1959 Maybelline Ad Pays Tribute to a Century of Black Life, History and Culture

Selma featured and won the 2015 Academy Award for best song... "Glory."  I think my Great uncle, Tom Lyle Williams would be proud to have played a part of Black History. Maybelline was the first American Cosmetic Company in history to feature a black model in an ad in 1959.

Tom Lyle Williams, contracted Dorothea Towles Church, in 1959.  She was the first Black Maybelline model to appear in Ebony Magazine.

This ad features Dorothea Towles Church, with, Magic Mascara, Maybelline's first wand mascara, and a new line of products, in 1959.

Dorothea Towles Church, the first successful black model in Paris, who discovered personal liberation on the runways of Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1950s,

  When it comes to beauty, color doesn't matter.

Claudinette Fouchard

Ebony captured the No. 1 spot as the most widely circulated and most popular Black magazine, a position it has been able to maintain for 50 consecutive years.

Claudinette Fouchard the first Haitian to compete in Miss World. Miss Haiti, is crowned Reine Mondiale du Sucre 1960 by Miss International 1960, Stella Marquez of Colombia.

"Ebony," says Publisher John H. Johnson, "was founded to project all dimension of the Black personality in a world saturated with stereotypes. 

I remember being with my family, at my great uncle Tom Lyle's, home in Bel Air, and noticing an Ebony Magazine in the pile of magazines next to his chair.  I'd seen the pile from around the world, with Maybelline ad's in them, all my life, but never saw a magazine like this one.  He opened a page to a Maybelline ad, featuring an African American, Maybelline model, and said, isn't she gorgeous.