1. Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Quincy T. Mills, “Truth and Soul: Black Talk in the Barbershop,” in Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 162–203.
2. Barbershop, directed by Tim Story (Beverly Hills, Calif.: MGM Home Entertainment, 2002), DVD.
3. Quincy T. Mills, “‘You Don't Look Groomed’: Rethinking Black Barber Shops as Public Spaces,” in Benjamin Talton and Quincy T. Mills, eds., Black Subjects in Africa and Its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 77–94.
1. Colored American, October 20, 1838.
2. Colored American, October 20, 1838.
3. On Samuel Cornish and the Colored American see Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
4. Colored American, October 20, 1838.
5. See Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery; Leslie Alexander, African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784–1861 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
6. William H. Grier and Price M. Cobb, Black Rage (New York: Bantam, 1968), 88. See Fred M. Holycross, “The American Barbershop: Changing Gender Roles and the Modification of Masculinity,” master's thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1990; Trudier Harris, “The Barbershop in Black Literature,” Black American Literature Forum 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1979): 112–118; Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Quincy T. Mills, “Truth and Soul: Black Talk in the Barbershop,” in Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Craig Marberry, Cuttin’ Up: Wit and Wisdom from Black Barber Shops (New York: Doubleday, 2005). For representations of black barbers in popular culture, see Vorris L. Nunnley, Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011); Barbershop, directed by Tim Story (Beverly Hills, Calif.: MGM Home Entertainment, 2002), DVD; and Barbershop 2: Back in Business, directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan (Beverly Hills, Calif.: MGM Home Entertainment, 2004). In 2006, Music Television (MTV) launched The Shop, a reality show based in Mr. Rooney's Barbershop in Jamaica, Queens, New York. The former UPN situation comedy Cuts focused on the barber-beauty salons emerging in urban areas at the turn of the twenty-first century.
7. Joseph B. Bibb, “The Barber Shop Chord,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 23, 1943.
8. In Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), Jürgen Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as a discursive arena in which citizens deliberate about matters of “public concern” and “common interests.” Nancy Fraser outlined four problematic assumptions in Habermas's concept. First, it is possible for socially unequal citizens to deliberate in the public sphere. Second, one comprehensive public is a necessary condition for greater democracy. Third, private interests should have no place in discourses in the public sphere. Fourth, civil society and the state must be separate to have a functioning democratic public sphere. Scholars of counterpublics have rejected Habermas's bourgeois conceptualization of the public sphere as liberal and universal. Fraser and Mary Ryan argue that the masculine bourgeois public was not the public, but there existed numerous competing counterpublics. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” and Mary Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth Century America,” in Craig Calhoun ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 109–142, and 259–288. Scholars of the African American experience have also pointed out the limited reach of Habermas's bourgeois public sphere, arguing that it cannot be applied wholesale to black public life because they were historically excluded from the kinds of deliberative spaces Habermas studied. They too called attention to counterpublics. On the black public sphere and counterpublics, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” in The Black Public Sphere Collective, ed., The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Michael Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Melissa Harris Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (November 2002): 446–468.
9. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 10.
10. George Schuyler interview with William Ingersoll, June 6, 1960, in The Reminiscences of George S. Schuyler, 1962 (Alexandria, Va.: Alexander Street Press, 2003), 179.
11. George S. Schuyler, Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1966); George S. Schuyler, Rac(e)ing to the Right: Selected Essays of George S. Schuyler, ed. Jeffrey B. Leak (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001).
12. For Higginbotham, the market economy had no bearing on the essential functions of the black church; therefore, she retained this distinction from Habermas's idea of the public sphere. “The public sphere in Habermas's sense,” Nancy Fraser points out, “is not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than buying and selling.” Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 111. The debating and deliberating and buying and selling were quite central to modern black barber shops.
13. Douglas Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Bristol published the first scholarly monograph on a historical account of African American barbers. He examines black barbers’ experiences as businessmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to argue that they fostered fraternal bonds and established a tradition of mutual cooperation. Because he focuses on a “tradition,” he overstates the continuities and dismisses conflicts among barbers. Knights of the Razor charts a fine course for thinking about black men's perseverance to build businesses despite the confines of slavery and the constrictions of black citizenship. Urban historians mention barber shops when accounting for black urban community formation. See Allen Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); David Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); David Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); Kenneth Kusmer, The Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); Richard Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Juliet E. K. Walker discusses black barbers within the context of their entrepreneurial acumen and prowess. See Juliet E. K. Walker, History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race and Entrepreneurship (New York: Macmillan, 1998), and Juliet E. K. Walker, ed., Encyclopedia of African American Business History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999).
14. On black insurance companies, see Merah Stuart, An Economic Detour: A History of Insurance in the Lives of American Negroes (New York: Wendell Malliett and Company, 1940); Walter Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Alexa Benson Henderson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company: Guardian of Black Economic Dignity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990); Robert C. Puth, Supreme Life: The History of a Negro Life Insurance Company (New York: Arno Press, 1976); Robert Weems, Black Business in the Black Metropolis: The Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company, 1925–1985 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). On black beauty business and culture, see Tiffany Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); A'Lelia Perry Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (New York: Scribner, 2001); Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Julie A. Willett, Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Stylin’ Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2003). On sports, see Neil Lanctot, Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
15. Indeed, recent scholarship on the black cultural economy offers a fresh and innovative look at black entrepreneurial culture and public engagement. See Gill, Beauty Shop Politics; Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Davarian Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Andrew W. Kahrl, This Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
16. Davarian Baldwin offers a similar term, “marketplace intellectual life,” to explore the intellectual engagement of the black working class through consumer-based amusements. The marketplace intellectual life, he argues, was a sphere “where cultural producers, critics, and patrons engaged the arena of commercial exchange to rethink the established parameters of community, progress, and freedom.” See Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes, 9.
