My research focuses on how and why societal perception of Black women in America has evolved in response to the personal agency that Black women have exercised against existing social structures. Specifically, I examine how American media shifted from dehumanizing Black female figures through ‘uglifying’ or degrading their competence and beauty in advertisements pre-desegregation to dehumanizing this demographic via fetishization and animalization post-1954 with the release of legislation that ended the United States’ Jim Crow era and legalized interracial marriage: Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Loving v. Virginia (1967). Based on my research, which spans disciplines of gender and sociology, psychology, sexuality studies, women’s studies, anthropology, public policy, political science, philosophy, and public affairs, I argue that a nuanced relationship exists between Black women, advertisement producers, advertising companies, and the legislative bodies that govern the United States. Dehumanization occurs both when society portrays Black women as subhuman ‘undesirables,’ as observed before judicial rulings incited legal desegregation in the United States, and when society depicts this marginalized group as objectified, hypersexual, and animalistic. Black women reclaim and assert agency in the face of instances that downplay their humanity in various ways. Importantly, while agency in the past manifested via protesting and advocating for legal change, – the reformation of laws that actively segregated and dehumanized them –agency exerted in the contemporary era appears via storytelling – individualizing themselves amidst a society that celebrates a sexy, Black woman monolith in advertisements and the media.