Marjorie Joyner

Early life and family background

Marjorie Stewart Joyner was born on October 24, 1896, in Monterey, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains region of the state. Historical sources describe her as the granddaughter of enslaved people and note that her father, George Emmanuel Stewart, was a schoolteacher and her mother, Annie Daugherty Stewart, provided a family environment that emphasized education and self-improvement. Growing up in rural Virginia in the era after slavery, Joyner lived with the realities of racial segregation and limited opportunity, especially for Black girls and women. Her early life was shaped by the economic pressures that pushed many African American families into the Great Migration, a movement that eventually took her family north to Ohio and later to Chicago. That movement would place her in a city where Black business, journalism, and civic life were expanding even as racial barriers remained severe.

Joyner moved to Chicago in 1912. There she encountered the bustling world of urban Black entrepreneurship and the rapidly growing beauty culture industry. Chicago’s South Side offered both opportunity and segregation: Black women could build businesses and institutions, but only by navigating discriminatory structures that constrained schooling, employment, and public accommodations. Joyner’s later achievements must be understood against this backdrop. Her career was not simply a story of individual talent; it was also a response to the social conditions that made Black institution-building necessary.

Education and entry into cosmetology

Joyner enrolled at Chicago’s A.B. Moler Beauty School and in 1916 became the first African American graduate of the school. That milestone was a significant barrier-breaking achievement in a field that was becoming increasingly formalized. Vocational education was one of the few routes available to many women, but Black women still faced exclusion from training and licensing networks. Joyner’s success gave her credentials that she could use to open doors in the beauty trade, and it helped establish her authority in a profession that would become central to her life’s work.

That same year, she married podiatrist Robert E. Joyner and opened her own beauty shop in Chicago on South State Street. The salon became the foundation for her business career and a site of mentorship, technical practice, and social visibility. Joyner quickly moved beyond salon ownership into education and organization. She became associated with the world of Madame C.J. Walker, eventually serving as a protégé and, later, as national supervisor of Walker’s beauty schools. In that role, she helped guide the training of beauticians and expand the professional network that supported Black women in beauty culture.

Madame C.J. Walker network and professional leadership

Joyner’s work with the Madame C.J. Walker system connected her to the most prominent Black beauty enterprise of the early twentieth century. Walker’s network was not just a business; it was also a training pipeline and an institutional model for Black women’s entrepreneurship. Joyner’s work as national supervisor of the beauty schools placed her at the center of this world, where she helped shape curriculum, mentorship, and standards. She also advocated for the professionalization of Black beauty culture through donations of money and materials to historically Black colleges and universities, helping ensure that students could be trained in the Walker system and certified for work.

Her reputation as an educator and organizer grew alongside her salon career. Joyner helped write Illinois’s first cosmetology laws in 1924, participating directly in the legal shaping of the profession. This was a crucial development, since licensing and regulation could be used either to exclude or to legitimize. By helping define the legal structure of cosmetology, Joyner worked to make beauty work more respected and more stable as a career path. She was also known for advocating in spaces where Black women were often denied access, including professional contests sponsored by white beauty organizations. Exclusion from those competitions helped inspire her to build Black-led organizations that could support independent professional advancement.

Invention and the permanent wave machine

Joyner’s most famous technical contribution was her permanent wave machine. On May 16, 1928, she filed the patent application for the device, which used multiple heated rods to curl or straighten hair more efficiently. On November 27, 1928, the U.S. Patent Office granted her Patent No. 1,693,515. The machine became a standard fixture in salons and was designed to serve women of different hair textures. It is often described as the first patented permanent wave machine created by a Black woman, and Joyner is widely recognized as one of the first Black women — and often as the first — to receive a U.S. patent for her own invention.

The invention was important for both technical and symbolic reasons. Technically, it simplified and standardized an important salon process. Symbolically, it placed a Black woman beautician inside the patent system at a time when women, and especially Black women, were rarely recognized as inventors. Joyner later also created a scalp protector to reduce discomfort from the permanent wave machine, securing a second U.S. patent, though exact dating is not consistently specified in accessible sources. Together, these inventions show that she understood cosmetology as a field of mechanical innovation as well as style and care.