17. Zephyr L. Frank, Dutra's World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004); Brad Weiss, Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009).
18. See Earl Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (June 1995): 765–787.
19. Eric Sundquist, in his discussion of the shaving scene in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, introduced the concept of “shaving-time” to mark a suspended historical moment that “pointed toward a future of black ascendancy.” I have expanded his concept to mark an ever-changing moment that centers the grooming process within the dynamic interrelations among barbers, patrons, and publics. See Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 162.
20. On the hidden transcript see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcript (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’; Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (June 1993): 75–112.
21. See Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Kahrl, This Land Was Ours.
22. My discussion of “willing congregation” during segregation is taken from Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
23. See Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
24. On gender as a cultural process, see Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). On gender and the development of American labor and business, see Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Kathy Peiss, “‘Vital Industry’ and Women's Ventures: Conceptualizing Gender in Twentieth Century Business History,” Business History Review 72, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 218–241.
25. See E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2004).
1. Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands (Boston: E. G. House, 1818).
2. William Richardson, ed., Melville's “Benito Cereno”: An Interpretation with Annotated Text and Concordance (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1987), 37.
3. Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 156.
4. Christopher Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 95.
5. Higginson quoted in Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 159. See also Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968), 211.
6. Quote from Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Latrobe's View of America, 1795–1820: Selections from the Watercolors and Sketches, ed. Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Horne, and Charles C Brownell (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 120. See also Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of Southern History 61, no. 1 (February 1995): 46–47.
7. On plantation culture, see John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 105–191; Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 12–92.
8. Quoted in White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture,” 45; Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001), 16.
9. James Williams, interview by Irene Robertson, n.d. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938, Vol. 2: Arkansas Narratives, part 7, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, American Memory, 9 November 2002, http://memory.loc.gov.
10. William J. Anderson, Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, Twenty-four Years a Slave; Sold Eight Times! In Jail Sixty Times!! Whipped Three Hundred Times!!! Or The Dark Deeds of American Slavery Revealed. Containing Scriptural Views of the Origin of the Black and of the White Man. Also, a Simple and Easy Plan to Abolish Slavery in the United States. Together with an Account of the Services of Colored Men in the Revolutionary War—Day and Date, and Interesting Facts. (Chicago: Daily Tribune and Job Printing Office, 1857), 14.
11. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England, ed. Louis Alexis Chamerovzow (London, 1855), 111–112.
12. William Wells Brown, Clotel; or The President's Daughter, ed. M. Giulia Fabi (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1853; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 8.
13. Historian Walter Johnson points out that this kind of grooming for the slave market helped create the fantasies sellers and planters traded. See Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
14. Bill Reese, interview by Sadie B. Hornsby, June 19, 1939, “I Cater to Colored People,” ed. Sarah H. Hall and John N. Booth, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, gen. ed. George P. Rawick, Vol. 4: Georgia Narratives, part 2 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 512 (hereafter Reese interview).
15. Ira Jones, interview by Grace Monroe, n.d., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, gen. ed. George Rawick, Supplement Series I, Vol. 5: Indiana and Ohio Narratives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 100.
16. Edwin Adams Davis and William Ransom Hogan, The Barber of Natchez (1954; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 56. Free black and enslaved children who had no guardian were often ordered by local courts to serve apprenticeships with black artisans. In 1808, Georgia established such a law that required free blacks between the ages of eight and twenty-one and without a guardian to be bound out as apprentices. In 1854, the Georgia legislature dropped the threshold to five years of age. Donald Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 67. For further information on forced-child apprenticeship and the work life of enslaved children, see Karin L. Zipf, Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715–1919 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Wilma King, Stolen Children: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
17. Isaac Throgmorton, interview, 1863, Canada, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies ed. John Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1977), 432–433 (hereafter Throgmorton interview).
18. William Johnson's Natchez: The Antebellum Diary of a Free Negro, ed. William Ransom Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 27–30 (hereafter Johnson, Diary); James Maguire, interview by Henry Bibb, 1851, Slave Testimony, 274–75 (hereafter Maguire interview).
19. Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 254. In 1838, Frederick Douglass, a fugitive slave at the time, could not find a job as a caulker in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He recalled in his narrative that “such was the strength of prejudice against color, among the white caulkers, that they refused to work with me, and of course I could get no employment.” See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. David W. Blight (1845; reprint, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1993), 118. For a discussion of labor discrimination in the antebellum urban North, see Jones, American Work, 246–272; Leonard Curry, The Free Black in Urban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 15–22; David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Sean Wilenz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). On labor competition and racialization see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
20. Douglas Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 28–29.
21. Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 235–236; see also Juliet E. K. Walker, History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 107.
22. John Russell, “The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619–1865” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1913), nn. 108, 151.
23. Luther Porter Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 76, 98.
24. William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, Vol. 1 (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1863), 73.
25. John S. Powell, interview by Susie R. C. Byrd, n.d. [circa 1934], Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, reprinted in Talk About Trouble: A New Deal Potrait of Virginians in the Great Depression, ed. Nancy J. Martin-Perdue and Charles L. Perdue, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 278.
