Antonio Johnson
De’Angelo Smith’s carefully steadied hand cuts a closed-eyed, relaxed client, July 2018
Executive Cuts and More Barber Shop, Detroit, Michigan
Digital B&W
Image courtesy of the artist
YOU NEXT: HOW BLACK BARBERSHOPS SAVE LIVES
ANTONIO “TONE” JOHNSON
Antonio Johnson
De’Angelo Smith’s carefully steadied hand cuts a closed-eyed, relaxed client, July 2018
Executive Cuts and More Barber Shop, Detroit, Michigan
Digital B&W
Image courtesy of the artist
Some time ago, I trekked from my home in Brooklyn to the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem to watch the comedian Hannibal Buress perform. In the middle of his act and out of nowhere, Buress asked the crowd, “You ever think you were depressed but really you just needed a haircut?” The joke elicited chuckles from the largely White audience but the Black men in the room erupted in laughter.
As Buress’s joke and the response it received suggest, there’s something about a fresh haircut that can change a Black man’s outlook on the world and himself. Indeed, getting a haircut is an external experience that can have a profound internal impact on a Black man, and that experience extends beyond just a cut to the barbershop itself.
This is something I’ve always felt. Growing up, getting my haircut was a weekly event that I looked forward to more than anything. My uncle Jason, my mother’s youngest brother, was a barber and is still today my reference for everything cool, stylish, and “fly.”
In between semesters at college, he worked in a barbershop on Market Street. I can picture it as if I was there now—the old wood paneling, the receptionist in her pink shirt with gold doorknocker earrings and long nails. When it was my turn, my uncle would sit me in his chair, turn me toward the mirror and say jokingly, “Man, your hair is peasy! Let me hook you up.”
In that chair, surrounded by members of my community, totems of our shared experience and under the hand of my uncle, I felt safe and like anything was possible. Those feelings of confidence and power only grew as I saw myself transform from “peasy-headed” to crisp, new, and ready to take on the world.
Then there was my dad’s barber, Mr. Leon. His barbershop was in Southwest Philly, just around the corner from my dad’s childhood home. Mr. Leon was in high demand as a barber—despite his wet and silky Jheri curl—and my dad would remind me on the drive to Mr. Leon’s shop that the older man had cut his hair for every major moment in his life—graduations, first dates, his wedding.
While my dad got his usual cut, I’d study the style guides taped to the walls in the small shop and flip through every issue of Jet magazine I could get my hands on to see the Beauty of the Week. It was also at Mr. Leon’s that I learned that my dad was a basketball legend in our community. “Your dad was better than Magic,” a customer might say before another jumped in to describe my dad’s jump shot or an incredible play he once made.
Over the years, I came to understand that barbershops were more than places to get a shape-up, a shave, or trim. I learned that barbershops were the only spaces created in American life where Black men can speak and receive feedback about who they are, who they want to be, and what they believe to be true about the world around them.
Unbeknownst to many, the Black barbershop’s history as a site of uplift runs deep. As stops on the underground railroad, barbershops literally gave freedom to Black people during slavery.1 After slavery, barbers—many of whom had been trained to serve White men as slaves—became some of the race’s first entrepreneurs.2
As such, barbershops became sites of economic power, and many barbers used their resources to influence local politics and sometimes provided loans to customers so they might purchase the freedom of family members or relocate to cities with better opportunities.3 This is a history unknown to many, though it is certainly felt in the Black barbershop experience today. After all, it was in a Black barbershop at eleven years old that I first learned about historically Black colleges. I’d later graduate from one, Morgan State University in Baltimore.
Antonio Johnson
A reluctant client recoils at the sight of clippers, August 2018
Better Image Barber Salon, Chicago, Illinois
Digital B&W
Image courtesy of the artist
I’m embarking on a twelve-city tour of America’s Black barbershops to document their meaning, to tell the true and untold story of one the nation’s oldest cultural institutions. This project, You Next, is an intimate photographic exploration of the ways Black barbershops operate as sites for the cultivation of Black male identity and wellness. It will visit shops in major U.S. cities known for their barbershop culture—Newark, Washington D.C., New York City, Oakland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, and my hometown of Philadelphia.
When complete, You Next will highlight the role of Black barbers as stewards of these spaces who literally have a hand in shaping identity and maintaining barbershops as physical sites for community, thought, and expression.
They serve that purpose on a deep psychosocial level. That is, of course, not to say that barbershops are perfect spaces. Sometimes they can act as sites of disrespectability, homophobia, and misogyny. Still, most Black men—even those who are sometimes uncomfortable in barbershops—might admit they find solace and possibility within their walls.
So why You Next? In Black barbershops, “you next” is said by barbers to customers to indicate that they’re on deck for a haircut. After waiting in a shop, sharing, laughing, debating, those magic words signify you are about to be transformed. It is my hope that viewers of You Next will see themselves in the images captured, identify with the experience, and be transformed by it.
Beyond haircuts, barbershops have tremendous potential to help the Black men they serve achieve health and wholeness. In fact, there are some barbershops across the country already offering much-needed social services to great success.
Antonio Johnson
Donald Perry holds a client’s head still while giving him a line-up, August 2018
The Grain, Atlanta, Georgia
Digital B&W
Image courtesy of the artist
Black men have the lowest life expectancies and highest death rates of all Americans.4 There are a number of things killing us: Homicide is a leading cause of death,5 and Black men die at higher rates than other men from heart disease,6 HIV/AIDS,7 and certain cancers.8 Additionally, many Black men are crippled in our society and economy by disproportionately high unemployment rates,9 low graduation rates,10 and mental illness that often goes undiagnosed and untreated.
