper cosmetology license, Brantley argued that braiding is a legacy of African ancestors and that those requirements should not apply. For about 10 years, Brantley worked with one of her clients, who happened to be a lawyer, against the requirement to stop her work as a braider and require her to attend cosmetology school where she would learn how to use chemicals with hair, even though chemical use was not a part of her practice.
“I don’t put my hands in processed chemicals that people go to their schools for,” she says. “I don’t use sharp instruments, I’m not using scissors to cut anybody’s hair or anything like that.”
An injunction was put on her building, shutting her down and leaving her and her five children homeless, she says.
“Somebody in the community that knew I had been braiding their wife’s hair said, ‘You can come and have my house,’ and that’s when me and the children went back into the house, and I had to wait a long period,” she says. “My livelihood was put on hold until my lawyer could get them to release the injunction.”
In 2007, Texas began regulating hair braiders into the state’s barbering statute. This meant that to teach the 35-hour braiding curriculum Texas now required, Brantley had to install barber chairs, obtain at least 2,000 square feet of floor space and mount five sinks. Additionally, she was required to become a licensed barber school instructor, which would require up to 750 hours learning to teach barbering and pass written and practical exams on barbering instruction.
Brantley says when that ruling came down, she was told there was no one who could teach her.
“These people owe me because they were already in violation of what they sent me through for the first 10 years, and then after, they said in 2007, ‘Well, we can’t find nobody to teach you ancestral braiding. We don’t even know what ancestral braiding is, so there’s nobody here that can teach you. So we’re going to grandfather you, but we’re going to make every other Black person pay us $500 to $1,000 for 35 hours, and we’re going to use your curriculum that you so graciously gave us during the hearings,’” she says. “They captured my whole concept of ancestral braiding, and it’s just sad, and what they did was they put it in their curricula, and then they said, ‘Well, you are free to braid hair, but you’re not free to teach any classes.’”
Brantley says it was beautiful to see others protest these new rulings in her community.
“I kept teaching. People started rallying up against the unfair laws of cosmetology, they would go and say, ‘I’m not going to pay the money to come get any training because what I want to know how to do, Isis is teaching it, so I’m going to give my money to Isis to be trained, and I’m going to keep standing up in protest against this particular ruling of 35 hours,’” she says. “Even after people were rebelling and saying no, I was teaching so many women in (the) Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, people that were moving here from Vegas and California and Iowa and different places. I was training still, and we just stayed with what I was doing.”
After that, Brantley says the Institute for Justice learned she was grandfathered in, and she worked with the organization to file a federal lawsuit against Texas on Oct. 1, 2013, because braiders are not barbers, and they should not be required to train as such.
The lawsuit was a success. In January 2015, a federal court declared that the barber school requirements were seen as unconstitutional to apply to hair braiding schools, and by June 8, 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott signed House Bill 2717 to officially exempt hair braiders from having to obtain a cosmetology license.
Brantley says the 2015 signing had a lot to do with opening the doors for the 2023 CROWN Act, which prohibits race-based hair discrimination in Texas workplaces, schools and housing policies. But she says, “It’s a sloppy-written bill.”
“We still lost some of the children’s opportunity to exercise their right to wear their hair in several schools in Texas, especially the one in Houston,” she says, referring to Darryl George who claims the male-only hair length limit placed by Barbers Hill ISD is unconstitutional. Because of these outcomes, Brantley says she is far from done with the fight.
“Just to continue to make the whole world respect and stay open when it comes to Afro hair, and people are still being fired because of their afros. Young girls, young boys are still being harassed in schools. I mean, we’re still under this whole slave mentality when it comes to just getting any type of reciprocity or respect for being original people here in America and those that were forced here,” she says. “There has to continue to be advocates for social change, advocates for economic liberty, economic freedom, the right for people to own their own businesses, the right for people to be able to decide, ‘I don’t want college, I want a trade,’ and making it legal for these things to happen.”
