In 1955, a group of women met at Katie Ethel Whickam’s Dryades Street School of Beauty Culture and Barbering to form the Metropolitan Women’s Voters League (MWVL). Whickam, appointed chair, immediately launched a voter registration drive.
According to the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Louisiana Weekly predicted “women of the community are going to participate like never before.” The Weekly understood – like Whickam – the power of a Black beautician.
“Their salons and schools, as segregated spaces, offered Black women a place to speak freely and organize safely,” the HNOC states. In 1971, Whickam said the “Negro beautician touches the lives of a number of women second only to the Negro minister of the gospel.”
As president of the National Beauty Culturists’ League for 27 years, Whickam demonstrated the important role beauticians played in civil and voters’ rights. Presiding over the league’s 1957 annual convention in New Orleans, she encouraged beauticians to “register and vote and make an effort to have every customer a registered voter.”
In 1960, the MWVL and three other New Orleans Black voter organizations created the Kennedy-Johnson Voters League to support that year’s Democratic presidential ticket. As secretary, Whickam was the only female leader. She also worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy to improve civil rights.
Born in Assumption Parish in 1903, Whickam graduated from the L’Oréal Beauty School in Paris in 1957. In 1959, she received an honorary doctorate from Leland College in Baker, Louisiana.
“The importance of voting rights and participation at the polls was a message Whickam would relay time and again,” HNOC states. “Through her efforts in New Orleans and beyond, Whickam exemplifies the vital role beauticians played in the Black freedom movement…Whickam left a legacy of activism and advocacy for full political participation by all American citizens.”
She died in 1988.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
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