My hair, your choice

  In 1786, Louisiana territory was under the Spanish rule of Governor Esteban Rodriguez Miró. God forbid if a woman of African descent was mistakenly treated with the same decency as a white woman, so Miró enforced a law that forced Black women to outwardly identify themselves as the “slave class”, even though a large percentage of them were free. That outward identifier was the tignon, a material knotted to make a headscarf. Black women were to completely cover their hair to refrain from displaying “excessive attention to dress.” It is noted that Miró hoped the laws would control women “who had become too light-skinned or who dressed too elegantly, or who competed too freely with white women for status and thus threatened the social order.” I guess this was supposed to spare the feelings of the city's white women, but it did not work. The law was put in place to label free women of color as less than others, and they did what had been in the nature of Black women for centuries – forming beauty and innovation out of oppression.
  These Black women followed the law by covering their hair but decorated their tignons with bright, beautiful colors, jewelry, and feathers.