One day last spring, Jett Hawkins, 5, asked his mom to braid his hair for him. He loved the way it looked: “I was so proud and happy,” says Jett, who lives in Chicago. But when he got to school, his mother says, an administrator called her and told her that his hairstyle had broken a school policy that banned students from wearing braids, locs and twists.
Jett is not the only kid who has been singled out at school for wearing natural Black styles. Hair-based discrimination can be official, like when a school handbook states that students can’t wear braids, or unofficial, like when a teacher tells a student that their Afro is “too distracting.” Either way, it “sends the message that your culture and your identity is not accepted,” says Danielle Apugo, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies Black women and girls’ experiences at school.
Kids, parents and others have been fighting back. After Jett’s mother, Ida Nelson, gave an interview to a local newspaper about what happened, an Illinois state senator named Mike Simmons read about it and decided to propose a new law so it wouldn’t ever happen again. In January, the Jett Hawkins Act went into effect, preventing Illinois schools from creating dress codes based on hairstyles.
At least 14 other states have also passed similar laws making it illegal to discriminate against people based on wearing hairstyles associated with race, including at school. These laws are often named the CROWN Act, which stands for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair, and soon they might go national: On March 18, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its own version of the CROWN Act. If it ends up passing the Senate, Black students and others all over the country will be able to wear their hair how they want, without having to worry about being disciplined or targeted.
D’Angelia McMillan, 12
Louisville, Ky.
When D’Angelia performs as part of her step team, she likes to wear her natural hair in an Afro or a ponytail — but she doesn’t like when classmates or dancers from other teams ask her why it’s not straightened. “Every time people ask me that question, I get all up in my head and pressured,” she says. “It makes me feel like I’m different from everyone else.” A couple of years ago, she decided to push back. Since then, she has spoken at the State Legislature in support of a CROWN Act, which might be passed in Kentucky. “The reason why I’m fighting for the CROWN Act is so nobody has to be discriminated against,” she says. “And nobody can tell them how they should wear their hair.”
Jett Hawkins, 5
Chicago
Last spring, after Jett’s mother began speaking out about his experience and why it was wrong, his school decided to change its hair policy. But Jett is glad that thanks to the Jett Hawkins Act, other students in his state won’t have to worry about getting in trouble or being made to feel bad about their hair. “It can make them feel more confidence,” he says. He’s also working to make sure that kids outside Illinois get to feel the same way. He’s now the youngest member on the CROWN coalition team, a group advocating for state and national laws to let kids wear their hair in styles that are associated with their race or culture.
Ava Russell, 9
Newark, Del.
Ava usually wears her hair in a bun, but sometimes she likes to wear it down. “It shows my curls off,” she says. One day when she was wearing her hair down, she says, a teacher told her it was a distraction and made her mom pick her up. That experience, in early 2020, was so upsetting that at the end of the school year, she switched schools. Last year, her home state, Delaware, became the ninth state to adopt a CROWN Act. To Ava, it’s a relief to know that other kids in the state now “don’t have to go through what I went through,” she says.
Ezekiel Lemott, 9
Chicago
Ezekiel is Rastafarian, a member of a religion that says believers shouldn’t cut their hair. He wears his in dreads and a cap, just like his dad and his sister. But when he was in first grade, he says, his teacher would send him to the principal’s office because of his hair, forcing him to miss a lot of class. “I thought it was unfair, because everybody else had their hair how they wanted to,” he says. His classmates bullied him, too, to the point that once he actually cut off some of his dreads. With the passage of Illinois’s Jett Hawkins Act, Ezekiel no longer has to worry about being punished for how he wears his hair (though schools can still have rules about hats).
Michael Trimble, 6
Tatum, Texas
In 2019, when Michael was in preschool, his grandmother says the superintendent of his district gave her a choice: Cut off Michael’s ponytail or pin it up. The district’s rule book stated that boys couldn’t wear their hair in a ponytail, a puff ball or generally longer than their collar. But Michael didn’t want to cut it. “I thought it was cool to have long hair,” he says. According to his grandmother, when she refused, he was expelled. She began speaking out against what happened, and was even arrested when she sent him to school after he was expelled, and it became a local news story. Last year, the district changed its policy, and now Michael can attend school, with his ponytail. “It feels good to wear my hair how I want to,” he says. “I like my hair, and everybody else at school likes it too.”
Kimora Sajous, 14
Orlando, Fla.
For her seventh-grade picture day, Kimora decided to wear her hair in Bantu knots, a hairstyle in which sections of hair are twisted and stacked on top of themselves. But when she went to pose for her photo, she says, a school employee told her she couldn’t get her picture taken because of her hair. “It gave me a lot of self-image issues,” says Kimora, who straightened hair for photo retake day. “It took me a while to get past that and feel like my hair is beautiful.” She eventually switched to a school with more students of color, where she hasn’t experienced any problems with her hair. But she’s pushing to get a CROWN Act passed in the Florida Legislature and nationally. “This isn’t something that just happens once to one kid,” she says. “It happens a lot, and it needs to be changed.”
Charley Locke is a writer, an editor and a story producer who often works on articles for The New York Times for Kids. Djeneba Aduayom is a photographer in Los Angeles. Her work is inspired by her mix of French, Italian and African heritage.
