EBONEE DAVIS: MOTHERLAND

Model and activist Ebonee Davis has been redefining what presence means in the fashion industry since the day she defied her agents and walked onto a Calvin Klein set with her natural hair. What followed was not just a career milestone—it was the beginning of a reckoning. The campaign dropped the same week Philando Castile was murdered by police. Something in her mind made a permanent connection.

"The lack of representation in the fashion industry was directly correlated to the lack of value of black lives in the world," she says. "It's rooted in the same systemic oppression."

The Calvin Klein Moment

Her agency told her she would lose all her bookings if she went natural. Three weeks later she booked Calvin Klein—the biggest campaign of her career at the time. She has not looked back. But she has looked deeper. "From there, it became a deeper exploration beyond just hair. I began to unpack the colonial mindset."

That unpacking led to a TED talk, a Harper's Bazaar essay, and eventually to a flight to West Africa—and to the founding of the organization Daughter, which awards scholarships to African descendants to travel to the continent.

The Motherland

"I was pretty open-minded going there for the first time," she says of her 2018 trip, "and I definitely came away from it with a sense of community, home, and groundedness—sentiments I had never experienced in the U.S." She visited Togo, Benin, and Ghana. The experience was spiritual before it was logistical.

"I began to unpack the colonial mindset. That's what led to my first trip to Africa, which led to the start of the organization Daughter in February 2019."

Daughter

The program is built for African descendants who have been separated from the continent—historically and psychologically. "We visit natural sites, monuments, museums, waterfalls, mountains. The goal is to reconnect not only physically but spiritually." Participants are called scholars. The itinerary is intentional: the land, the history, and the living culture are the curriculum.

Daughter has since expanded beyond West Africa, with planned trips to Haiti and partnerships with grassroots organizations across the diaspora. "We want to build bridges," she says. "Not just between continents but between the fragments of ourselves."

Dormant Potential

She uses a phrase that keeps returning: dormant potential. "We are magical beings, worth so much more than what we think we are capable of. We have been put in boxes in which we do not fit." The work of Daughter—and of her activism more broadly—is the work of opening the boxes. Of returning people to themselves. Of reminding a generation that the roots go deeper than anyone told them.

Photography by J.D. Barnes. Styling by Harisson T. Crite.