By Michael Henry Adams
Who today has ever heard of Rose Meta Morgan? If, thanks to groundbreaking work by Stanley Nelson and A’Lelia Bundles, many are aware of the triumphant, if brief, lives of Madam Walker and her daughter, no biographer has come forward for their successor in the sphere of Black beauty.
Born in Edward, Mississippi, in 1912, this curious brown-skinned girl grew up in Chicago. By 1942, she owned and operated the largest African American beauty parlor in the world. Emulating the enterprise of the Walkers and the business acumen of her father, industrious one-time sharecropper Chaptle Morgan, Rose Meta Morgan got her start, while a schoolgirl, making artificial flowers.
Her big opportunity came in 1938, when Morgan styled the hair of the great Ethel Waters. Impressed by Morgan’s deft touch, Waters invited her to New York City as her guest. Impressed by Walters’ glamour and by New York’s sophistication, Morgan moved to Harlem and, within six months, attracted enough customers to open her own beauty shop. Soon, she hired five stylists and signed a 10-year lease on a vacant mansion owned by Dr. Charles Ford. This savvy adaptive use of an existing structure has a direct correlation with Madam Walker’s practice.
By 1946, the Rose Meta House of Beauty at 401 West 148th Street had a staff 29 strong, including 20 hairstylists, three licensed masseurs, and a registered nurse. In partnership with Olivia Lee Dilworth Stanford (another transplanted Harlemite, born in the Deep South), Morgan operated up-to-date beauty procedures, offering rub-downs, hairdressing, facials, manicures, bodybuilding, and health-food lunches.
Stanford and Morgan not only created their own line of beauty products, expressly formulated for African American women, but they expanded their business into shops around the city and across the country.
The Rose Meta House of Beauty was exactly for Black women what Elizabeth Arden’s was to whites. Broad noses, full sensuous lips, dark skin, and even “kinky” hair were not looked upon as loathed defects. Their mission was not an effort to either disguise or diminish “Blackness.” They sought instead to celebrate African Americans with products and services meant to enhance their beauty. The first step in this process was to indicate to Black women something of their worthiness, to show that their patronage was valued, by providing first-class care in luxurious surroundings.
Rose Morgan, who had been briefly wed and quickly divorced, amazed the world when she remarried. How, among the hundreds of young, vivacious women romantically linked to the “Brown Bomber,” did this handsome, if dark, nearly middle-aged woman-of-the-world “catch” the “heart-throb” of a generation?
Joe Louis had gained his title dramatically in a 1937 rematch with Max Schmeling of Nazi Germany. The bout lasted just two minutes and four seconds. Disgraced, having suffered defeat at the hands of a Black man, ironically, Schmeling, the symbol of Aryan might, went on to become a Coca-Cola executive and a multi-millionaire. Louis, by contrast, mismanaged by manipulative handlers and dogged by Federal tax charges, died a physical wreck, seldom successful in overcoming crushing debt. Yet it’s Joe Louis who holds the distinction of having defended his title more times than any other heavyweight in history, knocking out five world champions.
For a financially desperate Louis, in part, at least, Rose Morgan’s appeal must have been her unusually ample means. In 1948, ever-increasing gains saw Morgan open a new House of Beauty in an existing but brand new building. Joe Louis’ deluxe bar and restaurant, with the “world’s largest oval bar,” fashioned from mahogany and rosewood, was planned by Black Harlem architect Vertner Woodson Tandy with engineer Sidney Frieman. Opened with fanfare in 1946, it closed abruptly in 1947. How fortuitous for Louis that Morgan could take this costly albatross off his hands. How lucky too for Miss Morgan, to find so stylish and up-to-date a venue for her expanding business, that by now included regular fashion shows featuring Black designers like Mildred Blount, Willard Winter, L’Tanya, and others who were to gain acclaim.
By 1955, Morgan’s first location at 148th Street closed, but not before an entirely new International-style Morgan’s House of Beauty, designed by Columbia-trained Black architect John Lewis Wilson, opened. Young Wilson had begun his career as a draftsman for Vertner Woodson Tandy, Madame Walker’s architect, who was the first Black architect registered in New York State. Located at 507 West 145th Street near Amsterdam Avenue, it was an ideal setting for beauty culture, and included a dressmaking department and a charm school in addition to the usual hair salon facilities. In the early 1960s, she added a wig salon. Over time, she employed and trained over 3,000 people.