26. 1850 U.S. census, population schedule, Richmond, Henrico County, Virginia, sheet 247, dwelling 179, family 200, Ruben West household; National Archives microfilm publication M432, roll 951; digital image, Ancestry.com, http://www.ancestory.com (accessed 2 January 2013). 1860 U.S. census, population schedule, Richmond, Henrico County, Virginia, sheet 44, dwelling 202, family 338, Ruben West household (listed as RM West); National Archives microfilm publication M653, roll 1352; digital image, Ancestry.com, http://www.ancestory.com (accessed 2 January 2013).
27. Davis and Hogan, The Barber of Natchez, 19–22.
28. Johnson frequently gambled on horse races. See Davis and Hogan, The Barber of Natchez, 32–37.
29. Brown, Clotel, 24–25.
30. Brown, Clotel, 25.
31. Gregg D. Kimball, American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 43.
32. Joe William Trotter, River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 40.
33. Molly W. Berger, “A House Divided: The Culture of the American Luxury Hotel, 1825–1860,” in Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohun, eds., His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 45.
34. Berger, “A House Divided,” 45; see also Jacqueline S. Wilkie, “Submerged Sensuality: Technology and Perceptions of Bathing,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 649–650.
35. Richard L. Bushman and Claudia L. Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,” Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1988): 1225; Marilyn Thornton Williams, Washing “The Great Unwashed”: Public Baths in Urban America, 1840–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 5–21.
36. Pittsburgh Gazette, May 14, 1833; Pittsburgh Gazette, June 14, 1833.
37. Laurence A. Glascoe, ed., The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 57–58.
38. Harris Business Directory for 1839 (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), 14, quoted in Walker, History of Black Business, 107; See also William Switala, Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2001), 85.
39. Paul N. D. Thornell, “The Absent Ones and the Providers: A Biography of the Vashons,” Journal of Negro History 83, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 287.
40. Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 50.
41. Davis, The Barber of Natchez, 34–35.
42. Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, ed. Julie Winch (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), quoted in Walker, History of Black Business, 107.
43. Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 254–259. On the sexual politics of amalgamation and its anti-abolitionist rhetoric see Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47–74; Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 170–216.
44. Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 106–107. Lemire argues the customer was perhaps painted to be an abolitionist, based on his Quaker-like dress and the fact that his “desire for equality…would have paved the way for his own economic and perhaps literal bloodletting.” This reading goes against the interracial collaboration between black and white abolitionists of the time, as well as whites’ concerns about this interaction.
45. On black dandyism see Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
46. Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, 46, 52.
47. Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, 45–63.
48. Russell, “Free Negro in Virginia,” 151. See also Marie Tyler-McGraw and Gregg D. Kimball, In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia: An Exhibition at the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia, February 11, 1988-September 13, 1988 (Richmond, Va.: Valentine Museum; distributed by the University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
49. Johnson, Diary, see entries for the months of October 1839, 268–271, and July 1840, 284-288.
50. James Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 13, 67–68.
51. James Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur: Autobiography of James Thomas, ed. Loren Schweninger (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 85.
52. Johnson, Diary, January 15, 1848, 604; September 12, 1850, 743. For additional references to his barbers leaving to work on steamboats, see pages June 2, 1847, 571; and August, 25, 1849, 661.
53. Johnson, Diary, July 5, 1836, 126–127.
54. Johnson, Diary, January 8, 1841, 314; and January 15, 1851, 770–771.
55. William Still, The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their Efforts for Freedom, As Related by Themselves and Others (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), 449.
56. Throgmorton interview, 432–433.
57. Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 197. See also Kimball, American City, Southern Place, 138-140.
58. Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1985), 37–38. Also see Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984).
59. Koger, Black Slaveowners, 96.
60. The six barbers were Reuben West, Richard C. Hobson, John Ferguson, George P. Gray, George Ruffin, and Richard W. Henderson. See Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 220.
61. Russell, Free Negro in Virginia, 95n, 151.
62. Johnson, Diary, December 24, 1835, 87; and December 27, 1835, 88.
63. Johnson, Diary, February 7, 1841, 317. Historian Douglas Bristol reads these acts from Johnson's perspective, which completely obscures the ways his apprentices navigated their bondage. To explain “William & John & Bill Nix's” decision to stay out after 10 P.M., Bristol claims the surplus funds Johnson allowed them to keep from a day's receipts “apparently went to their heads.” Bristol describes Johnson's relationship with Bill Winston, his enslaved apprentice, as one of paternalism. He claims, “Winston viewed Johnson as a surrogate father,” and describes Winston's unsavory behavior (such as altercations with other apprentices) as “independent streaks” that could be “trying at times” for Johnson, who had to perform his “role as disciplinarian” by slapping and whipping Winston and other apprentices when they did not “behave.” Johnson may have had affection for Winston, possibly hoping to groom him into a successful barber like himself, but Winston was still enslaved. The problem with paternalism is that it usually privileges the master's good will. Bristol, Knights of the Razor, 46–47.
64. On paternalism, see Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). A number of scholars have criticized the paternalism framework of the master-slave relationship. See Manisha Sinha, “Eugene D. Genovese: The Mind of a Marxist Conservative,” Radical History Review 88 (Winter 2004): 4–29; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 24–29; James D. Anderson, “Aunt Jemima in Dialectics: Genovese on Slave Culture,” Journal of Negro History 61, no. 1 (1976): 99–114; Michael Tadman, “The Persistent Myth of Paternalism: Historians and the Nature of Master-Slave Relations in the American South,” Sage Race Relations Abstracts 23 (February 1998): 7–23; George Frederickson, “The Skeleton in the Closet,” New York Review of Books, November 2, 2000, 61–66; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), esp. 328–334.
