Ebook: Cutting along the color line: Black barbers and barber shops in America
Author: Mills Quincy T
- Tags: African American barbers, African American barbers--History--19th century, African American barbers--History--20th century, African American business enterprises, African American business enterprises--History--19th century, African American business enterprises--History--20th century, African Americans--Race identity, African Americans--Race identity--History--19th century, African Americans--Race identity--History--20th century, Barbershops, Barbershops--United States--History--19th century, Barbershops-
- Year: 2013
- Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
- City: United States
- Edition: First edition
- Language: English
- epub
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...