Louis’ and Morgan’s Christmas Day wedding and reception were held at Rose Morgan Louis’ home, at 175-12 Murdock Avenue in the Addisleigh Park section of Saint Albans, Queens. The first suburban New York community opened to Blacks, Addisleigh Park rapidly became the suburban equivalent of Harlem’s Sugar Hill and home to greats like Lena Horne, Count Basie, Roy Campanella, Ella Fitzgerald, Illinois Jacquet, and Jackie Robinson.
Rose Morgan’s marriage to Joe Louis was amicably annulled after three years in 1958. In 1965, Morgan was one of the founders of New York’s only Black-owned commercial bank, the Freedom National Bank. She retired in the mid 1970s.
Some said it was her friendship with Marian Bruce that prompted Morgan to marry Louis. Born in 1920, Bruce was a cabaret singer noted as an elegant stylist. During her career in show business, in the 1940s and 1950s, she starred in the first all-Black show ever presented in a Miami Beach nightclub. Beautiful and always beautifully dressed, she was also popular abroad on the continent. One element of this popularity lay in her dry wit and sharp repartee. “It was truly something to hear such unexpected and expert cussing coming from the pretty mouth of this pretty lady…” observed Taylor Gordon and Jimmy Daniels, among others.
Never afraid to take a stand for justice, or to be photographed, Miss Bruce appeared in the illustrations of at least two news stories for Ebony and Our World magazines, covering the new House of Beauty salon opened by her dear friend Rose Morgan. In both, Bruce, most decoratively, poses clad only in a towel during strenuous exercise and a subsequent massage. Black journals from this period were hardly adverse to introducing a little titillation among their pages. The only thing surprising about these pictures is how perfectly they portray an aspect of the scandal that engulfed Morgan and Bruce almost immediately after they were taken.
At a House of Beauty party in August of 1948, when handsome graphic designer Art Harris went searching for his girlfriend, he found her easily enough. She was with Rose Morgan. They were in the rub-down room. They said that they were giving each other a “massage.”
“Not a word was spoken,” explained photographer Marvin Smith half a century later, saying how the couple returned home quietly. “Marian thought she had gotten over, that they would both pretend that nothing had happened. Regarding women she’s caught him with, she often had.” Harris encouraged her hopeful delusion, her friend continued. “As she undressed, he was in the bathroom. The only thing that was odd was his sharpening his razor. Why shave again, just to go to dinner?”
Smith said, she knew him well enough to know he was not kidding, when razor in his hand, he’d come after her, snarling, “‘I will kill you both’. Bare-assed-naked, she ran into the street. It was in the Amsterdam! The next day, my brother and I took her to Riis Beach to get away from the scandal.”
Marriage and family were the most drastic subterfuges used by gays to cover their tracks in the past. In no time at all, Marian Bruce and Rose Morgan both found husbands. But not before Miss Bruce, with defiant satisfaction, sued Harris for assault, for an award of $2,990.
Bruce married first. Her husband was widower Arthur C. Logan, the personal physician to both Duke Ellington and his brilliant gay collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. It was in great part due to her marriage that Mrs. Logan would come to focus her opposition to discrimination, joining her husband to become a major NAACP activist, Democratic campaign worker, and Civil Rights Movement fundraiser. These activities culminated in Mariam Logan being named to head New York City’s Commission on Human Rights from 1977 to 1979. A widow for over 20 years after her husband’s suicide, Mrs. Logan died in 1993.
I met Miss Morgan around 1989, and she once attended a party I gave. Interested in talking to others, this faultlessly turned out matron was also interesting to listen to. She said how she continued to exercise every day and to assiduously care for her health. Our mutual friend, Alma Rangel, also enjoyed listening to Morgan’s tales of her eventful life: “We were at a house party together in Florida, and she kept us spellbound, late into the night.”
After her marriage to Joe Louis ended, Rose Morgan briefly married a third time. Determined to write her life story, Rose Morgan returned to Chicago in 1999 to tend to her ailing sister. When she died in 2008, despite two major biographies of Joe Louis released at the time, almost no one noticed.
What a pity that this extraordinary lady, so fastidious and concerned with every detail, who prided herself on giving as much attention to ordinary, unknown customers as to star clients like Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Sara Lou Harris Carter, or Katherine Dunham, never completed the memories she was determined to record. Had she succeeded, it’s doubtful a woman who accomplished so much would have died with almost no notice taken whatsoever, unmentioned in either the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times.