US | Thu Mar 26, 2015 8:26pm EDT

Airport pat-downs of black women's hairstyles discriminatory: ACLU

SACRAMENTO, CALIF. | BY SHARON BERNSTEIN

(Reuters) - Two black women who said their hairstyles made them targets for airport security pat-downs said on Thursday the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had agreed to stop singling out women for screening based solely on their "sisterlocks."

Malaika Singleton, a neuroscientist based in Sacramento, said she was on her way to London last year for an academic conference on dementia when a TSA agent at Los Angeles International Airport began pulling and squeezing her hair.

"I was going through the screening procedures like we all do, and after I stepped out of the full body scanner, the agent said, 'OK, now I'm going to check your hair,'" Singleton said on Thursday.

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She contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, and it turned out that one of the lawyers there, a black woman who also wears the tiny, stylized form of dreadlocks known as sisterlocks had the same experience - twice.

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