Desegregation and the Barber Shop
WHILE visiting Chicago in November 1942, Bayard Rustin, civil rights activist, remarked to associates of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) that he needed a haircut. When someone told Rustin where he could not get one, the University of Chicago barber shop, he proceeded to test the waters. Rustin entered the Reynolds Club shop shortly before James Robinson, a white CORE member. The barber bypassed Rustin and offered to groom Robinson, but both activists insisted that Rustin be served first. The barber denied Rustin his haircut, but a Divinity School professor witnessed the exchange and subsequently formed a committee of Divinity School faculty and CORE members to desegregate the shop. After threatening a boycott, the committee convinced the campus shop to desegregate.1 What did it mean to travel in the Jim Crow era and seek a haircut in a white barber shop? Where did the desegregation of white barber shops fit within the larger black freedom movement?
Exclusion from white barber shops was off the radar of most black activists; in refusing to cut African Americans’ hair, white barbers had the convenient excuse that they lacked the training to cut “kinky” hair. In doing so, however, they relied on biological racism, drawing on ways of seeing race through hair type, to turn customers away. Men who were excluded understood the arbitrariness of this policy, and when black college students were turned away from campus barber shops, progressive white students rallied in support of their classmates. The largest of these campaigns took place on or near northern rural college campuses with small black neighboring populations. While these desegregation campaigns complemented other campaigns to open access to public places, many wondered if this was a black cause—or if liberal white students were establishing their own interpretation of civil rights.
Yet the struggle against segregated barber shops on campus was not simply an issue of adjustment to college-town living; black domestic and international travelers found themselves challenging Jim Crow's color line as well. A black barber shop was not on every corner in American cities and small towns, and black travelers loathed having to go far out of their way to find a black barber. Moreover, African diplomats in the United States encountered the same humiliation of being refused service from white barbers, which caused international embarrassment to the United States during the Cold War. As the issue grew from a local to a national problem, protesters relied on civil rights and labor legislation, as well as appeals to the State Department, to desegregate white shops. That the evidence of segregation in this period comes from college students and domestic and international travelers suggests that traveling for school and leisure brought with it certain class expectations: black middle-class travelers expected to be able to travel freely and be accommodated at their convenience. In the years after World War II, black encounters with Jim Crow's barber shop had to do with extended travel away from black neighborhoods, in contrast to the daily lives of black laborers and domestics. In short, what would African Americans do when they were away from the familiar space of black barber shops?
As activists in the black freedom movement struggled to break the back of Jim Crow in places of public accommodation across the nation, students in northern college towns, and some urban college campuses, targeted white barber shops on and around campus to address racial discrimination in their backyards. College students across the country, particularly in the North and West, noticed that segregated barber shops were affecting both African American students and African exchange students in the post–World War II period. Some towns had no black barber shops, and white colleges and universities certainly had none on campus. This left the small number of African, African American, and Caribbean students to drive several miles to a black barber, cut their own hair, go to a fellow student with haircutting skills—or go to the campus barber. For many, the last option was certainly most convenient, but white shops on or near campus proved less than welcoming.
College student protests of white barber shops reflected a coalition of white and black students, many affiliated with their campus chapter of the NAACP or other student organizations, who found in these campaigns an opportunity to participate in the black freedom movement. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it took a popular black athlete to spark a campus-wide protest of white barber shops near campus.2 On October 30, 1953, Lee Ingwerson denied a haircut to James Caroline, the university's star halfback, even though the barber displayed Caroline's picture in the shop window along with a welcome sign on the door.3 A week later, on the afternoon of the Illinois-Michigan game, students affiliated with the Student-Community Human Relations Council (S-CHRC) distributed flyers to football fans to raise awareness of the issue. Illinois ranked fourth in the Associated Press (AP) poll coming into the game, so protesters were sure to see a huge crowd. One flyer read: “‘J.C.’ Caroline, brilliant star halfback of the fighting Illini, whom you'll see in action today, ran into an obstacle greater than any Ohio or Purdue line could produce. The obstacle, a campus barber; ‘J.C.’ was flatly, and rudely refused service, due to the fact that he's a Negro! Yes, ‘J.C.’ Caroline, potential All-American cheered by thousands each Saturday cannot get a haircut on his own campus! Here is a strange example where Americanism is displayed on Saturday afternoons and vicious, active discrimination during the rest of the week. Is this the American way?” (emphasis in the original).4 The protesters identified a problem that black athletes and entertainers knew all too well: white business owners lauded their talents but deplored their bodies, frequently resulting in discrimination.
Local white barbers cited two major reasons for not cutting black customers’ hair. First, barbers claimed they lacked the skill and “special equipment” to cut “Negro hair,” which they believed took longer to cut than whites’ hair. Second, they feared losing white patrons by serving blacks. The Racial Equality committee of the campus YMCA had been assisting with the protests and refuted these excuses by referring to a University of Chicago barber who, after Rustin's stand and subsequent protest, opened his doors to all patrons.5 According to the committee, the barber had not lost business since he changed his policy, his barbers learned to cut blacks’ hair without special training, and he did not need to invest in new equipment. Although the Illinois campus area barbers claimed their policy was not based on prejudice, they pressed that the time was not ripe for a nondiscriminatory policy in their shops.6
Despite barbers’ reluctance, the S-CHRC mounted a layered campaign that included public pressure and legal action. The YMCA Racial Equality committee drew up petitions that read, “I will continue to obtain my haircut in a barbershop which will cut hair of individuals regardless of race, color, or creed.” The committee presented approximately 2,000 male signatures to the barbers as a kind of guarantee that they would not lose business. The committee also organized a legal action committee to gather evidence against barbers, which was taken to state attorney John Bresee. Bresee was slow to act, but Robert Johnson, a black student in his senior year and a member of S-CHRC, filed suit against Ingwerson, with financial backing from the YMCA Committee. The committee also enlisted public opinion and successfully encouraged the University Student Senate, the Men's Independent Association, and the Student Committee on Discrimination and Academic Freedom to pass resolutions on the matter. The YMCA Committee even requested assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Chicago. Earl S. Rappaport, student co-chairman, wrote a letter to the ACLU describing the campaign, and framed it in terms of American foreign relations. Rappaport wrote, “I would also like to point out the fact that the Champaign-Urbana area is visited by so many outstanding individuals and students of foreign countries attend the University that this discrimination may have many bad repercussions on the nation as well as the international scene.”7 They believed the muscle of a national organization such as the ACLU would be too much for local barbers to bear. Edward H. Meyerding, executive director of the ACLU in Chicago, declined to get involved because two attorneys had already taken Johnson's case and the ACLU had a policy of not competing with the NAACP or duplicating its work and services if they decided to get involved on appeal.8 With continued pressure and protest to change their policies, local barbers appeased the protesters in a very calculating way.
