Now a practicing Rastafarian, Polk sports thick garlands that gently cascade onto his shoulders. “Your hair is your covenant,” he says. “Once you grow your locks, it puts you on a path.”
Unfortunately, that path was a collision course with Federal Express’s grooming policy, which requires men to confine their dos to “a reasonable style.” After years of deliberation, Polk’s bosses gave him a choice: shear his locks or be transferred to a lower-paid job with no customer contact. He refused both options and was terminated in June 2000.
His tale is not unique. Although Rastafarians number about 5,000 nationally, today dreadlocks, twists or braids are at the height of fashion, nearly as common as Afros were 30 years ago. If Afros symbolized militancy, dreads signal a more spiritual self-declaration, a figurative locking with African ancestors. As Stanford professor Kennell Jackson, who teaches a course called “African Coiffures and Their New World Legacies,” puts it, “There’s a divinity to these locks.”
Divine or not, some employers consider them unacceptably outre. Six other New York-area FedEx employees have lost their jobs because of dreadlocks. They have sued, alleging religious discrimination; the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and New York’s attorney general have also charged FedEx with violating religious protections in the Civil Rights Act. Rival delivery service UPS is facing similar allegations from Charles David Eatman, 35, a nine-year veteran driver who refused to hide his locks beneath a hat and was fired. Around the country, religion-based claims are pending against police departments and prison authorities, schools and retailers, alleging that rules against knotted locks unfairly single out Rastafarians in particular and African-Americans in general.
They might have a point. Hair suits date to the ’60s, when people who were fired for wearing Afros sued for the right to express themselves. But courts generally upheld the rights of employers to set their own grooming standards, as long as they are evenly applied. Religious claims have had better luck. Sikh men have won protection for their beards, for instance. Rastafarians are now seeking similar concessions.
Chris Gilliam, 37, a 14-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department who began wearing locks last fall, was drawn to the style’s symbolism. “If left to its own devices, our hair will lock. People, left to our own devices, maybe we will come together too,” he says. That utopian point was lost on his police brass, who saw only a violation of a policy banning “ragged, unkempt or extreme” appearances. (Chief Terrell Bolton, who wears his hair in a style called Box Fade, did not return calls.) Gilliam and three other officers have since been reprimanded; two have been fired.
But the dreadlock deadlock may be easing. On Aug. 8, after a suspension that lasted more than a year, Baltimore beat cop Antoine Chambers was allowed to resume his work with locks intact, thanks to the intercession of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Even FedEx altered its policy slightly a few weeks ago: in the future, observant employees who seek a waiver may wear their locks tucked under uniform hats, says a company spokeswoman. The concession isn’t enough to settle the lawsuits yet. The EEOC also wants penalties and reinstatement for the fired drivers, says trial attorney Michael Ranis. He’s optimistic. Some new styles, he knows, grow more appealing over time.
