Zeta Phi Beta Soror Marjorie Joyner Was One of the First Black Women to Receive a Patent

Did you know that inventor and beauty industry pioneer Marjorie Stewart Joyner, one of the first Black women to receive a U.S. patent, was a member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.? Joyner was a longtime member and supporter of the sorority.

Marjorie Stewart Joyner was born on October 24, 1896, in Monterey, Virginia, the granddaughter of an enslaved woman and a white enslaver. After her parents divorced, she moved to Chicago as a young girl, and in 1916 she became the first African American to graduate from the A.B. Molar Beauty School. She soon opened her own salon.

Joyner’s career took off when she met Madam C.J. Walker, the pioneering Black hair-care entrepreneur. Joyner became a teacher and eventually the national supervisor of the Madam Walker Beauty Schools, training some 15,000 stylists and overseeing roughly 200 schools across the country.

Her signature contribution came in the kitchen. One evening, while making a pot roast, Joyner realized that the thin rods holding the meat together might be adapted to curl hair from the inside. She attached sixteen rods to a hairdryer hood, and the result was her permanent wave machine, which could set long-lasting curls far more efficiently than the old curl-by-curl method. She filed her patent on May 16, 1928, becoming one of the first Black women to receive a patent, though because the design was filed under the Walker Company, Joyner never profited from it personally.

Joyner’s influence reached well beyond the salon. She helped draft Illinois’s first cosmetology laws, co-founded the Alpha Chi Pi Omega Sorority and Fraternity for Black beauticians, and was a founding member of Mary McLeod Bethune’s National Council of Negro Women. For decades she led the Chicago Defender Charities and its famed Bud Billiken Parade. A lifelong learner, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Bethune-Cookman College at the age of 77.

Marjorie Stewart Joyner died on December 27, 1994, in Chicago, at the age of 98, and was later inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Her ingenuity and lifelong service reflect the scholarship, service, and finer womanhood at the heart of Zeta Phi Beta.

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