Isis Brantley- The Angel Behind the Revolution

It’s been said that Angels walk among us, and a few minutes with Isis Brantley will make you a believer.

She’s been celebrated and awarded for the way that she’s transformed thousands of Black women’s crowns. And yet, her anointing doesn’t just stop at her hands. It’s showcased in the way that she shifts the energy of the room when she walks in it. How her smile lights up and captivates her audience. One would think it’s simply her beauty that draws you in, when in reality it’s the innate divine energy that courses through her veins, presented through the glow in her smooth chocolate skin and effervescent soulful eyes.

Isis Brantley, nicknamed “Yeye” (grandmother) by her loved ones, is a woman of pure genuine essence. Her depth runs deep and flows like the rivers she frequents when the moon reaches its fullness, giving offerings to her ancestors similar to the gifts she bestows upon the world.

To date, she’s been celebrated for what she’s done, her earthly accomplishments. But this interview serves as a celebration for the priceless gift that she is: a woman who could have taken the easy route and allowed darkness to consume her, but who fought with the strength of those who’d come before her to maintain her blinding light.

This is the story of Isis Brantley. The Matriarch of Natural Hair Care.

It’s impossible to celebrate National Black Hair Month without celebrating the Matriarch of Natural Hair—a woman who so fiercely protected the rights of “kitchen braid-ticians” that it temporarily cost her freedom. In 1997, Isis was arrested, handcuffed, strip-searched, and jailed for braiding hair without a state cosmetology license. She was the only braider in United States history to face incarceration for practicing this ancient African tradition.

Instead of running, she stood. She fought. And what began as a personal violation became a movement.

She’s the ultimate defender of the underdog, using her softness as her strength, allowing her words to become magic, restoring the lifeless with hope. When I ask her about that moment—sitting in a cold jail, arrested for doing what countless Black women have done to feed their families—she reflects with crystalline clarity about her choice.

“I asked myself why I was locked up, taken to jail by these cops—something I never imagined in my life. I asked myself, ‘Okay, what’s next? What am I supposed to do? I don’t understand any of this.’ So I had to understand at that point that I was given a choice—to run or to stand and accept the call for action. It’s like I was nominated to represent something bigger than me, and I didn’t want to run. It’s your time to defend the underdog. It’s your time to stand. And so with that, I knew the power of transformation was upon me.”

“I turned that pain into poetry and my heartbreak into wisdom,” she says simply.

The Public Face: A Revolutionary’s Resume

Most people recognize the name Isis Brantley as the hairstylist who created Erykah Badu’s signature aesthetic, transforming a teenager into an icon. When Erykah was no more than thirteen years old, she walked into Isis’s space and informed her how she’d changed her perception of herself: “You were the first person ever to call me beautiful.” That moment became the foundation for one of the most groundbreaking careers in music and culture. But that only scratches the surface of what Isis has done.

That 1997 arrest ignited a legal battle spanning decades. In 2007, Isis won her first victory, changing Texas law from requiring 1,500 hours of cosmetology training to just 35 hours for braiders. By 2023, after federal court rulings, her work helped pass House Bill 567, the CROWN Act in Texas, which protects Black women from hair discrimination at work and school. She didn’t just change a law. She changed the destiny of countless Black women and girls who would no longer be told their natural hair made them unprofessional or less than.

The statistics are staggering. Eighty-six percent of Black teenagers experience hair discrimination by age twelve. Black women are 2.5 times more likely to be perceived as unprofessional because of their hair. And it was Isis’s fight that changed that landscape entirely. She founded the Institute of Ancestral Braiding in 1989, created the Sisters of Isis product line, established the Natural Hair Parade and Festival in Dallas, and created the Crown Festival specifically for children. She’s taught thousands of braiders and spoken at universities including UT Austin, NYU, and Sewanee College.

During our interview, I begin to tell Isis that she’s been celebrated for what she’s accomplished with her hands, for standing in her truth, for her legal victories. She sits in her humble manner and becomes quiet. When I continue, telling her that what she hasn’t been celebrated for is the gift that she is—which is exactly where her power lies—something shifts. She lets out a soulful cry.

“You better speak that,” she says. “You better say the truth.”