On Saturday, May 1, 1954, campus barber shop proprietors announced they would take steps to accommodate black customers. However, their steps toward desegregation came with caveats and conditions that either left them power to turn away potential clients or transferred the quality of haircut received onto the customer. Rules posted in two shops near campus noted these qualifications:
With these rules, white barbers essentially formalized what they had already been doing. The rules at once emphasized barbers’ skills and their underlying preference to keep blacks and women out of their shops. It is unclear what “unusual styles” the first rule referenced: in the 1950s no hairstyle brought women into the barber shops in large numbers, as the bob did in the 1920s. Rules 2 and 3 “officially” excluded anyone who appeared to have hair that white barbers marked as other-than-straight (curly, kinky, wooly). Although these “regulations are applicable to all members of the public, regardless of race,” black men were more likely to be marked as having “curly, kinky, wooley” hair. Since the late nineteenth century, white barbers who were associated with the barbers’ union commonly used public health or a concern for the spread of contagious diseases to secure regulations that would marginalize black barbers. But here, white barbers employed the barbers’ licensing law, passed in 1919, and the public health provision as a tool to exclude black customers. In all, these rules would have been woefully inadequate under any circumstances, but they left an opening for students to at least get inside the shops.
And they did, with help. By October 1, the S-CHRC reported that all shops had opened their doors to black customers—including Ingwersen's shop, which, a few days earlier, had fallen in line. The students at Illinois successfully obtained equal access to white barber shops; equal treatment, though, was another matter. Some students were satisfactorily served and others “assumed responsibility” for their haircut. Albert Porter said he was humiliated in Val Rund's Barber Shop. “After about three minutes of close-cutting with the clippers,” Porter reported, Rund “slapped some lather on my head and rubbed so hard I thought I would start to bleed. He took the stuff off; I paid him; he threw the change in my hand, and I left.”10 Some black students received butchered haircuts that would have made them the laughingstock of campus. According to John Langdon, acting co-chair of the S-CHRC, a barber “played a game” with a black customer, “spinning around on his heels and taking swipes at the customer's head with the clippers as he turned.”11
Campus barber shop politics also inspired the white liberals who lived in many college towns. For example, the residents of Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of Antioch College, took pride in the town's liberalism, and when word spread that two white barber shops refused to serve black customers, even though these were long-standing policies, students and residents sprang to action. In 1960, the campus chapter of the NAACP initiated a test case against Squire's and Lewis Gegner's barber shops. Lawrence Rubin, a white student, served as president of this predominately white chapter. Black and white students entered the shops and demanded service. Squire capitulated, but Gegner would not be moved. “You know I don't cut Negro hair,” he told the black student.
The ACLU assisted in charging Gegner for violating Ohio's public accommodation statute. Gegner's defense attorney painted him as a hardworking, independent business owner and the ACLU as a communist-leaning, un-American organization set to infringe on individual liberties. The defense also pulled out a surprise star witness: a black barber who catered to Yellow Spring's black community. He testified that “black hair” required special training because it differed from “white hair.” Rubin believed this testimony was self-serving because he stood to gain customers. Yet the prosecution had a star witness of its own who would challenge Gegner's claim of not being able to cut curly hair. Professor David Epstein testified that he had gotten his haircut at Gegner's shop. Epstein lowered his head and showed the court his “full head of tight, dark, kinky curls.”12 This damning testimony revealed to the jury that Gegner possessed the skills to cut curly hair and he violated state law by refusing to cut blacks’ curly hair. They found Gegner guilty and fined him one dollar—hardly a punitive judgment—which had no effect on him or his business.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Civil Rights Commission ordered Gegner to accommodate black customers. The commission based its ruling on a law that had become effective in October 1961 requiring any business to serve all customers regardless of race, creed, or color. Common Pleas Judge Warren C. Young ruled against this section of the law and threw out the commission's order to Gegner, rendering it unconstitutional. Young reasoned that a barber must have special training, pass a state examination, and be licensed. Ultimately, he agreed with Gegner that compelling him to serve black customers when he did not know how to cut their hair abridged his inherent freedom to operate his trade.13 The problem with the judge's reasoning was that Gegner did pass a state examination and was indeed licensed.
In the aftermath of Gegner's appeal, students continued to pressure him to serve all customers. The organizers and demonstrators were mostly white students from Antioch. They had been unsuccessful in convincing black students from neighboring Wilberforce University and Central State College, two historically black colleges and universities, to join the protests. Otha Nixon had recently moved to Yellow Springs after he graduated from Central State. He commuted every day to Dayton, where he worked as a teacher. He read in the Yellow Springs News that Antioch students were picketing Gegner's shop. Intrigued by the demonstrations, Nixon attended the meetings held by the Antioch Committee for Racial Equality (ACRE). He was not motivated to join the demonstrations as a move to secure Gegner as his barber. Nixon did not even frequent the local black barber shop because he disliked the way this barber cut his hair. In fact, a friend from college continued to cut Nixon's hair. The local black barber, though, seemed miffed that Nixon was involved in the protests. “Why are you doing this, when you can come here and get your haircut,” the barber asked him. Nixon replied, “Man, I'm doing it because he won't cut my hair. That's why. And, it's wrong.” One of a few black participants, Nixon offered to recruit black students from Wilberforce and Central State. The ACRE needed blacks’ involvement to prevent authorities from marginalizing their campaign as one that lacked the support of the very people they proposed to be fighting for. Pragmatically, they needed black men to seek haircuts inside the shop. Nixon obtained permission from Charles Wesley, noted historian and president of Central State, to “go into the cafeteria and speak to the students and tell them that we needed black participation at Gegner's.” Wesley, like other black college presidents who faced the reality that their students participated in the sit-in movement, provided unofficial support, telling Nixon, “Don't tell them I gave you permission.”14 As their numbers increased, students staged two major demonstrations at Gegner's in 1963 and 1964; in between the two, they picketed the shop every Saturday.
Nixon entered Gegner's shop with another black student and a white student, and went directly to Gegner for a haircut. Gegner refused and told him to leave, an order that Nixon ignored. Since they had planned this test, there were tons of students and police outside the barber shop. The police forcefully removed him from the shop. As Nixon remembered these details in 2009, he became overcome with emotion as he recalled the events of that day. When the police dragged him out of the shop he “started singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ I cried…got emotional, limp, couldn't walk…they had to carry me.” The police took him to the jailhouse but did not arrest him.15 After this incident, the publicity began to pick up as newspapers across the country reported on the demonstrations.
The 1964 demonstration probably drew the most publicity because the police engaged in a southern-style strategy of resistance that would have made Eugene “Bull” Connor proud. Nixon remembered this as the “biggie” where “they had police dogs, fire hoses, fire engines, and tear gas. They had their billy clubs. They had these redneck police from the other surrounding counties.” Rubin recalled that “hundreds of Antioch students and others held a mass protest” in front of Gegner's shop. Those “others” comprised black students from Central State and Wilberforce. Typical of protest decorum, male and female students dressed in their Sunday finest for the demonstration. The fire engines and dogs indicated to them that this might be a violent battle. It is unclear what precipitated the police charging into the crowd, but they started grabbing the students and, according to Nixon, “dislocating or breaking their thumbs.” The students were “screaming and hollering, and people were running, and the tear gas started, the water hose started…and they were trying to throw us into cars.” The cloud of tear gas watered students’ eyes and the students began to vomit. The police arrested 108 students that day. The Yellow Springs News office was next door to Gegner's shop, offering their photographers intimate access to the escalating violence, which they captured and documented in the paper the following day. To avert further protests, Gegner closed his shop until the Ohio Supreme Court ruled on his appeal against the Civil Rights Commission order that he serve black customers.16
The demonstrations at Gegner's barber shop revealed fissures within white communities that often sat hidden behind public expressions of liberalism. While the coalition of police officers from surrounding counties acted as ambassadors for Bull Connor, Yellow Springs police chief James McKee, a black man, generally supported the demonstrations as long as they remained peaceful and nonviolent. Many Yellow Springs residents supported the demonstrations as well. Nixon remembered Yellow Springs as a very liberal, “hippie” town. His reference point for liberalism was that “there were a lot of mixed marriages.”17 Members of the village council, though, viewed the demonstrations differently. They were concerned that the town's liberal image would be tarnished. Nixon did not recall Jim Crow rearing its head in any other space in the town. Hundreds of students demonstrating in Yellow Springs did not fit well with the liberal image held by black and white residents; Yellow Springs was not supposed to be Birmingham. The village council did not support the demonstrations because it wanted to keep the national spotlight off the town, especially considering the contentious and violent demonstrations in the South.18
More broadly, the challenges that black students faced—in Yellow Springs and other college towns—in getting a haircut illuminate the racial and spatial politics of grooming. On one hand, barbers correctly pointed out that there are different hair types. “Straight,” “curly,” and “tightly coiled” are the three most common hair types, each requiring different grooming methods. For example, barbers can cut straight hair with a comb and scissors. These two instruments are insufficient to cut tightly coiled hair because the hair grows in various directions. Instead, clippers are used for tightly coiled hair because they can rapidly cut the hair close. White and black barbers have historically acknowledged these differences. Yet, white barbers appropriated this biological difference to mark tightly coiled hair as inferior.