65. Johnson, Diary, February 23, 1836, 103.
66. Johnson, Diary, July 24, 1840, 286–287.
67. Johnson, Diary, August 10, 1840, 289; September 12, 1841, 347; October 1, 1842, 406–407; January 26, 1843, 424; August 14, 1843, 444; August 23, 1843, 445–446; August 24, 1843, 446; and December 19, 1843, 467–468.
68. Johnson, Diary, January 1, 1844, 470.
69. Davis and Hogan, Barber of Natchez, 91.
70. Johnson, Diary, October 5, 1841, 350; October 9, 1841, 351.
71. Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities; The South, 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 274–275; Savannah, Minutes of the Council, October 15, 1822, Mss., City Hall, Savannah, Georgia. Black workers were also pushed out of unskilled jobs in the South, though primarily in cities with large Creole populations like New Orleans, Savannah, or Mobile, or border cities such as Baltimore or Richmond.
72. Brenda Buchanan, “‘The Art and Mystery of Making Gun Powder’: The English Experience in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War Through the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Brett D. Steele and Tamera Dorland (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 233–274.
73. Briston, Knights of the Razor, 81; Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 40–43; “Barbershop Ordinance for Slaves, Lashes for Penalties, about November 1, 1856,” Interesting Transcriptions from the City Documents of the City of Mobile for 1859–1869, Washington, D.C.: Works Progress Administration, Municipal and Court Records Project, 1939, 197.
74. Quoted in Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 48–49.
75. Bobby Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780–1930 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 11–12; Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 50.
76. Autobiography of James Thomas, 1–8; John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11–45; Lovett, African-American History of Nashville, 10–11.
77. Ira Berlin, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civi War (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press, 1992), 138–147.
78. Autobiography of James Thomas, 1–8; Lovett, African-American History of Nashville, 10–11.
79. Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 23.
80. Loren Schweninger ed., Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks: Series I, Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1777–1867 microfilm (Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America, 1999), Mississippi, 1829, reel 03, frame 0367; quote from Virginia, 1837, reel 20, frame 0548. See also Virginia, 1815, reel 17, frame 0775, 1834, reel 20, frame 0116, 1836, reel 20, frame 0419; Texas, 1839, reel 15, frame 0082, 1842, reel 07, frame 0169 (hereafter Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks).
81. These concerns were certainly not limited to barbers. In 1850, Harriet Cook, a black washerwoman, received the support of thirty-nine white men to remain in Loudoun County, Virginia, arguing, “It would be a serious inconvenience to a number of the citizens of Leesburg to be deprived of her services as a washerwoman and in other capacities in which in consequence of her gentility, trustworthiness and skill she is exceedingly useful.” For white patrons, Cook was “exceedingly useful” as a “gentile” service worker. Jones, American Work, 203–204.
82. Quoted in Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2003), 135.
83. Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks, North Carolina, 1833, reel 06, frame 0387.
84. Maguire interview, 274–275. Eliza Potter, a free black northern hairdresser, often traveled to New Orleans to dress hair. She met there an enslaved hairdresser, Louise, who “was sold five different times, for a thousand dollars each time, and, by each of her owners, promised her freedom whenever she had made the thousand dollars and given it to them.” With each owner, as soon as Louise saved 85 to 90 percent of the amount to purchase her freedom, he sold her to another slave owner, starting the cycle again. According to Potter, Louise “lost her reason, and is now a lunatic.” See Eliza Potter, A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, (Cincinnatti, 1859), 253–254.
85. Still, The Underground Railroad, 335.
86. Still, The Underground Railroad, 150–152.
87. Throgmorton interview, 434–436.
88. As historian Richard Wade has noted, “Cities offered some slaves an uneasy sanctuary from the master, as well as a springboard to freedom beyond.” Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 218.
89. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 185–187.
90. H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Fugitive Slaves and American Courts: The Pamphlet Literature ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Garland Pub., 1988).
91. Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 80. On slave runaways, see also Blassingame, The Slave Community, 192–222.
92. Still, The Underground Railroad, 427–428.
93. Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856), 85.
94. Brown thought England was near New Orleans because he heard people say it was “only just across the water.” John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England, ed. Louis Alexis Chamerovow (London: W. M. Watts, 1855), 100–101.
95. Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi, 45; J. Blaine Hudson, “Crossing the Dark Line: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Louisville and North-Central Kentucky,” Filson History Quarterly 75, no. 1 (Winder 2001): 33–83.
96. James Forten to William Lloyd Garrison, May 6, 1832, in C. Peter Ripley, ed., Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 3 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 85–86n5, 88–89. Cassey was treasurer of the American Moral Reform Society.
97. Register of Trades of the Colored People in the City of Philadelphia and Districts (Philadelphia: Merihew and Gunn, 1838), 6–7.
98. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 170–216.
99. Switala, Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania, 82; Glascoe, ed., The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh, 59.
