gave back strongly to the African-American community. During this time, hundreds of African-Americans became owner-operators of successful beauty salons and barbershops. These offered permanents and hair-straightening, as well as cutting and styling services, some to both White and Black clients. In this era, men regularly went to barber shops to have their beards groomed, and some Black barbers developed exclusively White, elite clientele, sometimes in association with hotels or clubs. Media images tended to perpetuate the ideals of European beauty of the majority culture, even when featuring African-Americans. African-Americans began sponsoring their own beauty events. The winners, many of whom wore straight hair styles and some of whom were of mixed race, adorned Black magazines and product advertisements. In the early 20th century, media portrayal of traditional African hair styles, such as braids and cornrows, was associated with African-Americans who were poor and lived in rural areas. In the early decades of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans left the South for opportunities in northern and midwestern industrial cities, many African Americans wanted to leave this rural association behind. Scholars debate whether hair-straightening practices arose out of Black desires to conform to a Eurocentric standard of beauty, or as part of their individual experiments with fashions and changing styles. Some believe that slaves and later African-Americans absorbed prejudices of the European slaveholders and colonizers, who considered most slaves as second-class, as they were not citizens. Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharp say that they believe the preference for Eurocentric ideas of beauty still pervades the Western world. Rise of Black pride Afro hair has been through many different cycles. Slavery played a major role in the ups and downs of the pride that African-Americans take in their hair. "Everything I knew about American history I learned from looking at Black people's hair. It's the perfect metaphor for the African experiment here: the price of the ticket (for a journey no one elected to take), the toll of slavery, and the costs remaining. It's all in the hair. Like Jamaica Kincaid, who writes only about a character named Mother, I've decided to write only about hair: what we do to it, how we do it, and why. I figure this is enough", said Lisa Jones in an essay titled Hair Always and Forever. Cheryl Thompson writes, "In 15th-century Africa, hairstyles were used to indicate a person's marital status, age, religion,