Vanilla Beane Obituary

Vanilla Beane was an African American businesswoman and milliner. Beane was the sixth of seven children born on September 13, 1919, in Wilson, North Carolina to Martha Hagans Powell and James Powell.

She attended a single-room school in Nash County, North Carolina, and worked on local farms, including tobacco and cotton.

She graduated from Charles H. Darden High School in 1940, but as a member of the 1938 class.

Beane followed her two sisters to Washington, D.C. in the 1940s because there were more jobs available.

Throughout her career, Beane created custom hats for local and national figures such as poet Maya Angelou and civil rights activist Dorothy Height; one of Height’s hats is featured on the USPS Forever stamp.

In 1975, she was inducted into the National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers Hall of Fame, a trade group founded in 1949 in New York City for Black fashion professionals.

Vanilla Beane died on October 23, 2022, at a Washington hospital. She was 103 years old. According to her grandson Craig Seymour, the cause was complications from an aortic tear.