The image of a young woman in cap and gown against an illustration of academic-looking buildings nestled between two trees is strikingly different from other beauty products of the 1920s and 1930s. Tuskegee Belle was established in the mid-1920s in Montgomery, Alabama, and was intended for Black customers. An upscale beauty line for Black women was rare enough, but Tuskegee Belle’s scholarly iconography makes it a true anomaly in the history of makeup, especially at a time when most contemporary brands utilised floral motifs and other non-academic ornamentation. The patriotic colour palette of red, white, and blue also suggests a claim to American citizenship and belonging. What does the Tuskegee Belle brand, and in particular their face powder, reveal about the intersection of race, gender, beauty, and higher education in the Jim Crow South?
To understand the radical nature of this object, one must look at the context of its creation. Tuskegee Belle’s trademark registration dates to 1924, with newspaper advertisements appearing a year later listing the Lewis Drug Company as the manufacturer. By 1927, another Montgomery-based firm, Capital Chemical Company, had taken over production. During this period, the American beauty industry was in its infancy, and cosmetic packaging rarely connected women to academic pursuits. Instead, artwork and ad copy portrayed women golfing, dog-walking, or going to the movies – activities that linked makeup to the ‘modern’ woman and helped shed its historical associations with the lower classes and sex work. For Black women, this connection was even more crucial. Struggling against pervasive stereotypes of being uneducated or hypersexual, the use of rouge and lipstick was hotly debated within their own communities. Even Booker T. Washington initially discouraged it, only allowing a beauty culture curriculum at Tuskegee Institute after repeated requests and a significant donation from Madam C.J. Walker. By showing beauty products with a graduate on the packaging, Tuskegee Belle encouraged the notion that beauty aids were not only permitted but a necessary tool in shedding negative stereotypes and presenting a ‘respectable’ face to the world.
However, Tuskegee Belle seems to have been the only brand that directly referenced women not just attending school, but earning a degree, as evidenced by the graduation attire. For young Black women, this was doubly significant, as many were barred from pursuing formal education compared to their white counterparts. The packaging could thus be read as a tribute to the relatively new Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) which were established across the South after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865 to serve formerly enslaved people who were prohibited from attending existing universities. Tuskegee University, known as the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute until 1927, had been providing opportunities for Black female students since its founding in 1881. While it is impossible to confirm whether the packaging depicts the Tuskegee campus specifically, it undoubtedly portrays an academic setting.
Combined with the brand’s name, the imagery could also be viewed as a way of reclaiming the Southern belle archetype. Traditional Southern belles were white and wealthy, with Black labour directly supporting their lifestyles. Despite having easy access to secondary education, they were expected to be socialites and housewives rather than career women. The ‘Tuskegee Belle’, on the other hand, is a Black woman whose upper-class status was earned through her own intellectual labour and academic achievement.
Tuskegee Belle stood out not only from other brands more generally, but also from fellow companies whose offerings were meant to serve Black customers. Whether they were Black-owned, such as Overton’s, or white-owned like Valmor, the packaging showed illustrations of women accompanied by feminine decorative details such as jewellery and flowers. Brands released in the 1930s and 1940s such as Brown Skin Beauty and the ill-fittingly named Snow White followed suit. Others, most notably the Memphis-based Keystone Labs and LaClyde Lucky Co. used jazz motifs and good luck symbols, respectively. This article cannot provide an in-depth comparison of the packaging of early-to-mid-twentieth century brands sold primarily to Black customers, but in looking at these examples, it is safe to say that Tuskegee Belle was an outlier.
It appears that additional Tuskegee Belle toiletries, including talcum powder, skin ointment, and face powder were introduced in 1929. The February 1928 issue of the trade journal Aromatics noted that Tuskegee Belle’s advertising would expand to the national scale, and the line itself was to include men’s products along with rouge and lipstick for women. However, it seems these plans did not come to fruition. Per the brochure enclosed with the powder, the face powder was available in pink, flesh, hi-brown, brunette, and white – exactly the same shades then offered by Overton’s. Whilst these were standard among brands trying to serve Black customers in the 1920s and 1930s, most of the colours were not necessarily appropriate for deep skin tones.
Many cosmetic lines geared towards Black customers included light shades, either as an attempt to reach a white audience in the interest of earning a bigger profit, or, when combined with the use of bleaching cream (a heavily advertised product in Black publications) to emulate white skin. At the very least, light powders could help offset the colour discrimination within the Black community itself. As historian Blain Roberts explains, some Black women in the Jim Crow era may have used bleaching agents and face powder to appear lighter-skinned:
‘The act of passing [as white] was rare, but color prejudice within the Black community was not, a reality that manufacturers of bleaching agents exploited. From the late nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth, common wisdom held that lighter-skinned blacks belonged to a more affluent, more refined, and more educated class than did those with darker complexions.’
Additionally, the early beauty industry encouraged cosmetic usage to assist in social and economic success (landing a husband or a job) and beauty, for Black women, was rooted in the idealisation of white skin. Roberts points out that dark skin was sometimes prized in the Black community, as it indicated there was no ‘contamination’ from whites in their lineage, and notes that while we have a rich historical record of Black women’s perspectives in hair straightening, there is comparatively little on their attitudes towards bleaching creams and face powders. But as Susannah Walker highlights, a light complexion could nevertheless lead to better romantic prospects or professional opportunities. The Tuskegee Belle brochure also shows photos of three light-skinned Black women as happy customers, another common advertising tactic. Images of deeper-skinned women who failed the ‘paper bag test’ did not appear in most Black beauty advertising until the 1960s, unless the image was part of a before-and-after to demonstrate the effectiveness of bleaching cream.
While the face powder shades expose the complexities of Black beauty notions, the brand nevertheless promoted Black pride through a ‘beautiful race subject fan’, a free gift-with-purchase handheld fan featuring a photo of a well-dressed Black family in a fashionable home, which implied that a middle-class lifestyle was within reach for Southern Black families. Selling for the line offered another path to that life, as the opportunity was included in nearly every Tuskegee Belle advert, providing upward mobility and economic freedom to women who had few other options. A 1928 article from the Tuskegee Institute confirmed that the brand was created especially for Black clientele, with a policy of hiring only Black employees and directors who promised agents ‘fair and square treatment at all times.’ One such figure was Oscar Earle Saffold, listed as agency director by 1930. While his exact role in the company’s founding remains unclear, it is possible that Saffold was partially inspired by his wife, Nell, a teacher in the Montgomery public school system. Given Tuskegee’s alignment with conservative politics in the 1920s and the persisting significant gap between white and Black higher education in Alabama overall, the graduate shown on Tuskegee Belle packaging could perhaps be seen as aspirational – a look towards a future where top-notch high school and college education for Black women would be the norm rather than the exception.
Whilst it can be argued that the Tuskegee Belle line did nothing more than enforce respectability politics and uphold white supremacist beliefs surrounding beauty, the imagery on the packaging can be interpreted as a celebration of Black women’s recent access to educational opportunities. It also suggests that education is at least as important as physical beauty for Black women, and prioritizes the former over the latter in terms of life goals. This is a radical departure from not only Black beauty products and advertising, but those of the greater beauty industry, which focused on improving one’s appearance above all else.
The Tuskegee Belle powder box resides in the collection of the Makeup Museum, an online space dedicated to researching, exhibiting, and preserving makeup from all eras and cultures, with a focus on the overlooked parts of makeup history. This article is part of a broader ongoing effort to document how marginalized communities have used makeup to claim space, define their own identities, and strive for a more inclusive atmosphere in both the realm of beauty and society more generally.