Awareness raised, confidence built since Maryland’s version of the CROWN Act took effect 2 years ago

When Stephanie M. Smith was an undergraduate college student in Virginia, an older Black man approached her in a supermarket and made a critical comment about her newly self-locked natural hair. “He said, ‘You didn’t do that to your hair on purpose?’ Just me gallivanting upon with my life was so unacceptable to him,” recalled Smith, now a state delegate representing the city of Baltimore. “It’s not just non-Black people who have this internalized hatred. Plenty of Black people have absorbed this poison.”