For barbers, race thus did the work of organizing hair type, but hair also did the work of categorizing race. By articulating different hair types as “Negro hair” or “white hair,” barbers collapsed the biological differences of hair type onto racial groups. The term “white” or “Caucasian” hair seldom appears in the historical documents because it was the standard by which all others were judged. Therefore “Negro hair” was marked as other, abnormal, and requiring “special” training to learn how to cut. White barbers associated blackness with kinky hair. Hair texture is hereditary, but multiple genes control it. Genetic variation prevents direct correlations between race and hair type.19 Yet, the history of interraciality complicates these essential notions of blackness and hair type. Many black men sported hair just as straight as that of white men, yet white barbers excluded black men with straight hair right along with men who had tightly coiled hair. By articulating their exclusion policies based on a preferred niche in catering to a particular hair type, white barbers engaged in a discourse that relied on objective and race-neutral language that, at its core, was anything but objective and race-neutral.
The intimate environs of college towns left the increasing, but still small, number of black students with the responsibility of navigating campus, town, and racial politics. Black students sought to claim campus space by attempting to desegregate their campus barber shops, and they found a segment of white students and student organizations interested in assisting them. The coalition of black and white students demonstrated that the desegregation of white barber shops went beyond the existence and proximity of black shops. Indeed, white barbers’ ideologies of race and hair type informed activists that this desegregation struggle was intended to dismantle white supremacy.
Black students may have found the scarcity of black shops and the unwillingness of white barbers to groom them in small towns across the country, but the challenge of conveniently getting a haircut in any shop was not easily mitigated in the city, either. Unlike in small towns, black-owned barber shops anchored black neighborhoods in every major city. For many black men, the barber shop was a regular destination in their Saturday routine. They had a chance to get their weekly haircut, talk with their regular barber, and play the dozens or a game of chess with other men hanging out in the shop. Yet, some men simply wanted a haircut, from any barber, and they searched for the closest shop regardless of the barber's race. Black students at urban college and university campuses could relate to the challenges of distance their college-town counterparts faced when looking for the closest barber shop, which more often than not was white. The conflicts between black men and white barbers in the city reveal blacks’ insistence on claiming their freedom of movement by pushing the boundaries of segregation.
Chicago was a case in point. In June 1948, Joffre Stewart, a black student at Roosevelt College downtown, walked a few doors from the college to get a shave and haircut at Leone's Barber Shop. Stewart could have traveled to one of the many black barber shops on the South Side, but assuming he had been coming from campus, Leone's was a stone's throw away. The barber told him he could not be served because he needed an appointment. Stewart went back three times over the course of six months, each time being turned away. As a member of CORE, Stewart was familiar with the strategies of direct action. On January 3, 1949, he enlisted Jack Fooden, a white member of CORE and graduate student at the University of Chicago, to enter the shop first, and Stewart would follow a few minutes later. Fooden got seated without difficulty and without an appointment. Stewart then entered and again was refused even though Fooden relinquished his chair to him. At this point, the barber announced the shop was closing and the men would have to leave. Stewart and Fooden attempted this strategy a few more times until, on the last occasion, the barber called the police. Instead of arresting the barber for violating the Illinois civil rights law, the police arrested Fooden for “disturbing the peace” and Stewart for “resisting an officer.” The police took both men to the Central Police station and booked them on disorderly conduct. With trial set for the following week, Fooden was released on a twenty-five-dollar bond, but Stewart elected to remain in custody until the police, or “representatives of violence,” as he called them, discharged him. CORE reported that police regularly beat and kicked Stewart while he was imprisoned. Authorities placed him in the Bridewell Prison hospital for refusing to walk, and Stewart claims he was repeatedly slapped and clubbed while in the hospital. He was eventually taken to a psychopathic hospital, where he remained up to and through his trial so that officials could “determine his sanity.” Stewart and Fooden contacted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on January 20 for assistance with the trial the next morning. With little preparation, Sanford Wolff appeared in court on their behalf. Wolff obtained a finding of not guilty for Fooden, while the presiding judge, Oscar Kaplan, dismissed the charges against Stewart because he had been assigned to the County Psychopathic Hospital.
The issue of Stewart's mental health raised other concerns.20 Stewart's family and friends in CORE expressed deep concerns that he had been placed in a mental facility because authorities believed he had to be crazy to resist and not cooperate at the time of arrest and throughout his imprisonment. Stewart's family, however, claimed the psychiatrist intimated that Stewart would become more aggressive in his “crusade for human rights,” as a manifestation of his schizophrenic state.21 Stewart was eventually paroled from the mental facility to his mother, but being committed to a mental institution seemed an unlikely end result for trying to get a haircut a few steps from one's college campus. It is unclear if Stewart's initial attempt was a conscious act of resistance or simply an act of convenience. As this instance and others, including the debate surrounding Rosa Parks's intentions, demonstrates, African Americans’ frustrations with Jim Crow's indignities in everyday life had a way of blurring the line between conscious and convenient acts of resistance in public places.22 Nonetheless, authorities in the Stewart case made the message clear: he had to be crazy to attempt to desegregate a white barber shop and be uncooperative with authority.23
Stewart was among the few black students who led the battle for barber shop desegregation in the North. These campaigns were small and fairly easy to organize, requiring at a minimum one black and one white protester. By World War II, eighteen northern states had passed civil rights legislation prohibiting discrimination in public places of accommodation, providing students the legal infrastructure to stake their protests. Protesters appealed to barbers to change their policies and to the state to enforce its laws. As historian Thomas Sugrue points out, protests against commercial Jim Crow did not require mass mobilization, as did protests against job discrimination.24 Public accommodations protests in the North received little media coverage in larger cities, so it is no surprise that these protests in small college towns were treated similarly. The black press, however, made note of public accommodations protests that occurred across the country, including the barber shop campaigns. Even without the southern-style Jim Crow signs, northern activists faced little difficulty demonstrating that Jim Crow reared its head in their restaurants, swimming pools, hotels, and barber shops.25 These were the battlegrounds of northern public accommodations struggles, whereas southern student activists targeted lunch counters. Yet did African Americans really care about a desegregated barber shop?
