Cutting Along the Color Line
Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Today, black-owned barber shops play a central role in African American public life. The intimacy of commercial grooming encourages both confidentiality and camaraderie, which make the barber shop an important gathering place for African American men to talk freely. But for many years preceding and even after the Civil War, black barbers endured a measure of social stigma for perpetuating inequality: though the profession offered economic mobility to black entrepreneurs, black barbers were obliged by custom to serve an exclusively white clientele. Quincy T. Mills traces the lineage from these nineteenth-century barbers to the bustling enterprises of today, demonstrating that the livelihood offered by the service economy was crucial to the development of a black commercial sphere and the barber shop as a democratic social space.
Cutting Along the Color Line chronicles the cultural history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions. Through several generations of barbers, Mills examines the transition from slavery to freedom in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth-century expansion of black consumerism, and the challenges of professionalization, licensing laws, and competition from white barbers. He finds that the profession played a significant though complicated role in twentieth-century racial politics: while the services of shaving and grooming were instrumental in the creation of socially acceptable black masculinity, barbering permitted the financial independence to maintain public spaces that fostered civil rights politics. This sweeping, engaging history of an iconic cultural establishment shows that black entrepreneurship was intimately linked to the struggle for equality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Interviews, archival research, and examples plucked from film, and literature invigorate historian Mills's enlightening chronicle of the American barber shop from 1830 to 1970. The book follows the rise of a tradition "historically dominated by blacks," and the complicated role of barber shops as public spaces at different historical moments. While antebellum barbers treaded the edge "between service and servitude" to white aristocrats, the profession was often a means for social and economic independence. James Thomas, the first black man to achieve both freedom and residency in Nashville, owned a barber shop. Post-war, many "color-line" barbers continued to serve an all-white clientele at the expense of potential black patrons. Zora Neale Hurston witnessed such tensions as a manicurist in a D.C. shop during the summer of 1918. Other obstacles examined include new competition from white barbers, modernizations like the commercial safety razor, outside regulation, and even the financial impacts of popular hairstyles. Most intriguing is Mills's discussion of barber shop desegregation within the black freedom movement. As he stresses, "Black college students entered white barber shops for haircuts just as they entered lunch counters for hamburgers." The shop transforms with each generation in this vivid account.