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9th
Annual
International
Locks Conference
Blends Natural Hair, Health, and
Beauty
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
Sharon Goodman has produced for nine years a
community oriented grassroots natural hair care and beauty
conference. The conference has grown over the years from a one
day five-hour event that attracted fifty attendees to now being
a three day weekend affair with an international flavor that
attracts thousands.
Over the years, Goodman and her staff have
expanded the conference and extended its scope to include
additional aspects of culture, hair care, health, and healing
modalities. “Each year,"
she explains, "it grows more and more; more people know
about it; more people attend; and we’ve extended our scope. It
used to be called just the Locks Conference, but now it’s
called the Locks Conference, International Hair, Health and
Beauty Expo.
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"We’ve added a lot of holistic
health practitioners, complimentary modalities, and
topics like disease reversal, yoga, stress management,
vegetarian cooking, and how to have healthy happy homes.
So not only do we want to concentrate on celebrating the
beauty of ourselves on the outside, but we want to build
up the beauty on the inside, body, mind and
spirit.” |
In addition to natural hair care products
created by black entrepreneurs and sold by black vendors and
natural hair care stylists who gave demonstrations and worked on
attendee’s hair at the Expo, this year’s conference offered
thirty workshops on a variety of topics and issues focusing on
holistic health, roots, and culture featuring African drumming,
doll making and entertainment, and the hair hut that focused on
healthy natural hair, natural hair maintenance and
styling.
Goodman was ecstatic at the growth and
evolution of the Expo. “Last year we had one thousand five
hundred people come through in two days. I was so happy. Last
year was the first year it was held at Harambe Institute. John
Skif (the Chief Academic Officer of Harambe) used to attend the
conference when it was at Community College and Temple
University. He was so taken by it that he invited us to come
here to his school.
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"We use the club (Club Diamani
adjacent to the school), the courtyard, the school the
whole place and when people come in and see the black
art all around, because this is an Afrocentric school
they appreciate it more.”
Photos: Herman
Ramsee & son (?), vendors at the Locks Conference |
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Akosua Ali-Sabree — therapist, holistic healer
and poet — served as Operations Manager for the Expo. For her,
the Expo is empowering. “The
significance of this Conference is that out of all the
activities we have in Philadelphia the Lock Conference allows a
number of different communities to come together to learn and
exchange — communities that normally wouldn’t come together.
It allows small business people to display their wares, people
have things they want to do in the workshops or share with folks
this is the venue for that. It’s a real family environment.
All ages can come to share and I’m real excited about that. As
a practitioner that’s what I’m about; people relaxing, being
stress free, learning more about their ancestry, learning about
the possibilities in the world.”
Most of the attendees wore natural hair
styles — including locks and braids — and the Expo gave off
a more culturally aware vibe. Goodman is anticipating an even
bigger event next year to celebrate their tenth anniversary.
“Next year is going to be our tenth and we’re going to go
all out. It’s going to be a whole week thing. We’re going to
go to other school besides Harambe, different other venues like
First Friday and the Library, we’re going to do something
there. So I want this to go on and on.”
Goodman is genuinely appreciative of the
community support the Expo has received over the years and she
attributes that to the Expo’s growth and popularity. “The
community is very supportive. Every year we get more and more
people. This year we had to turn away some vendors, a lot of
vendors wanted to attend the affair is so great.”
While people come from all over to attend the
Expo, it retains a local flavor. “Most of the vendors are
local. We have some from as far away as Atlanta Georgia, New
York, Washington. And I see this year we have quite a few
African vendors, too, from the Motherland.”
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Goodman indicated a lot of the
traffic to the Expo was from word of mouth. “We did a
survey last year and we found out much of the awareness
about the Conference was from word of mouth, our ad in
the New Observer, and the post cards we sent out.
We hang out flyers, posters, and things like that. But,
from the survey, people said they heard about it from
word of mouth. Plus its always the same time, the first
weekend in October so people know about it and remember.” |
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In keeping with the concept of economic
development the Expo encourages helping African-American
entrepreneurs promote their products.
“The Expo pushes all aspects, culture, economics. I’m
a vendor myself I make dolls. We want people to make money a lot
of the money we make we spend it right back with the vendors in
the community so its really community and culturally based. This
really a community event. We don’t go out to big corporate
sponsors looking for sponsorship, we go to the community and we
get sponsors from the community. We have duafe Holistic Hair
Care, LeRoi and Cinza Simons and Chic Afrique, people right from
the community willing to support us and come back every
year.”
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Over the course of the weekend, the
Expo features a fashion show, workshops, vendors, spoken
word artistry, entertainment and the culminating event a
hair show and competition. “Natural hair stylists,
master braiders, and this year we added a barbering
aspect, master barbers are going to come and show their
stuff. They put on skits, plays and vignettes and they
are going to be judged on their styles and creativity.
The judges will be professional and lay people who are
creative who know stuff about styling. There will be
first second and third place prizes for locks, braiders
and barbers they will be judged and graded on
creativity, technique and overall presentation.”
It rained Saturday but that didn’t stop the traffic to
the Expo. The vendors were out in force and the
attendees didn’t allow the rain to deter them. |
Byron Pugh, a
vendor, was pleased, “This is attractive to me because of the
atmosphere. The actual area, the purpose of us being able to
come together be in one place where we can really be able to
meet our culture and connect with other people who are really
trying to buy things that are hopefully more culturally aware,
be aware of who they are and learn and be taught in a place
where they can feel good about themselves. And hopefully walk
away with a good feeling about where they came from and what
they did that day.”
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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updated 20 October
2007 |