Community leadership, organizing, and activism

Joyner’s influence extended beyond salons and patents. In 1929, she helped organize the first Bud Billiken Day Parade with Chicago Defender founder Robert S. Abbott. The parade became a landmark event in Chicago’s Black community, celebrating children, education, and civic pride. Her role in its creation reflected a broader commitment to African American public life and to the construction of joyful, visible Black institutions in a segregated city.

In 1935, Joyner became a founding member of the National Council of Negro Women. The organization was created to advance the interests of Black women and communities, and Joyner’s participation aligned her with one of the most important networks of Black women’s leadership in the twentieth century. She also worked with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and others to combat racial segregation and discrimination, and she became a benefactor of Bethune-Cookman College, strengthening her ties to Black higher education and to Mary McLeod Bethune’s leadership circle. These relationships show that Joyner’s activism was national in scope even when her base remained in Chicago.

During World War II, Joyner helped lead a Chicago community center that provided social and educational programs and supplies to Black soldiers. She understood wartime service as an opportunity to support community welfare and to build the morale and resources of Black Chicagoans serving in the military. Her work during this period illustrates how Black women leaders often combined philanthropy, institution-building, and civic support in response to the pressures of war and segregation.

Legal activism and Black professional institutions

Joyner also used legal action to challenge racial injustice. In December 1937, she filed a lawsuit against the Burlington Rock Island Railroad after being forced to ride in a baggage car next to a coffin while traveling for a speaking engagement. She received a settlement in 1938. The incident illustrates the humiliations of Jim Crow travel, and her decision to sue demonstrates the courage required of Black women who challenged discriminatory treatment in public life. Her case belongs to the broader tradition of African American resistance to segregation through both protest and the courts.

In 1945, Joyner founded the United Beauty School Owners and Teachers Association (UBSOTA) and the Alpha Chi Pi Omega Sorority and Fraternity. She also helped establish the Natural Beauty Culturists’ League that year. These institutions gave Black beauty professionals a means of collective organization, professional identity, and mutual support. They also reflected Joyner’s belief that beauty work was not merely cosmetic but a serious profession requiring education, standards, and community leadership. Over time, she organized international travel tours for beauty professionals, helping members of her network visit Europe, Haiti, the Middle East, Mexico, and West Africa, extending the reach of Black beauty culture beyond the United States.

Honors, later life, and death

Joyner received recognition during her lifetime for her contributions to cosmetology and civic life. Sources note that she was honored by the Smithsonian Institution for pioneering African American cosmetology, named Chicago’s senior citizen of the year in 1975, and remembered for her leadership in the Black beauty profession. She remained active well into later life, continuing her relationships with churches, colleges, civic organizations, and the beauty industry.

Marjorie Joyner died on December 27, 1994, at her home on Chicago’s South Side. Her death marked the end of a life that had begun in post-Reconstruction Virginia and unfolded through the rise of Black urban politics, the professionalization of beauty work, the expansion of women’s rights, and the long struggle against racial segregation. She was remembered not only as an inventor but also as an educator, organizer, and philanthropist whose work helped define Black beauty culture in the twentieth century.

Legacy

Joyner’s legacy lies in the institutions she helped build and the barriers she helped break. She was a rare Black woman inventor in the patent system, a professional educator in a segregated labor market, and a civic leader whose work connected beauty, politics, and social uplift. Her permanent wave machine is now remembered as an important innovation in salon technology, but her wider legacy is equally important: she helped Black women claim professional authority, build businesses, and create organizations that could endure beyond individual careers.

In histories of women’s invention, Joyner demonstrates that innovation often occurs in fields that traditional accounts overlook. Her work in cosmetology, law, and activism shows that beauty culture can be a site of technological creativity and community leadership. For that reason, Joyner remains a foundational figure in women’s history, Black business history, and the history of American invention.