When I ask how she imagines that she makes people feel seen, she reflects with wonder. “I’m gifted with the ability to see one’s magic, and read people to mirror how magnificent and how outstanding they are.”

This is the real revolution. Not the legal victories, though those matter. Not the celebrities, though they’re part of the story. The real revolution is Isis’s ability to unlock something in people that they didn’t know was there—of enduring unspeakable pain and remaining so wrapped in love that she infects everyone she comes across. She is an incredibly rare magical force, and her essence speaks for itself.

When I ask her directly if she even recognizes the impact she’s had on the community, her voice breaks. “Honestly, it’s this moment with you today. Not until this moment with this interview did I even know the impact that I have on people.”

This is the moment that stops me. Isis has lived her life as a fierce defender of love, her entire life, and yet the magnitude of just how powerful and loud her love is has been invisible to her. To understand Isis and her mission, to truly grasp the impact of her greatness, you have to understand where it all began.

“As a kid, coming up in a very poor environment, there was a lot of civil unrest, a lot of things happening around the community,” Isis tells me. “And yet, there was something very unique about my mother. Her ability to still create an environment that activated self-worth, that activated all the gifts. Around this time, it was so easy for us to find a reason to celebrate life.”

Her mother, Bill Brantley, had five children by age twenty-four and worked two jobs. She could have been broken by life. Instead, she became an alchemist. She took the anger, the poverty, the oppression of the projects in South Dallas and transformed it into a celebration. The Brantley house became the heart of the community with Bill inviting neighborhood children to sing, to dance, to perform. She created talent shows where every child’s natural beauty and gifts were highlighted. When people in the projects wanted to become somebody, they came to Bill Brantley’s house.

“It’s like sugar that was sprinkled all over the community,” Isis says, her voice full of reverence even now. “Because when people wanted to come and be somebody in the projects, they would always come to Bill Brantley’s house, because they knew that we were going to be doing something on stage, that we were going to be highlighting their natural beauty, their natural gifts. They just knew this is where we go to smile.”

Isis watched her mother turn homelessness into home. Turn struggle into art. Turn pain into poetry. Her mother showed her that in the darkest places, you still bring light. That your circumstances are not weakness, but power waiting to be unleashed.

This woman has been through the ringer and remained a vessel of love. It’s not just something she learned, It’s who she is. It’s what she leads with. It’s what she creates with. It’s her DNA.

Black Girl Magic as a Practice

When I ask Isis about Black girl magic and Black joy, she doesn’t give me theory. She gives me her life.

“I feel the need to say that’s how I grew up, wrapped in Black girl magic and joy. We started the Kool Kat Klub in the projects. There may have been people over here participating in some type of tournament, it was just always a collective, an ancestral sweetness of rhythm and a fire. That’s what we were living and growing and excelling from. It’s almost like somebody left the blueprint for us to follow. It was the blueprint that we gifted from generation to generation. We were always able to tap into it.”

Isis was immersed in a culture where her mother wrapped a child’s throat with herbs, where neighbors created an informal economy on the porches of the projects, trading and building community with nothing but their ingenuity. It was in those projects where Isis learned to see beauty as medicine and laughter as resistance.

“Black girl joy and magic doesn’t deny the reality,” Isis says firmly. “It uncovers it. It transforms it.”

I ask her what she would say to someone who didn’t grow up seeing that kind of love, someone in survival mode who doesn’t know how to reconnect to softness.

Her answer is the work she’s been doing her entire life. She talks about mothers bringing daughters to her salon, how she tells them: “Your life, girl, fills your beauty. Your joy makes people happy.” She points out their eyes. She notices their smile. She speaks to the artist she sees in them. And something awakens.

“People who are not Black, they don’t know how we do it,” Isis says, her voice filled with warmth. “Black women are as close to God as you can get. We just have that divine feminine resilience.”

The Rebirth: From Dana to Isis

When “Dana’s” first husband gave her a book and told her he wanted to call her Isis, she understood immediately. Her birth name, Dana, carried the weight of a different story. Dana came with chastisement and hardship, with the aggressive teachings the women before her inherited. Dana was beautiful, but Dana was also tethered to pain.

Isis, the goddess of love and beauty and protector of children, was a new beginning. It was like the new moon. A chance to begin again.