White shops bypassed southern activists’ radar. Civil rights workers in the South routinely placed themselves in danger by registering to vote, sitting at a lunch counter, attempting to desegregate a school, or staging a march. But if black activists in the South had challenged white barbers to desegregate their shops by attempting to get a shave, it would have added new meaning to “putting one's neck on the line for freedom.” Langston Hughes used his witty, race-conscious literary character Simple to illuminate this tenuous space within the larger national black freedom movement. Simple reasoned, “It would take a brave black student to sit-in at a white barber shop in Memphis, Jackson, Toogaloo, Birmingham, Atlanta, or anywhere else. Did you say non-violent? With all the love he has got in his heart, I have never read in no newspaper where Rev. Martin Luther King has gone into a white barber shop down South and said, ‘I love you, barber. Cut my hair.’ Martin Luther King has got more sense than that. He knows prayer might not prevail in no white barber shop in Birmingham. Or in Boston, either.”26 Hughes used a little creative license in suggesting that there were no barber shop sit-ins, but his larger point spoke to the marginal place of barber shops in local desegregation campaigns.
If anyone understood the significance of black barber shops in urban America and the ways that segregation had organized the city, it was certainly Horace Cayton, Jr. In 1930, Cayton had co-authored, with St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis, the monumental book on black Chicago. In the summer of 1946, Cayton lived on an estate outside of Saratoga Springs while writing another book. One August morning, he found himself in a predicament where he needed a haircut, but there was no black barber shop in town. He was planning to drive into Saratoga Springs to “see if I can find a colored barber to cut my hair.”27 With this trip on his mind, Cayton focused one of his regular columns in the Pittsburgh Courier on black men's challenges of getting a haircut at their convenience. “One of the most annoying things about being colored,” Cayton began his column, “is the difficulty one has getting his hair cut. Of course, this difficulty doesn't present itself when [one] lives in the Negro communities of such cities as New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, etc. One picks out the cleanest shop and the most amusing barber and goes there on Friday or Saturday, according to his individual schedule. But when you move out of the Negro settlements your [troubles] begin.” In Cayton's assessment, black men faced a challenge if they lived in a place with no “Negro Colony,” which probably meant no black barber shop.28
This sojourn to a black community for a haircut, in Cayton's view, amounted to an “awful waste of time,” especially when he had to travel from Long Island to Harlem every two weeks. While staying with friends in Long Island during the first part of the summer, he would follow this procedure for his haircut journey:
I got up at six o'clock in the morning and caught an early train to New York. Ate breakfast at the station and then I proceeded to Harlem where, after waiting my turn for approximately an hour, I would get my hair cut. It would then be about lunch time and I would eat and spend the afternoon at some picture gallery. Then I would go to a show and later—if fortunate or unfortunate, it's just how you look at it—I might have a date to go out dancing. I would then have to stay overnight and take the early morning train back to Long Island. All in all, the hair cut would cost me about twenty-eight hours of time and any where from fifteen to thirty dollars—according to whether I had a date.
Cayton summed up the cost of his bimonthly haircut journeys as a “right steep price to pay for being colored.” To be sure, he cared little about going to a white barber shop because, as he wrote, he would “much prefer a Negro barber, not only for reasons of racial solidarity, but also because I have the feeling that perhaps a Negro barber knows how to cut my hair better than would one of the other group.” It annoyed Cayton that he, unlike white men, had to make a “pilgrimage” to New York City for a fifteen- or twenty-minute haircut. Cayton concluded that, “other things being equal,” he would only patronize a black barber. But, considering the time and money that he invested in getting a haircut while living on Long Island, he did not see things as being equal.29
If traveling in small towns and big cities across America posed dilemmas for black men in finding a trusted barber to trim their locks, then international travel increased their level of uncertainty. “Only once have I had a white person cut my hair,” Cayton noted, “and that was in France. I entered the barber shop on that occasion with both conscious and unconscious fear for I realized that was the only thing that I had done in France that I had never done in America.”30 Nonetheless, Cayton's barber shop experience in Paris substantiated perceptions for him that France was a country without racial prejudice; a sentiment that several African American soldiers, entertainers, and writers had posited since World War I.
Langston Hughes employed his fictional protagonist Simple to explain the racial politics of international travel and the challenges of getting a haircut. In “Haircuts and U.S.A.,” published in December 1962, Simple lauded Europe as a place where blacks could sit in a white barber's chair without incident. Simple's friend John Williams had won the “sweepstakes” and traveled to France, Italy, and Spain. One of the most memorable aspects of his trip was being able to get a haircut anywhere. “That is certainly not true in the U.S.A.,” Simple noted, “where a Negro has to look for a colored barbershop—just like in most towns down South he still has to look for a colored restaurant in which to eat, a colored hospital in which to die, and a colored undertaker to get buried by, also a colored cemetery to be buried in. They have no such jackassery in Europe.”31 Being able to get a haircut in Europe made the white barbers in Paris seem less prejudiced because of how they treated their black patrons. More than getting a haircut, getting a shave seemed to be the true marker of racial trust. Simple contended, “Here in the United States to get shaved a white barber is liable to cut a colored man's throat instead of trimming his beard. I have never heard tell of no sit-ins in no barber chairs in America.”32 Yet by 1962, there had been several sit-ins, or shave-ins, at various colleges across the country. If Hughes was not aware of these campaigns, he was certainly aware of the problems that the small number of black college students had in getting haircuts in these small towns. Simple noted that his dentist's son was one of the few black students at a small college in Ohio. Local white barbers refused to cut their hair, claiming lack of training, thus sending these students forty miles to Toledo. Hughes was likely referring to the Antioch case. Simple remarked that “if white Americans can learn how to fly past Venus, go in orbit and make telestars, it looks like to me white barbers in Ohio could learn to cut colored hair. But since they also might cut my throat, I prefer to go to Paris, to get my hair cut there…. Even here in Harlem, I thank God for Paris barbers. Amen!”33 Most black men would have disagreed with Simple in suggesting that he much preferred to travel to Paris to have his hair cut by a white barber. The thought of traveling and receiving a haircut anywhere was a liberating idea for some.
If Europe offered black travelers a sense of rebirth beyond the “restrictive bonds of ethnicity, national identification, and sometimes even race itself,” as Paul Gilroy suggests, I argue that blackness and black culture were not necessarily something to escape.34 Hughes emphasizes this rebirth in Europe as a way to illuminate the racial restrictions and volatility in the United States. Blacks were not attempting to escape black shops; they just wanted the option of going to any shops as a marker of their freedom. The everyday complications of navigating landscapes beyond black public spaces heightened travelers’ senses when they submitted control to allow non-black barbers to groom their hair.
Black domestic and international travelers had to consider the complications of gaining access to basic necessities during their journeys, such as places to be groomed, to eat, and certainly to sleep. Although one could go without a haircut for an extra week or two, restaurants and hotels caused much greater concerns. The 1937 publication of The Negro Motorist Green-Book provided “the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments, and to make his trips more enjoyable” in Jim Crow America.35 Black travelers relied on black restaurants and hotels to accommodate them during their travels. The Negro Motorist also included a small listing of barber shops in each city. These listings were far from comprehensive, partly because proprietors had to pay to have their businesses listed. Again, haircuts were easier to negotiate, but the comments of international travelers suggest that getting a haircut in a white barber shop abroad illuminated the state of Jim Crow back home. Black men could, and indeed often did, go their entire lives without stepping foot inside a white barber shop without feeling “segregated” because they much preferred a black shop. Unlike other public spaces, barber shops never adorned Jim Crow signs because custom did the work of ordering these spaces.36 The barber shop's private and intimate space encouraged black and white men to congregate in racially homogeneous shops. Beyond the interior of the shops, the structure of segregation meant that black shops were located in black neighborhoods—areas white men might only frequent at night in red light districts. White shops were more spread out across urban areas, which meant that if white men did not want to, they did not have to go to a black shop, even though they could. In contrast, local black travelers faced inconveniences outside of black communities. Even though black men preferred black shops, they resented passing up a white shop to avoid humiliation.
