Poro Hair and Beauty Culture.
An Early Black Female Industrial Pioneer
[Education]. Malone, Annie Minerva Pope Turnbo. Poro Hair and Beauty Culture. Saint Louis, Missouri: [Annie Minerva Pope Turnbo Malone], (1922).
Oblong 8vo.; copious multi-colored illustrations throughout; grey pictorial wrappers; fine.
First and apparently only edition of this catalogue detailing the offerings of Poro College, an early commercial venture and vocational training center for African American women.
In November 1918, Annie Minerva Pope Turnbo Malone (1869-1957) founded Poro College, a school for black female beauticians. One of the nation’s wealthiest African American entrepreneurs, Malone invested nearly one million dollars in the facility in the hopes of extending “more far-reaching economic opportunity to a greater number of Race women than...any other commercial enterprise” (introduction). Malone’s college was also a convenient distribution center for Poro beauty products (including soap, deodorant, cold cream, “peroxide vanishing cream,” face powder and other vanities described in this catalogue). Malone’s was one of two extremely successful cosmetic lines aimed specifically at black women–the other, the Indianapolis-based hair-treatment line founded in 1910 by Madame C.J. Breedlove Walker, also grew into a multi-million dollar enterprise. Ultimately, Malone’s Poro line was peddled internationally by more than 75,000 Poro beauty school graduates; the profits enabled Malone to underwrite student scholarships in every black land-grant college in the U.S. Malone’s Cinderella tale unraveled in 1951, when a costly divorce suit left the entire Poro empire in government receivership.
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