100. In Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), James and Lois Horton suggest that black customers frequented Peter Howard's barber shop in Boston for shaves, but the shop was also a space where patrons and other members of the community exchanged pertinent news. They further claim that abolitionists could often be found discussing the abolition movement in Howard's shop, which was also a station on the Underground Railroad. They cite John Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace, for this information; however, Daniels does not actually provide a source citation for his discussion of Howard. Therefore, there is no clear evidence that black customers actually frequented Howard's shop. It is certainly possible they did because white abolitionists may not have cared one way or the other. Nonetheless, I am left to believe that Horton and Horton assumed Howard's shop was the kind of bustling space for black men that they are today. They do cite a Civil War pension record of a veteran who enlisted in a Massachusetts black regiment in another black barber's shop. This shop might have been read alongside Howard's shop. See Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 36–37, 142n48; John Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 57.
101. Switala, Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania, 86.
102. Switala, Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania, 88.
103. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 145.
104. Joseph A. Borome, Jacob C. White, Robert B. Ayres, and J. M. McKim, “The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 92, no. 3 (July 1968): 351.
105. Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 37.
106. Frederick Douglass, “Persecution on Account of Faith, Persecution on Account of Color: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on January 1851,” North Star, January 30, 1851 reprinted in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews Volume 2: 1847–54, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univesity Press, 1982), 296. See also Erasmus Wilson, ed., Standard History of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (Chicago: H. R. Cornell and Company, 1898), 821.
107. “Fugitive Slave Excitement in Manchester, N. H.—Fatal Affray,” New York Times, June 13, 1854.
108. Still, The Underground Railroad, 106–107.
109. Trotter, River Jordan, 45; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 171.
110. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900: A Study of a Minority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 105.
111. “George DeBaptiste, His Death Yesterday-Sketches of His Active and Eventful Life-He Was Formerly a Servant of President Harrison-His Connection with the Underground Railway-His Efforts to Rescue Negroes from Slavery,” Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, February 23, 1875; Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900, 42; David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 14.
112. Autobiography of James Thomas, 74, 90.
113. Quote from Wendell Phillips Dabney, “Rough Autobiographical Sketch of His Boyhood Years,” (typscript, n.d.), 67, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; see also Matthew L. Cushman, “Free Black Barbers in Antebellum Richmond: A Cut Above the Rest” (unpublished paper, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2004).
114. Dabney, Rough Autobiographical Sketch, 83.
115. Dabney, Rough Autobiographical Sketch, 84.
116. Dabney, Rough Autobiographical Sketch, 121.
117. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 97–98, 231–232.
118. Henry Bradshaw Fearon, Sketches of America: A Narrative of a Journey of Five Thousand Miles Through the Eastern and Western States of America: Contained in Eight Reports Addressed to the Thirty-nine English Families by whom the Author was Deputed, in June 1817, to Ascertain Whether Any, and What Part of the United States Would be Suitable for Their Residence: With Remarks on Mr. Birkbeck's “Notes” and “Letters” (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819), 58–60; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery; The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 181.
119. Isaac Candler, A Summary View of America Comprising a Description of the Face of the Country (London: T. Cadell, 1824), 284, quoted in Candler, Summary View of America, 284, quoted in Jones, American Work, 285.
120. David Walker, Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 29.
121. Walker, Walker's Appeal, 232; Litwack, North of Slavery, 175.
122. Report of the Proceedings of the Colored National Convention, Held at Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday, September 6, 1848 (Rochester: John Dick, North Star Office, 1848), 5, quote from 13 (hereafter Colored National Convention, 1848) in Howard Holman Bell, Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864 (New York: Arno Press, 1969); see also Patrick Real, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 35–36.
123. Colored National Convention, 1848, 17; Litwack, North of Slavery, 174; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 234.
124. Colored National Convention, 1848, 5; Real, Black Identity and Black Protest, 35.
125. Colored National Convention, 1848, 19.
126. Anti-Slavery Bugle, August 24, 1850, quoted in Joan R. Sherman, Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 42.
127. Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852; repr., New York: Humanity Books, 2004), 145–146.
128. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People, 44, 46, 192–193. Barbers valued education as much as Delany. Black barbers either educated their children in the business of barbering or used their remuneration from barbering to send their children to school. In the early 1840s, Fountain Lewis Sr. arrived in Cincinnati and gained a job in a Frenchman's barber shop. When his employer moved from the city, Lewis took over the shop. His son, Fountain Jr., entered the business with him when he came of age. As men of means, black barbers had the resources to send their children to school. Accoding to historian Nikki Taylor, in Cincinnati's First Ward, which was heavily populated with black barbers in 1850, 83 percent of barbers’ children attended school. See Nikki Marie Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 134. For these Cincinnati barbers, their occupation presented black men with a multitude of possibilities, which included formal education in school and informal education in their barber shops. Yet, many black leaders debated the respectability of barbering as a manly profession in a free society.
129. William Wells Brown, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863), 152.
130. Pennsylvania Freeman, September 29, 1853, 154.
131. Sherman, Invisible Poets, 43. On Whitfield's writings see James Monroe Whitfield, The Works of James M. Whitfield: American and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet, ed. Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
132. “Proceedings of the Convention, Of the Colored Freemen of Ohio, Held in Cincinnati, January 14, 15, 16, 17, and 19, 1852,” in Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 277, quoted in Litwack, North of Slavery, 181. On the call for blacks to acquire wealth see “Proceedings of the Convention, Of the Colored Freemen of Ohio,” in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 276. African Americans at a Pennsylvaia convention passed a similar resolution in 1865. See “Proceedings of the State Equal Right’ Convention, of the Colored People of Pennsylvania, Held in the City of Harrisburg, February 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1865, Together With a Few of the Arguments Presented Suggesting the Necessity for Holding the Convention, and an Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of Pennsylvania,” in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 156–157.