Similar to the proprietors of campus shops, white barbers expressed concern that serving black customers would drive away their existing white customers, but the central issue in desegregating barber shops rested on how white barbers viewed hair type as a racial marker and how the state viewed the blurred lines between discrimination and service differentiation. Here, too, barbers expressed concerns about the perceived difficulties in cutting “kinky” hair. In the fall of 1960, Charles Flott, Jr., an eight-year-old resident of Uniondale, Long Island, ventured into Angelo's Barber Shop at 523 Uniondale Avenue for a haircut. Flott was very light-skinned, but when the barber discovered Flott was black, he increased the price to five dollars. Angelo Mustachio, the proprietor, had posted a sign in his shop which read “Kinky Haircut—$5.” The barber raised the price in accordance with the shop's policy, which suggested that kinky hair took more work to cut, and thus required a higher fee. It is unclear if the barber realized Flott was black while he cut his hair or afterward. Based on a photo of Flott, his hair was quite curly, adding to the barber's confusion according to notions of kinky hair. Flott's skin was light enough that the barber could not determine his race. For white barbers, when skin color failed to do the work of race, hair type picked up the slack. Flott's parents filed a complaint against Mustachio with the State Commission Against Discrimination (SCAD). After a public hearing, Elmer A. Carter, chairman of SCAD, ordered Mustachio to remove the sign and to immediately cut black patrons’ hair, with equal quality and rate extended to white customers.37
White barbers argued that they did not discriminate based on race, yet their clumsy use of hair type as a marker of exclusion proved race to be at the center of their clientele choice. Their emphasis on appearance as a signal of race made their attempts to categorize the “colored” from the “uncolored” fraught with erroneous judgment. A barber at the Greyhound Bus Station Terminal Barber Shop in Detroit thought he saw a light-skinned Negro entering his barber shop, and promptly told him “haircuts are only given by appointments.” The several barbers who stood idle claimed to be waiting for their customers. The “Negro” that the barber rejected was Kamal Kapur, an exchange student from India who was attending Syracuse University at the invitation of the U.S. Government. Before Kapur left Michigan for Syracuse, he shared the incident with a Birmingham, Michigan, businessman, who in turn informed the Detroit Commission on Community Relations. Richard V. Marks, commission director, remarked, “This is certainly a mark against our foreign affairs relations…and this type of thing is certainly not good.” The shop manager admitted that the shop did not serve “black Negroes,” and apparently he did not serve “Indian Negroes” either, but he agreed to write a letter of apology. The Pittsburgh Courier ran an article about the incident with the title “A Mistake? Deny Indian Haircut for Negro Looks.”38 Did the barber refuse Kapur because he looked black, or was Kapur simply black enough to be excluded?
White barbers drew on the category of “Negro” to racialize all men of color even if their hair was not “kinky.” Filomeno “Phil” Coronada Ortega, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, was surprised to be turned away from a downtown barber shop in Vero Beach, Florida. In 1961, Ortega, a “full-blooded American Indian,” was rejected from this barber shop because the barber did not serve Negroes. If the barber had trouble seeing that Ortega was not a Negro, the Dodgers also had trouble seeing he was not Mexican. In the 1960s, the Dodgers believed Ortega could help them expand their market into the Latino community. While Dodgers vice president Buzzie Bavasi attempted to “Mexicanize” Ortega, Ortega much preferred to highlight his Yaqui Indian background, thus thwarting all attempts at racial marking. He identified himself as Indian, the Dodgers marked him as Mexican, and the barber marked him as Negro. Ortega, and his Indian-Mexican-Negro self, ultimately had to find a black barber shop for his haircut.39 This barber may have followed baseball. Believing Ortega to be Mexican, he may have refused him on this basis and not his perceived blackness. When white barbers excluded those they perceived to be Latino and men who identified themselves as Latino, they omitted any particular reference to their Latin heritage by employing “Negro hair” to racialize all colored men. Yet this silence should not suggest that the Latino identity of these customers played no role in their discrimination, or that white barbers saw them as black. Instead, white barbers saw them as Latin-Negroes, an identity needing no distinction because perceived hair type grouped colored men into one category. White barbers articulated their exclusion of “Negroes,” regardless of race or nation, based on their “kinky hair,” which was also an attempt to deemphasize race to centralize hair and skill.40
In the post–World War II period, African immigrants and visiting diplomats faced similar difficulties in getting a haircut in the shop of their choice. They were more likely to walk into white barber shops because they lacked the same affinities for black barber shops as African Americans. Yet, as they would soon find, white barbers made no distinction based on nationality; race and hair texture were evidence enough. In 1959, Dr. Tigani El Mahi, a Sudanese psychiatrist, traveled to Pennsylvania to give a lecture at the University of Pittsburgh. When he entered the Hotel Webster Hall and requested a haircut, Frank Paolozzi “cupped his hands over his face and shied away,” showing no interest in serving him.41 Because Dr. El Mahi had traveled to the United States as part of a university-sponsored visit, and not a diplomatic mission, his exclusion failed to receive adequate attention and outcry. This would not be the case just one year later with a new presidential administration and the continuing decolonization of Africa. The high stakes of excluding African diplomats had significant implications for American credibility in Cold War politics.
When African dignitaries met the indignities of Jim Crow, the State Department, particularly the Kennedy administration, stood prone to embarrassment and worried about fumbling diplomatic relations with a new bloc of independent African nations. In the first eleven months of 1960, seventeen African nations achieved independence from their colonial powers. With a growing number of newly independent nations came a growing number of ambassadors who visited the United States. On June 26, 1961, Malick Sow, the first ambassador to the United States from the newly independent nation of Chad, drove from the United Nations in New York along Route 40 to Washington, D.C., to present his credentials to President Kennedy. Along the way, Sow stopped at a diner for coffee, but he was turned away because the diner did not serve blacks. Sow related to the State Department that these incidents of racial discrimination “make normal relations between the United States and African countries very strained.” These words were not lost on the State Department, which well knew that Jim Crow would undermine diplomatic relations with African countries.42 The State Department received numerous complaints from diplomats who were refused service, particularly in restaurants and barber shops, because these were public places of necessity. In fact, the New York Times reported on June 9, 1963, that State Department officials “said at least twenty African diplomats, including three or four Ambassadors, had complained that during the last 18 months they had been discriminated against in Washington barbershops.” Pedro A. San Juan, director of special protocol services, conceded that these incidents “cannot be dismissed with an apology,” but he failed to assert how he would handle the matter.43 These diplomats quickly realized that this unwelcome mat was not reserved only for them; black American residents had the same trouble. Yet most black residents probably would not have considered it trouble because they much preferred a black barber shop. Marguerite Cartwright of the Pittsburgh Courier believed that the increasing presence of African dignitaries was contributing to a decline of racial discrimination. She noted that the Hotel Taft in New Haven, Connecticut, “fired its barber for his refusal to serve Dr. Edwin Barclay of Liberia, who was a guest at the hotel.”44
Yet Washington, D.C., would continue to be the proving ground for African dignitaries’ reception into the United States. Prince Godfrey K. Katanywa, a visiting student from Uganda studying public administration under the auspices of the International Training Division of the Agency for International Development, became acquainted with Jim Crow's tonsorial parlor when his hair screamed out for a trim. On March 16, 1964, Katanywa entered the Investment Building Barbershop at 1010 15th Street N.W., in downtown Washington, D.C., for a haircut. Instead of getting a haircut, he met resistance from the barbers in the shop. One barber told Katanywa that he “could direct me to a colored area on 14th St.” in the Shaw black business district.45 In response, Katanywa lodged a formal complaint with the State Department.