“I would tell my mom, ‘Keeping the name Dana would have kept me attached to the extension cord, the cuttings, the fights with her men, the stealing,’” Isis explains. She sits in reflective silence, and I join her, acknowledging that she’s sharing a piece of herself with me that she’s never shared with any reporter, in any other interview. “Dana was way too beautiful of a spirit for me to carry in my DNA as something that was not beautiful.”

This act of naming herself was not rejection. It was reclamation. It was Isis choosing the version of herself that she knew was true. The version that could see magic in others. The version that could transform pain into light.

The Recognition: When She Finally Saw Herself

The moment that changed everything came when I asked her directly: “You’ve worked with homeless people and celebrities alike, you’ve infused so much love into this community, do you see that and feel proud, or is it just so natural to you that you don’t think about it?”

I heard her getting choked up with emotion through the phone. “Honestly, it’s this moment with you today. I see it.”

For the first time, telling her own story, Isis was seeing herself. She was recognizing the invisible work she’d been doing. She understood that when people encountered her, they became better. They felt more courageous. They were infused with beautiful activation. They began to make money. They had better lives.

“I’ve been this way ever since I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old,” she says, her voice trembling slightly. “Things became intentional. And I just realized that today.”

This is the power of witnessing. This is why it’s so important to give our matriarchs their flowers while they’re here with us. Because there are countless women like Isis who have spent their lives healing others, transforming communities, lighting the way for generations, and yet, they don’t even know the magnitude of what they’ve done, or the safety that they’ve created within others.

The Sacred Space: What We Stand to Lose

Isis talks about the importance of safe spaces with spiritual urgency. Her salon has always been more than a business. It’s been a sanctuary. A place where people can come to be themselves, to be loved, to be celebrated.

“When you touch a person’s head, you are touching their spirit,” she tells me. “And your hands either lift their spirit with confidence and truth, or you are taking away what’s most important. That’s that Godhead, those antennas that are connected to The Most High.”

In a world where we’re losing our third spaces, where we’re losing our matriarchs, where we’re becoming a fraction of who we could be by design, Isis has remained still. Like water, she has not been moved. She has kept creating these spaces. She has kept showing up.

When I ask what it feels like to carry that kind of power, to be positioned by the divine to open the channels of other people’s power, she pauses.

“It’s a blessing to continue to carry that, to carry The Matriarchy,” she says. “I am their strength and their wisdom and their beauty. I am their blood. Nobody sat down and shared with me how to do this. I chose to come back to Earth so that I can carry their power, that I can exhume their power.”

The Wisdom: Words for the Journey

Before we end, I ask Isis if there’s anything else, any words of wisdom for someone just starting their journey of returning to love.

“Spiritually and professionally speaking, we must find community,“ she says without hesitation. “We find the confidence in the medicine that we need to keep the connection. We need to reconnect to four hundred years of understanding. My salon is more than a business. It’s a sanctuary.”

Then she offers something that feels like a prayer, a benediction, the distillation of everything she’s learned and lived:

“Your chair is your throne. Your hands your medicine. Your salon is your sanctuary, and with that people can rest. And once they rest, they rise.”

The Legacy: Why Now?

Isis Brantley is a revolutionary, but not in the way we typically celebrate revolutionaries. She hasn’t made headlines by being loud or confrontational. She’s made a difference by being deeply, unapologetically herself. By standing in her light even when the world tried to dim it, and by transmuting generational pain into generational healing.

She’s fought legal battles for decades. She’s raised up thousands of Black women and girls through her work. She’s protected the sacredness of Black hair and the divinity of Black beauty at a time when the world still tries to erase both. She’s done all of this while remaining soft, open, generous, and deeply rooted in love.

And until this interview, she hadn’t even known the full extent of what she’d done.

This is why it’s so important to give our matriarchs their flowers while they’re here with us. Not after they’re gone. Not in retrospect. Now. While they can feel it. While they can know it. While they can understand the magnitude of their own magic.

Isis Brantley is still here. She’s still creating spaces for people to be celebrated. She’s still seeing magic in others when they can’t see it in themselves. She’s still turning pain into poetry and struggle into art.

Now, finally, she sees herself the way we see her. As an angel behind the revolution. As a vessel of love so profound that it changed laws, changed lives, and changed the trajectory of an entire community.

That’s the real magic. And it’s been in her all along.