Still on a high from President Barrack Obama’s  speech at Howard University for their 2016 graduation ceremony, my sister and I began to reflect on the images projected of black professionalism and black excellence for blacks in America.

Historically, the image of a black man being the  President of the United States of America, is something many blacks in America never thought we would see. A sight we only dreamed of because the narrative was basically unknown before President Obama took office. However, this same unimaginable image is no longer a dream but reality for several inspired African Americans graduating with their degrees.

To many people, the image of a Black President in the United States is just as rare as seeing positive images of black girls graduating, especially images of young black women graduating while rocking their natural curls.

During a recent graduation photo shoot we did for a client with natural hair, we began to explore some of the possible reasons why there is currently a lack of images of Black Women Graduating with Afro’s on social media.

We assume that this could be because the graduation cap was not designed with the offspring black men in mind. We don’t believe the graduation cap was created with women in mind, and definitely not with the black woman in mind. Consequently, this caused a ripple effect on several generations of black girls graduating trying to decide what hairstyle they should wear that will work with their graduation cap. My sister has personally experienced  this discomfort during her graduation ceremony. Her cap kept falling of her head during the ceremony. This caused her to second guess herself.

For a long time education was denied for several blacks in America. After doing research, our original thoughts on the matter was confirmed. My sister and I found that the graduation cap, also known as the mortarboard, was used during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to identify students, artists, and learned and blooming youth in general. During this time in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Africans or people from the diaspora were not viewed by the western world as scholars especially  to the inventors of the mortarboard. Or maybe the mortarboard was never intended for women to wear period, not matter the race or ethnicity.  We women naturally  tend  to have different hair styles that may not necessarily conform to the design of the graduation cap.

The first introduction of the mortarboard to the United States was most commonly found to be filed by inventor Edward O’Reilly and Catholic priest Joseph Durham who filed their patent in 1950. The Civil Rights Moment didn’t even get national attention in America until 1954 and blacks didn’t even get gain the right to vote until 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson signed The Voting Rights Act. Therefore, we assume that when O’Reily and Durham were inventing the shape of the graduation caps, they did not have African American’s in mind.

Fast forward to today, we are now in 2016 where the first black President is speaking at Howard University and our dear friend Ravon, is graduating from an Ivey league PWI with her masters. We wanted to shed light on the lack of images like the ones we took of our friend Ravon and create a new narrative in our America.

We are no longer just the children of sharecroppers, we are just as educated and qualified to succeed in our natural state of blackness,with natural hair and all.  Higher learning is now an option for us as a people and we no longer need to assimilate in order to have access to such opportunities. In today’s society natural hair should now be seen as professional, and walking across the stage to receive your degree with a afro should be historical.

An Afro in America has always symbolized a beacon of hope, strength, and resistance but now we want to help propel that narrative forward by promoting imagaes that depict the afro/natural hair a as symbol of professionalism and black excellence.

Upon googling black girls graduating there was no real representation until we stumbled upon the hash tag#BlackGirlsGraduate &  #BlackGirlsGraduateToo or any real representation of us…women who resembled my sister and I. Ravon’s graduation shoot reminded us that an image of a Black woman graduating with an Afro is revolutionary.  The rareness of this image is a reflection of the current movement and hashtag#BlackGirlsGraduate #BlackGirlMagic &  #BlackGirlsGraduateToo .

The fact is Ravon’s graduation photographs reaffirms the notion that:

Black Girls are Educated

Black Girls Rock

Black Girls can be Scholars

And most importantly, Black Girls GRADUATE!

#Thoughts?