The incident outraged newspaper reporters, congressmen, and the State Department. Three days after the incident, Baker Morten of the Washington Afro-American retraced Katanywa's footsteps to investigate the issue. When he entered the Investment Building Barbershop and asked for a haircut, the proprietor, Rene Nezet, first told him he did not need a haircut. Next, Nezet turned to his five “tonsorial experts,” as Baker referred to them, to ask if any of them would cut his hair—a question that received no response. Finally, Nezet leveled with Baker and told him, “I'll lose 50 per cent of my business if I cut colored people's hair. If the law required all barbershops to serve colored people I would also.”46 Representative Charles Diggs Jr., from Michigan, used this incident to push for tougher legislation prohibiting discrimination in barber shops. Diggs had a history of supporting economic boycotts. In August 1963 he organized a buy-in campaign in Detroit to encourage blacks to support a black-owned supermarket in an effort to fuel economic development.47 In D.C. he was supporting a consumer protest. “It is a monstrous insult,” Diggs proclaimed, “that a barber can refuse service to Negro diplomats but can take in any bum off of Washington's skid row who has the right fee and color.”48 Reaching the same conclusions as Representative Diggs, State Department officials stressed the need for regulations prohibiting such discrimination. Yet, the District of Columbia already had legislation on the books—legislation that many referred to as the “lost laws” because they were so widely disregarded that many people assumed there were no existing laws in place to prohibit racial discrimination in public places of accommodation.
Corporation counsel Chester Gray encouraged Katanywa to apply for a warrant under the District of Columbia's Civil Rights Act of 1872, which many people believed stood as the necessary regulation in place to deal with such discrimination. As discussed in Chapter 2, an African American had invoked the 1872 act to request a warrant against a barber for refusing to cut his hair, although in that case the barber was black. But because barber shops were not listed among the scheduled public places, the Police Court had denied him the warrant. Nearly a century later, Gray believed that “when a barber flatly refuses to cut a person's hair on grounds of race or color, he is in violation of the act of 1872.”49 A new regulation to prohibit racial discrimination in barber shops had been drafted in 1963, but it had yet to pass. The State Department prompted Washington, D.C., officials to consider new legislation for this “hair-raising problem.” The new law, according to Gray, “is designed to stymie barbers from having excuses such as ‘I don't know how to cut the hair of colored people.’”50 He said the 1872 law covered refusals of service but failed to protect against the myriad of possible excuses for not rendering service. Gray perceived the new law as a way to “meet modern conditions.” The law would provide for suspension or revocation of licenses, require all barbers to learn how to cut all types of human hair, and require every barber shop to have a manager who can be held accountable for its policy. The White House requested the Board of Commissioners to delay issuing an antidiscrimination law for barber shops in light of the pending federal civil rights bill in Congress. Gray believed provisions concerning racial discrimination in barber shops were in the civil rights bill.51 Ten days after denying Katanywa a haircut, Nezet changed his policy and issued an apology. He agreed to extend “the best possible service” to all future customers.
He argued that he did not intend to discriminate against Katanywa, but only intended to protect his business. Particularly, he explained that his barbers were not trained to “cut the hair of colored patrons.”52 Washington, D.C., officials stood prepared to implement their own antidiscrimination legislation if Congress rejected the proposed federal legislation or passed a weak version.
In some cases, labor regulations and civil rights legislations worked in tandem to protect the rights of African Americans to get a haircut in any barber shop they stepped into. Ironically, the white-dominated barbers union had worked tirelessly to professionalize barbering by lobbying for state licensing laws requiring apprentices to attend barbering school, master the anatomy of the body, and be examined by a state board. This emphasis on skill, efficiency, and sanitation had undergirded their politics of professionalization at the turn of the century. Black barbers resisted these proposed regulations because they believed white barbers would use these instruments to ultimately push them out of the field. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the tide had turned. White barbers were now claiming they had no skill to cut black men's hair. This excuse for exclusion flew in the face of many state officials who questioned what it meant to be a licensed barber. In 1957, California municipal judge Bill L. Dozier awarded the Reverend Archie Manley two hundred dollars because barber Robert Murrillo refused to cut Manley's hair on account that he had not been trained on “colored hair.” Judge Dozier balked at the excuse, stating, “A licensed barber must learn to cut a Negro's hair.”53 In 1965, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission charged Richard Draper, Jr., with unlawful discriminatory practices in violation of the provisions of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act for refusing to give Carl Brown of West Chester a haircut. Barber Louis Grimaldi testified during the commission hearings that barbers needed neither special training nor special tools to cut blacks’ hair. The commission concluded that a barber with fifty years of experience, like Draper, should possess the training to cut all types of hair, and required the Draper Barber Shop to render services to all patrons regardless of race, color, creed, ancestry, or natural origin.54
In 1963, the commissioners of Washington, D.C., considered new regulations to revoke the license of any barber who pleaded lack of skill in cutting “kinky” hair as a reason to deny service to black customers.55 Approximately two hundred people, mostly barbers, packed a room in the District Building on August 16 to participate in a public hearing before the District commissioners to discuss proposed regulations forbidding racial discrimination in barber shops and requiring barbers to cut “all types of human hair.”56 Walter B. Lewis, assistant executive director of the Washington Urban League, testified that barbers who serve nonwhites were able to cut all types of hair because blacks have a wide range of hair textures, suggesting the white barbers would be more well-rounded if they branched out beyond their homogenous white clientele. He proclaimed, “Any protest or inability to cut, or inconvenience in cutting hair, when nonwhites are involved is based not upon the technical requirements of the craft but upon prejudice and discrimination.”57 Most perplexing to Lewis and other supporters of new regulations was that racial discrimination by barbers had long been prohibited under the District's public accommodations law but went unenforced. Charles J. Bovello, secretary-treasurer of Local 239 of the predominately white barbers union, refuted charges of discrimination. He testified that he told his members to serve black customers, but only after a warning that they lacked the necessary skill and that the customers should assume responsibility for the quality of the haircut, releasing the barber of any liability. Daniel L. O'Connor, attorney for Local 239 and Chapter 396 of the Associated Master Barbers, claimed it would take approximately six months for white barbers to learn how to cut blacks’ hair.58 As the District commissioners considered the testimonies, the White House requested they delay a decision to avoid “jeopardizing a few votes in Congress in the battle on civil rights legislation.”59
The state stood squarely at the intersection of barber shop discrimination, where licensing regulations merged with civil rights legislation to address the professional labor issues of skill and training alongside the moral and political issues of racial exclusion. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the federal 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional in 1883, northern states passed their own civil rights laws that prohibited discrimination in public places of accommodations; some of these states listed barber shops in the schedule of places subject to the law. Most southern states, however, failed to follow suit. As a practical matter, northern protesters had laws on the books to challenge discrimination in barber shops. In 1963, Governor Bert Combs of Kentucky issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination in public places of accommodation and “other places that are licensed or supervised [like] barber shops and beauty parlors.” Those that failed to comply were subject to having their licenses revoked and businesses shut down.60 Despite Governor Combs's bold move, southern congressmen stood in solidarity against President Kennedy's proposed civil rights bill. Although lunch counters and waiting rooms were the major battlegrounds of desegregation campaigns in the South, the idea of an integrated barber shop was not lost on one prominent southerner. Alabama governor George Wallace remarked after Kennedy's assassination that the civil rights bill “destroys private property rights all over the country and would put a federal policeman in every beauty shop and every barber shop in California as well as Alabama.”61 Despite southern congressmen's battle to prevent the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, exemplified through their fifty-four days of filibuster, on July 2, Lyndon Johnson signed the act, which prohibited discrimination in public places of accommodation.62 The act was a significant milestone for African Americans in dismantling Jim Crow, yet all public spaces were not treated equal. If the 1964 Civil Rights Act was supposed to be a legislative success in the struggle against Jim Crow, no one told white barbers, because they continued to exclude men they marked with kinky hair.
