Does Black Enterprise Ban Dredlocks?

"No Such Policy Here":

"No Such Policy Here'
June 26, 2006
Black Enterprise Seems Alone in Ban on Dreadlocks

It was in 1998 that Kenneth Meeks, then assistant managing editor of the New York Amsterdam News, the Harlem black weekly, interviewed for a job at Black Enterprise magazine. He had worn his hair in dreadlocks for 11 years, and he was aware of the publication's no-dreadlocks policy. But he had twins to feed who were less than a year old.
Though he had free-lanced for the magazine and went for the interview, Meeks didn't give working there a serious thought. But then Black Enterprise offered the salary he wanted. And, as they wooed him, they kept asking, 'Can you cut your locks?'
Meeks is a man who admires the philosophy of the Rastafarian religious movement. But he gave in to Black Enterprise's requirement. 'I took a bunch of photographs for my kids with my locks, I whispered a silent prayer, and handed the scissors to my wife, who did it. For the first year, it was devastating,' said Meeks, who now runs the publication's television enterprises. 'Every lock I passed' on the street, he told Journal-isms, was painful to look at.
This year, as reported Friday, the magazine required a summer intern, Mashaun Simon, who is the student representative on the board of the National Association of Black Journalists, to cut his dreadlocks, too.... "