Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America

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. (Nov.)