Malaika Cooper will never forget the time her younger cousin was undergoing cancer treatment and made a full recovery. When her hair started to grow back, her cousin asked her if she could add extensions to her look for a high school dance.
“I was like, ‘Why do you need to buy more hair? Your natural hair is beautiful the way it is,’” Cooper remembered telling her in a feature for Baltimore Magazine.
Cooper, the owner of Dreadz N Headz, is also the brains behind the Baltimore Natural Hair Care Expo, a yearly event highlighting Baltimore and surrounding areas’ natural hair care manufacturers, educators and professionals.
“We walked into a beauty outlet and I saw a whole wall full of weaves—pink hair, green hair, purple hair—that were all telling my baby cousin not to wear her hair in its natural state, and that she needed to assimilate,” Cooper said. “It burned me up. That’s one of the reasons why I do what I do.”
It was what led her to become the founder of Happy Nappy Day—a festival highlighting professional haircare purveyors, while entertaining patrons with live music and good food—with a mission to help the people of Baltimore embrace their natural hair.
This year, the festival will take place on Sunday, July 9 from 1-8 PM at the football field at Walbrook High School in Northwest Baltimore. The event – which is free to the public – will include popular vendors like Ms. Jessie’s Natural Hair Products , Loc Soc (concentrating on accessories for locs), and Cooper’s very own Dreads N Headz.
Additionally, the festival will host live poetry readings and feature food trucks, including Jamerican Eats Caribbean Soul Fusion. African dance lessons will also be available for children. Furthermore, the Happy Nappy experience will hold an outdoor concert with headliner, pro-Black hip-hop group Poor Righteous Teachers.
“Hip-hop has always been a disruptive genre that has pushed back against societal norms,” MC Timothy Grimes told the publication. “It was one of the first platforms for urban youth to embrace themselves, so it’s fitting that hip-hop’s 50th anniversary [coincides with] Happy Nappy Day.”
The festival’s name is a nod to the word “nappy,” which derived from the word “nap,” which was used to describe fabric with frazzled fibers. Cooper now hopes to deter future generations from believing this magniloquence.
“When we were in the motherland, we had so many different textures and hairstyles that we used to identify ourselves with,” she said. “The braids that we used to wear could tell people what village we were from, what family or tribe we belonged to—everything. When we were brought here, somewhere along the line, we lost our culture. So many people are controlling how we see ourselves. We need to control the narrative.”