The act failed to adequately address the particular issues of exclusion in barber shops. Title II of the act addressed public accommodations, but like the 1875 act, it failed to include barber shops in its list of public places. Nonetheless, white barbers argued that they did not deny access based on race, which would have been prohibited under the Civil Rights Act. They instead said that they refused clients based on hair type or their lack of ability to cut certain types of hair. This labor and business discrimination would not have come under the act, still leaving a void for cities like Washington, D.C., that had been waiting, indeed told to wait, for the federal act to alleviate the daily humiliations of black people.
When the anticipated 1964 act failed to adequately address barber shop discrimination in Washington, D.C., the District commissioners passed a 1965 rule prohibiting discrimination by District barbers. Commissioner Walter N. Tobriner said, “We are sure that the barbering profession will cooperate with these new amendments and that the barbers of the District will provide their usual high level of service to all who have need of their skills, regardless of race or color.”63 Tobriner also noted that the 1872 Territorial Act rendered discrimination in barber shops illegal, but the only remedy was criminal prosecution, which was considered impractical in curbing discrimination and was rarely enforced. The new regulation provided for additional enforcement mechanisms through the District's licensing body. Commissioners made special provisions for barbers who claimed they lacked the skill to cut blacks’ hair by requiring them to acquire the additional “training” to accommodate all hair types. The new regulation would not be effective until September 13, giving barbers ample time to go back to school. The Board of Education offered barbers an opportunity to register for a free barbering clinic for the additional training at Chamberlain Vocational High School on Potomac Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets S.E.64 “Cut against the grain…that's it…straight back…and then down instead of up,” instructed Benjamin Thornton, who led the clinic in the evenings between 6:30 and 9:30 p.m. “Cut in the part with the sharp edge of the clippers…you'll have to press down harder…then comb a little…that's it…. He just wants a shape-up…use the blade at the top of his forehead…then all the way around.”65 Black boys between the ages of five and eighteen answered the call to give barbers heads to practice on in exchange for free haircuts. On the first night, barbers came from various sections of the city. But, according to Thornton, a large portion of the fifty barbers who registered as of June 25 were black. Some of them had been working in shops that served only whites, so they took advantage of the opportunity to “brush up” on cutting “Negro hair.” Other black barbers signed up to learn more about cutting “white people's hair.” On the first night, at least, they stood idle without practice-customers.66 These new standards were reflected in the practical component of the examination for a barbering license. All barbers were now required to bring in both a white and black subject to demonstrate their proficiency in cutting different hair types. Political officials changed District laws, and industry officials changed licensing requirements to desegregate white barber shops. It is unclear how many white barbers enrolled in the course to brush up on their skills to learn to cut curly hair, or if “overnight they acquired the necessary skill and, presumably, the esoteric instruments to enable them to barber the kinky head of the Negro.”67
White barber shops were not the only sites of conflict. The past practices of color-line barbers had not quite faded, resurrecting late nineteenth-century debates within black communities about entrepreneurial motive and racial justice. Color-line barber shops had become scarce by the mid-twentieth century, but some of these shops still existed as late as the 1960s, particularly in the South. After Alonzo Herndon died in 1927 and left his shop to his employees, they continued to groom exclusively white men in the downtown Atlanta shop. In fact, in late November 1965 fourteen black demonstrators from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staged a protest. They sat in all of the barber chairs and demanded service, but were denied.68 F. D. Cooper, a black barber and owner, noted the 1964 Civil Rights Act excluded barber shops not attached to hotels. After mounting pressure, he relented and agreed to serve fellow African Americans if, according to Jet magazine, “not too many of them flood the shop at one time” (emphasis in the original).69 A black barber shop in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s welcomed only white men. This seemed to simply be their business policy, because these barbers would get their own haircuts in black-owned and patronized barber shops, such as Magic City, in the Fourth Avenue business district. These urban shops escaped sustained protests at a time of intense civil rights organizing, but at least one rural, college-town shop was not so lucky.
Ralph W. Johnson of Davidson, North Carolina, the son of a light-skinned barber who groomed only white patrons, continued not only in his father's profession, but also in the ways of Jim Crow. Johnson described himself as “light in complexion, and my hair was straight, a fact which made me suspect at the outset among my youthful black peers.”70 Four years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act had passed, Johnson had not changed his policy of denying service to African Americans in his barber shop. He claimed he felt captive to a “social practice that had held me in its vicious tentacles and heaped injustices and deprivations upon my head for the whole of my life, and for all of the generations of my Negro forebears.”71 He had attended a segregated school and had other brushes with Jim Crow that he believed tied him to the black community despite his business policy. Johnson believed the Davidson community understood his precarious position in a small southern town, until white and black protesters demanded change.
The first week of April 1968 was a tumultuous one both for Johnson in his small, college-town barber shop and for the nation. On Tuesday afternoon, April 2, two black men with dark suits, white shirts, and neckties entered Johnson's barber shop, an occurrence that greatly puzzled him. “Since it was well settled that Negroes and white people were not served in the same barber shops,” Johnson recalled, “it was unusual for Negroes to enter the shop unless they had a personal reason for seeing someone there.”72 Johnson recognized the two men, who usually dressed in work clothes. One was an employee of Davidson College, and the other was employed in “local industry.” The two men walked the length of the shop, to where Johnson was sitting in the back, and asked him for a haircut. He replied that he could not cut their hair, yet he remained bewildered as to why these men were requesting service in his shop when they knew this went against local custom. After the rebuffed customers exited the shop, three white male Davidson College students entered, introduced themselves, and questioned Johnson on his policy of discrimination. He expressed two familiar explanations for refusing black patrons, dating back to the nineteenth century: the custom of segregation, and the potential loss of white patrons.73
Johnson's assessment of the situation rested on an outdated assumption: that local people accepted the order of things. Despite the palpable impact of the civil rights movement throughout the country, he reasoned that black people understood that he merely followed the customs of Jim Crow, a system that white people had prescribed. Since black residents had not protested his barber shop until this moment, Johnson could not fathom why they expressed their disagreement when they “knew” the customs and laws of North Carolina. As for the white students, Johnson thought it was absurd that they would question his policy since “separation of the Negro and white races was at the insistence of white people and enforced by laws of their making.”74 He assumed these students were southerners, which may or may not have been the case. In recalling these events in his memoir, Johnson repeatedly absolved himself of his decision to conform to Jim Crow customs in his shop. Johnson asserted his right and independence as a business owner to select his customer base, yet he also yielded to the preferences of his white patrons to keep that base white. While Johnson could not understand why these protesters questioned him on a policy that was well established, he additionally failed to grasp the fact that the tide had already turned across the nation, and that the civil rights movement had come to Davidson.
