When She Showed Up as Herself, Everything Changed

Cicely Tyson helped spark a nationwide natural hair wave just by showing up as herself on TV.

In the early 1960s, Hollywood expected Black actresses to hide behind wigs, presses, and Eurocentric looks, but Cicely Tyson quietly chose something different: her natural hair. The night before filming a role as an African woman, she went to a Harlem barbershop, had her straightened hair cut short, and asked them to shampoo it so it would spring back to its natural texture. She then kept that short, natural style when she joined the CBS drama “East Side/West Side” in 1963, becoming the first Black woman with a recurring role on a network TV drama.

Tyson later said that choice “created the natural hair craze.” Hairdressers all over the country wrote to tell her their clients were cutting off their straightened hair asking to “wear it like the girl on television.” Some Black viewers and stylists criticized her at first, saying her natural cut was “embarrassing,” which revealed how deeply Eurocentric beauty standards had been internalized. But other women—watching from living rooms, classrooms, and beauty shops—saw something new: a dark‑skinned Black woman on national TV whose hair looked like theirs, who was being presented as sophisticated, talented, and beautiful.

Her decision lined up with the rising “Black is Beautiful” and natural hair movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when Afros, TWAs, and later braids became symbols of pride, protest, and connection to African heritage. As activists like Angela Davis and artists across the diaspora embraced natural styles, Tyson’s visibility on TV and in magazines like Jet, Essence, and Ebony helped normalize natural hair as glamorous, professional, and worthy of the spotlight—not something to be hidden or “fixed.” In the 1970s she went further, wearing cornrows while promoting “Sounder” and on a 1973 Jet cover, helping to push braided styles back into the mainstream for Black American women.

For many Black women, seeing Cicely Tyson’s natural hair on screen was a turning point—an invitation to love their own textures, cut off the damage, and step into workplaces, schools, and public life without apology.