Indeed, Black men in America are dying too soon from preventable diseases, violence, a dearth of opportunity and, ultimately, a lack of access to interventions and care. There are barbers all across the country trying to change that, though.
Aaron Perry, the owner of JP Hair Design in Madison, Wisconsin, opened the Men’s Health & Wellness Center in a room added on to the barbershop last year. With a ninety-thousand-dollar grant from a Catholic charity, the center seeks to educate the shop’s clientele regarding diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and other conditions that disproportionately affect Black men. Over the next three years, Perry hopes to bring in screenings for diabetes, high cholesterol, kidney disease, and other conditions.
“Men typically don’t go to the doctor. They don’t seek out medical information,” Perry told Wisconsin State Journal. “We’re reaching men in a space where they’re already comfortable.”11
Across the pond, Black barbers are also developing barbershop-based mental health interventions. The barbers at Sammy’s, an Afro-Caribbean shop in London’s Camden section, made headlines early last year after they all committed to taking mental health first aid courses. It was an initiative that came out of their interaction with customers they believed weren’t well.
“As barbers, we get to meet many, many people. We speak with guys who we can tell are unwell, but they don’t talk about it and aren’t getting help,” said Sam Adu, who runs Sammy’s.12
“That’s why we’ve got to change things,” said Steve Gayle, another Sammy’s barber. “We want people to talk about it—to know it’s normal. Mental health is something everyone has, it’s just like physical health—sometimes it’s good, other times not so good. Anyone can get the flu and anyone can get depressed or anxious. If we talk about it, hopefully, other guys will too. They can get help to stop it from getting worse.”
Another recent example of barbershops in action as sites for social services came in September when businessman Russell Simmons traveled to Chicago to address the rising tide of violence in the city. Naturally, he targeted barbershops to get out his message. Simmons launched RushCard’s Keep the Peace initiative at Barber Studio on Chicago’s South Side. The initiative seeks to develop barbershops into focal points for conflict resolution, mentoring, and political organizing.
What efforts like RushCard’s Keep the Peace Initiative, and those at Sammy’s and JP Hair Design, show is that Black barbers understand their significance in the Black community and the special position they occupy. They also demonstrate that Black barbershops can effectively provide social services to individuals who need them, sometimes desperately.
I would really like to think that other people go to the barbershop because of this history or for the same reasons I do. I hope that they understand the significance and rarity of the space, but pop culture representations of barbershops suggest that most people believe them simply to be places to get a haircut. At the most, if one has watched films like Barbershop, they might understand that barbershops serve as neighborhood hubs hosting an array of characters and voices.
The interpretation of the barbershop as a community center still falls short, however, of capturing what they really are for so many Black men: sanctuaries in a hostile land.
Antonio Johnson
Collages of style guides and price charts, June 2018
Walt’s Barber and Bike Shop, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Digital B&W
Image courtesy of the artist
Antonio Johnson
Confrontation: A scene from Malden Brothers Barbershop, August 2018
Malden Brothers Barbershop, Montgomery, Alabama
Digital B&W
Image courtesy of the artist
Antonio Johnson
Bradley Lester uses downtime to shave his head, July 2018
Barber Station, Detroit, Michigan
Digital B&W
Image courtesy of the artist
Antonio Johnson
Tools of the trade: various clippers, brushes, and combs used by Maximilian A. J. Wells, a renowned Philadelphia-based barber, June 2018
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Digital B&W
Image courtesy of the artist
1. Mills, Quincy T. Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Levine, Robert S et al. “United States Counties with Low Black Male Mortality Rates,” The American Journal of Medicine, vol. 126,1 (2013): 76–80. doi:10.1016/j.amjmed.2012.06.019.
5. Michigan Department of Community Health. What Every African American Man Should Know About, 2005. www.michigan.gov/documents/MDCH_African_American_brochure_131114_7.pdf.
6. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “CDC Media Relations: Press Release.” www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/r010620.htm.
7. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “HIV Surveillance Report: Diagnoses of HIV Infection in the United States and Dependent Areas, 2016.” www.cdc.gov/hiv/pdf/library/reports/surveillance/cdc-hiv-surveillance-report-2016-vol-28.pdf.
8. National Cancer Institute, et al. “African American Disparities in Low-Grade Prostate Cancer Death.” www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2019/prostate-cancer-death-disparities-black-men.
9. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table A-2. Employment Status of the Civilian Population by Race, Sex, and Age,” May 11, 2020. www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm.
10. Indicator 23: Postsecondary Graduation Rates, nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_red.asp.
11. Wahlberg, David. “Barbershop Health Center Aims to Improve Health of Madison’s Black Men,” Madison.com, November 28, 2016. madison.com/wsj/news/local/health-med-fit/barbershop-health-center-aims-to-improve-health-of-madison-s/article_596a3b47-a116-50e7-b67c-cc2d358ac56c.html.
12. “Afro-Caribbean Barbers Hope to Help Black Men Open up about Mental Health Worries.” Islington Tribune, May 24, 2020. islingtontribune.com/article/barbers-mental-health?sp=75&sq=organ.
JOHNSON