Cutting Along the Color Line

January 6, 2014
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.

February 15, 2014

Mills (history, Vassar Coll.) examines the culture and history of black barbers and their barbershops from antebellum America through changes during and after the civil rights era. While taking a broad view and outlining the interrelationship of politics, fashions, and the barbershop business across time, Mills narrows in on a few stories to illustrate his findings. He traces the development of an association of black barbers, details the rise of several prominent businesses, and emphasizes the contradictions faced by many black barbers who achieved success by grooming only white patrons. The most interesting sections of his book are those where he delves deeply into stories of particular barbers such as Alonzo Herndon of Atlanta, a founding member of the Niagara Movement (precursor to the NAACP), and an organizer of insurance companies serving African Americans. He achieved success by "shaving the city's wealthy and politically connected white patrons." Mills covers desegregation's effects on barbershops in the South. VERDICT While intriguing and thoroughly documented, recognizing incongruities, tensions, and the ironies that arose from barbershops functioning both as businesses and as cultural institutions, Mills's book is not organized so as to keep his central themes clear. Specialists with a deep interest in the history of race, African American culture, and politics will find it useful, but readers with a more general interest may be lost by the difficult structure.--Ahmer Qadeer, Brooklyn

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