The protests against Johnson's barber shop commenced after he refused to give haircuts to the two black men. From the beginning, Davidson College students formed the core of the picketers. They distributed leaflets on campus urging students to boycott Johnson's shop to pressure him to change his policy because they had “no recourse in the courts” since “barber shops are not covered under the Civil Rights Act.”75 When two African students enrolled in the College prior to the passing of the Civil Rights Act, the administration secured an agreement from local businesses to make concessions to accommodate them. After the act passed, a small number of African Americans had enrolled in the college, and they too benefited from the special concession. Therefore, the five black students at Davidson College could go to Johnson or, as Johnson referred to it, “the only other barber shop in town”—owned by Hood Norton, a black barber and Johnson's estranged uncle, who also groomed only white patrons—to get a haircut, but the black residents of Davidson were turned away.76 Hood's shop was not the only other shop in town; Davidson had a third shop “exclusively for Negroes.” In fact, some black barbers who worked with Johnson and Hood during the day would work at the black shop in the evenings. As the students carried out their pickets in front of Johnson's shop, news spread to neighboring Charlotte and Winston-Salem, which brought an increasing number of people to the scene in opposition and support.
Johnson's memoir was silent on the regional and national civil rights and black power movement as he recalled the protests surrounding his barber shop April 2 through April 4, but he could not overlook the national response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4 because African Americans, even in small-town Davidson, expressed deep frustration and anger. Johnson believed he “was the focal point upon which my fellow Negroes centered their hatred and hostility.” That evening, someone hurled a rock at Johnson's shop window, an act that Johnson associated with the protests. The following day, an increasing number of African Americans joined the picket line. Even inside Johnson's shop, his barbers began to urge him to reconsider his racial exclusion policy, one to which they had no commitment. They were more connected with Davidson's black community than Johnson because they had been cutting black men's hair at night. They talked with some of the picketers when they went to work in the morning, and probably got an earful when they went to work in the black shop at night.77 One barber claimed he had been threatened by a group of blacks because he continued to work in the shop.78 On Saturday, April 6, Johnson's regular customers, particularly those from neighboring areas, had to wade through this sea of protest to get inside the shop. Although many of them scorned the protesters, they told Johnson they would still patronize the shop if it was integrated, but Johnson did not put much stock in their commitments.
King's death failed to provide Johnson any perspective on desegregation and the larger aims of the black and white protesters. “Forgotten was the fact that I, too, was a Negro,” Johnson reasoned, “and had been for all my life subjected to the same restraints that were imposed on other Negroes.”79 He firmly believed that the white students at Davidson College “had done this to me because I was a Negro, and that in so doing they were continuing the old practice of putting a nigger in his place.”80 However, Johnson had forgotten that King put his life on the line to rid the country of racial injustice. Most striking about Johnson's case is neither that a black barber excluded black customers in the late 1960s, nor that black protesters demonstrated against a member of their race, but that Johnson failed to understand his historical moment. The civil rights movement had swept through the North and South, freedom fighters had been assassinated, major civil rights legislations had passed, and yet Johnson clung to Jim Crow because in a very fundamental way Jim Crow made him who he was, for better and worse. Not even King's death proved powerful enough to move Johnson beyond the color line.
Johnson refused to yield to the demands of the protesters because of his stubborn sensibilities and economic concerns. He accepted the power of his patrons to demand a shop that served only whites, but dismissed white and black protesters’ calls to integrate. Ultimately, Johnson feared he would lose his white customers if he desegregated the shop. In the end, however, he decided to yield because of the pressure his own barbers put on him to change his policy. The mounting pressure they received from the black community had taken its toll on them. Johnson acknowledged that his business would go under without his barbers. In 1968, it was difficult to find black barbers who were willing to work in a shop that exclusively groomed white men. On May 7, Johnson instructed one of his barbers to cut the hair of another employee, symbolizing a new day in Johnson's barber shop. One barber noted, “It's something that had to be done, and I'm glad he did it. It takes a lot of pressure off us, the employees, and I think we will profit by it.”81 Johnson did not indicate the percentage of his white customers that continued to patronize the shop, but he had much to say about the “new element.” He disapproved of the behavior of his new black clients, citing intoxication as a source of rowdiness. It could certainly be that these customers were not intoxicated at all, but that Johnson was not accustomed to the loud, “unruly” conversations and banter among black men who gathered in barber shops. In any case, Johnson disapproved so strongly that he consulted his barbers about reversing his policy and prohibiting black customers again. When his barbers rejected the idea, Johnson, probably still bitter and resentful, decided to close his shop rather than continue to groom a black working-class clientele. After forty-seven years of grooming white men and only three years of grooming black men, Johnson closed his shop on November 15, 1971.82 Johnson's barber shop illuminates the strange career of desegregation where the practice of segregation lived beyond major civil rights legislations and was implemented by some blacks who felt caught in Jim Crow's web. It reveals the significance of an enduring system of discrimination that limited the life decisions of black communities by law and custom. Despite Johnson's history, it was mostly white barbers who pulled the levers of discrimination, and they employed age-old ways of seeing race to do it.
Domestic and international travel illuminated issues that black men and women took for granted: getting a haircut from someone other than their trusted barber or beautician could bring out racial bias based on hair type. Most black men had not considered frequenting a white barber shop until they found themselves a great distance from a black shop. In the case of African immigrants and visitors, they did not share the same affinities for black barber shops that African Americans harbored, which left Africans deeply insulted and the State Department considerably embarrassed. The struggles to desegregate white barber shops exposed what was difficult to see in other efforts to desegregate public places of accommodation, education, and transportation: the civil rights and black power movements were not attempts to close the social distance between blacks and whites; they were movements to dismantle white supremacy and ensure that black people had choices and control over their daily lives.83 A majority of black men preferred to frequent black barbers, but this affinity for a black public space did not give white barbers the green light to exclude customers of color based on social and biological constructions of race. Non-essentialist notions of race and the conveniences of travel informed these calls for desegregation. Black college students entered white barber shops for haircuts just as they entered lunch counters for hamburgers, and bus depots to sit in any section of the waiting area. In 1961, Ella Baker wrote an article titled “Bigger Than a Hamburger,” where she argued that the movement to desegregate lunch counters had nothing to do with consumers’ desires to eat hamburgers at the Woolworth's next to white consumers, because the hamburgers were not that good anyway.84 Instead, these college students struggled for the right to equal treatment and justice in public places of accommodation. Baker's reflections on the sit-in movement resonated with the goals of the larger black freedom movement. The movement to desegregate white barber shops, to appropriate Baker's words, was bigger than a haircut, offering a complex episode in the struggle for equal rights and access.