133. First quote from Frederick Douglass, “Learn Trades or Starve,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 4, 1853; second quote from True Wesleyan, “The Liberty Party,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 4, 1853.
134. Joe Trotter, River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 17; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 250; Herman D. Bloch, “The New York City Negro and Occupational Eviction, 1860–1910,” International Review of Social History, 5, no. 1 (1960): 28; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (New York: King's Crown Press, 1949), 104, 216.
135. Bloch, “The New York City Negro and Occupational Eviction,” 30; Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 77–78.
136. “Make Your Sons Mechanics and Farmers—Not Waiters, Porters, and Barbers,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 18, 1853. See also Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 240–241.
137. Quotes from “Learn Trades or Starve,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 4, 1853; “Letter from Benjamin Coates,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 11, 1853.
138. “Mr. Uriah Boston,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 1, 1853; “Uriah Boston Again,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 15, 1853. For background on Boston see Ripley, ed., Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 3, 279–280.
139. Uriah Boston, “Mr. F. Douglass Sir.,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 22, 1853.
140. Lewis Woodson, “Doing Something,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, October 28, 1853.
141. Robert J. Cottrol, The Afro-Yankees: Providence's Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).
142. Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 4, 278–280; Philip S. Foner and George Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 7–15, 80–89; Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored People and Their Friends, Held in Troy, N. Y., on the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th October, 1847 (Troy, NY: Steam Press, 1847) in Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions; “The Meeting,” The Colored American, June 6, 1840; “A Call for a Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York,” The Colored American, July 4, 1840; “Poughkeepsie,” The Colored American, July 25, 1840; “Celebration of West India Emancipation in Poughkeepsie,” The Colored American, August 21, 1841. See also the following articles in Frederick Douglass's Paper: “Nominations for Members of State Council,” October 28, 1853; “Statement of Votes Cast for Members of N.Y. State Council,” December 23, 1853; Uriah Boston, “Friend Douglass: Dear Sir—Allow me to Present a Few Thoughts,” April 20, 1855; “Classified Advertisements: Call for a State Convention of the Colored People of the State of New York,” July 27, 1855; quote from “The Troy Convention,” September 14, 1855; “Meeting of the Colored Citizens,” October 5, 1855.
143. “Death of Uriah Boston,” Dutchess Courier, June 16, 1889; Boyd's Poughkeepsie Directory, Containg the Names of the Citizens; A Business Directory; Record of the Rebellion of 1861, With Sketches of American and Other Wars; And an Appendix of Much Useful Information compiled by Andrew Boyd (Poughkeepsie: Andrew Boyd, 1862), 139.
144. Vail's Poughkeepsie City Directory for 1874-1875, compiled by J. P. A. Vail (Poughkeepsie: Vail and Co., 1874), 32; Vail's Poughkeepsie City Directory for 1880-’81, compiled by J. P. A. Vail (Poughkeepsie: John P. A. Vail and Co., 1880), 31; 1850 U.S. census, population schedule, Poughkeepsie City, Dutchess County, New York, dwelling 266, family 355, Uriah Boston household; National Archives microfilm publication M432, roll 497; digital image, Ancestry.com, http://www.ancestory.com (accessed 28 March 2011); 1880 U.S. census, population schedule, Poughkeepsie City, Dutchess County, New York, Enumeration District 054, sheet 28, dwelling 214, family 306, Uriah Boston household; National Archives microfilm publication T9, roll 825; digital image, Ancestry.com, http://www.ancestory.com (accessed 28 March 2011).
145. Xiomara Santamarina points out in her reading of Potter's book that “in her representations of her work Potter appears at an advantage relative to her white female employers not as their racial subordinate: her experience serves to display the foibles of her ‘betters.’” Santamarina, Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 112.
146. Potter, A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, 27.
147. Potter, A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, 68–69, 201–202.
148. Potter, A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, 163.
1. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, an Autobiography (1942; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 1995). The 1918 city directory lists three shops: 714 14th Street, N.W.; 1312 F Street, N.W.; 429 12th Street, N.W. The 1919 district city directory listed only four shops owned by Robinson, all of them located downtown: 1312 F Street, N.W.; 416 12th Street, NW; 1743 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.; and 1410 G Street, N.W. Whether Hurston slightly exaggerated or Robinson decided to list only his marquee shops, the average barber did not own a chain of shops. See Boyd's Directory of the District of Columbia 1918 (Washington, D.C.; R. L. Polk and Company, 1918), 1869; Boyd's Directory of the District of Columbia 1919 (Washington, D.C.: R. L. Polk and Company, 1919), 1945.
2. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 134–135. Robinson lived at 1762 U Street, N.W.
3. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 136.
4. On patron-client relations see S. N. Eisenstadt and Louis Roniger, “Patron-Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 1 (January 1980): 42–77; James C. Scott, “Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia,” American Political Science Review 66, no. 1 (March 1972): 91–113. On the “etiquette of civility” and patron-clientage see William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). See also Beth Bates Thompkins, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black American, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
5. Eric Foner, “The Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation,” Journal of American History 81 (1994), 435–460.
6. Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Myra B. Young Armstead, “Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August”: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, centennial ed. (1899; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 144.
8. Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner (Washington, D.C.: Association for the Study of Afro American Life and History, 1930), 31.
9. David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 68–71.
10. George C. Wright, Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 39; Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 384; Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977), 15–16; Eric Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
11. On the black elite, see Willard Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920, (1990; repr., Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000); Jacqueline Moore, Leading the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation's Capital, 1880–1920 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
12. Bill Reese, interview by Sadie B. Hornsby, ed. Sarah H. Hall and John N. Booth, “I Cater to Colored People,” The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, gen. ed. George P. Rawick, vol. 4, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 513 (hereafter Reese interview).
13. Andrew R. McCants, John Merrick: A Biographical Sketch (Durham: The Seeman Printery, 1920), 31–32; Walter B. Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 20–80; Booker T. Washington, The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1909), 37.
14. Alexa Benson Henderson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company: Guardian of Black Economic Dignity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 21–23.
15. George A. Myers and James Ford Rhodes, The Barber and the Historian:The Correspondence of George A. Myers and James Ford Rhodes, 1910-1923 ed. John A. Garraty (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1956), xv–xviii; Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 82; Cleveland Directory for the Year Ending June 1880 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Directory Company, 1879), 557; The Ohio Historical Records Survey Project, Service Division, Work Projects Administration, Historic Sites of Cleveland: Hotels and Taverns, (Columbus: The Ohio Historical Records Survey Project, August 1942, 615.
16. Holt, Black over White, 15–16; Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers.
17. On black women's political leadership at the turn of the twentieth century, see Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 111–150; Ann Gordon with Bettye Collier Thomas, eds., African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1997); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
18. Reese interview, 513.
19. Reese interview, 515.
20. George Knox, Slave and Freeman: The Autobiography of George L. Knox, ed. Willard Gatewood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979), 186 (hereafter Knox, Autobiography).
21. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 346.
22. W. Scott Hall, “The Journeymen Barbers’ International Union of America” (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1936), 69.
23. W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro in Business; Report of a Social Study Made Under the Direction of Atlanta University; Together with the Proceedings of the Fourth Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, held at Atlanta University, May 30–31, 1899 (Atlanta: Atlanta University, 1899), 9, 16.
24. Fred M. Holycross, “The American Barbershop: Changing Gender Roles and the Modification of Masculinity” (master's thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1990), 15–16; Richard A. Plumb and Milton V. Lee, Ancient and Honorable Barber Profession (Indianapolis: Barbers, Beauticians, and Allied Industries International Association, 1974), 18–19.
25. Reese interview, 515–516.
26. See advertisements in Andrew F. Hilyer, The Twentieth Century Union League Directory: A Compilation of the Efforts of the Colored People of Washington For Social Betterment (Washington, D.C., 1901), 17.
27. Alonzo Herndon, Barber Shop Ledger, 1902, Alonzo Herndon unprocessed collection, The Herndon Home, Atlanta, Georgia.
28. On urbanization and the New South, see Don Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); David Goldfield, Region, Race, and Cities: Interpreting the Urban South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Blake McKelvey, The Urbanization of America, 1860–1915 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Howard Rabinowitz, Race, Ethnicity, and Urbanization (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994). On Atlanta as a New South city, see James Michael Russell, Atlanta, 1847–1890: City Building in the Old South and the New (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), especially 232–258.
29. Quote from McCants, John Merrick, 32. See also Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 36, 153.
30. Atlanta City Directory, 1889 (Atlanta: R.L. Polk & Co., 1889), 990; Joseph O. Jewell, Race, Social Reform, and the Making of a Middle Class: The American Missionary Association and Black Atlanta, 1870-1900 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 71-72; Allison Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875–1906 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 51.
31. Henderson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company, 21–23.
32. McCants suggests that Merrick owned two shops for black patrons; however, no other sources account for these shops. McCants, John Merrick, 32–34, 39–40. Historian Walter B. Weare, in Black Business in the New South, asserted that Merrick's white patrons “thought of him more as the competent Negro businessman than as ‘John, the white man's barber.’” Weare, Black Business in the New South, 20–80.
33. Herndon Biographical Statement, Herndon Family Papers, quoted in Carole Merritt, The Herndons: An Atlanta Family (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 34–35.
34. “Betts, Atlanta's Oldest Barber, Is Now Dead,” Atlanta Constitution, November 19, 1901; Merritt, The Herndons, 35.
35. Ad reprinted in Edward R. Carter, The Black Side: A Partial History of the Business, Religious and Educational Side of the Negro in Atlanta, GA. (Atlanta, 1894), image insert after p. 184; “Bob Steele is Dead,” Atlanta Constitution, August 31, 1899.
36. Merritt, The Herndons, 36.
37. Henderson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company, 21–23; Alexa Benson Henderson, “Atlanta Life Insurance Company—Alonzo Herndon and Norris Bumstead Herndon,” and Juliet E. K. Walker, “Insurance Companies,” both in Juliet E. K. Walker, ed., Encyclopedia of African American Business History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 39, 297.
38. His other lenders included businessman H. S. Blossom; Robert Rhodes, brother of James Ford; A. L. Johnson; W. Chisholm; and H. R. Groff. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 308, 345; The Ohio Historical Records Survey Project, Historic Sites of Cleveland: Hotels and Taverns (Columbus: The Ohio Historical Records Survey Project, 1942), 327; “George A. Myers Gone!” Cleveland Gazette, February 8, 1930. Myers's ledger lists the nine men who financially assisted him in opening the barber shop. Quote from George Myers to James Rhodes, March 15, 1921, in Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, 126–127.
39. Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago's First Century, Vol. 1: 1833–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 202.
40. Charles Chesnutt, The Colonel's Dream (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905), 21.
41. Chesnutt, Colonel's Dream, 79.
42. Chesnutt, Colonel's Dream, 80.
43. Chesnutt, Colonel's Dream, 84.
44. Chesnutt, Colonel's Dream, 84.
45. “The Doll” was originally submitted to Atlantic Monthly in early 1904, but was not accepted for publication. It was later published in The Crisis in 1912.
46. Sylvia Lyons Render, ed., The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981), 409.
47. Render, ed., Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt, 412.
48. Martin Summers's discussion of the consumerist model of masculinity describes Forsyth's actions in Tom's shop. Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents.
49. This practice is what Homi Bhabha calls the duality of overlooking; the simultaneous process of surveillance and disavowal. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 236.
50. Knox, Autobiography, 9–10.
51. Knox, Autobiography, 107–108.
52. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 132.
53. Xenia Gazette, October 10, 1873.
54. Quoted in Howard Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 196 and Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 142–143.
55. The Republican-dominated Congress enacted the 1866 act, over President Andrew Johnson's veto, to counteract the Black Codes that southern states imposed on newly freed slaves. The act granted them citizenship rights such as to sue, make contracts, give evidence in court, and enter property transactions.
56. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 504–505; “Equal Rights,” Harpers Weekly, January 20, 1872; “The Virginia Legislature,” New York Times, January 6, 1874; “North Carolina Politics—Civil Rights,” New York Times, June 1, 1874; “The Civil Rights Bill,” New York Times, June 8, 1874.
57. U.S. Statutes at Large, XVI, 27, April 9, 1866, and, quote from, U.S. Statutes at Large, XVIII, March 1, 1875, 335, in Richard Bardolph, ed., The Civil Rights Record: Black Americans and the Law, 1849–1970 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1970), 46–47, 54–55. On the Civil Rights Act of 1875 see Foner, Reconstruction, 532–534; James M. McPherson, “Abolitionists and the Civil Rights Act of 1875,” Journal of American History 52, no. 3 (December 1965): 493–510; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Civil Rights Act of 1875,” Western Political Quarterly 18, no. 4 (December 1965): 763–775. For a detailed discussion of hotels and the Civil Rights Act, see A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, “Travelers, Strangers, and Jim Crow: Law, Public Accommodations, and Civil Rights in America,” Law and History Review 23, no. 1 (2005); and Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007).
58. On the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, see “The Civil Rights Bills: The Bill as Passed by the House Yesterday,” New York Times, February 6, 1875; “Civil Rights Discussed,” New York Times, February 28, 1875.
59. In most states, such as Kentucky and Tennessee, whites opposed the Civil Rights bill and proprietors vowed to disregard it. Some believed blacks were “decent” enough not to agitate on the issue. To prevent lawsuits, the Tennessee legislature abolished the right to sue for being “excluded from any hotel or public means of transportations, or place of amusement” to sue. Coincidentally, on March 23, 1875, Tennessee passed a law that gave a proprietor great latitude to exclude “any person, whom he shall for any reason whatever, choose not to entertain, carry, or admit, to his house, hotel, carriage, or means of transportation or place of amusement.” Tennessee was the only Confederate state to escape Radical Reconstruction because it complied with congressional requirements to show repentance and profess loyalty to the Union. Wright, Life Behind a Veil, 55–58. For Tennessee's Jim Crow law, see Acts of Tennessee, 1875 (ch. 130), 216, in Bardolph, ed., Civil Rights Record, 82–83.
60. “Threatened Prosecution of a Colored Barber in Washington for Refusing to Shave Two Colored Men,” New York Times, March 6, 1875; “A Colored Barber Refuses to Operate Upon Another Colored Man,” NewYork Times, March 20, 1875.
61. On Stewart's racial classification see 1880 U.S. census, population schedule, Washington, District of Columbia, Enumeration District 38, sheet 32, dwelling 245, family 292, Carter Stewart household; National Archives microfilm publication T9, roll 122; digital image, Ancestry.com, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed 2 January 2013). On Stewart and racial politics in D.C. during Reconstruction see Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 154, 162
62. Laws of the District of Columbia, June 20, 1872, ch. 51, pp. 65–66, in Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 109. On the 1872 law, see also Masur, An Example for All the Land, 229-230.
63. In Chicago, March 1875, two African Americans demanded, and were granted, seats in the “dress-circle” at McVicker's Theatre. A New York Times article concluded that J. H. McVicker, the white proprietor, faced a dilemma: “They do not want to lose the patronage of fashionable people, nor can they afford to pay a heavy fine several times a night by refusing to obey the law.” In Trenton, New Jersey, Horace Deyo and Henry Oregue were refused the opportunity to play pool at Peter Katzenbach's billiard saloon, which was attached to Trenton House hotel. The two men filed a complaint with U.S. Commissioner Shreve, who in turn dismissed the complaint on the grounds that saloons did not fall under the Civil Rights Act. According to the commissioner, this billiard room, like a barber shop in a hotel, was separate from the hotel business and “is a private business with which the law does not and cannot interfere.” For northern struggles, see “Various Notes of Interest from Chicago—The Civil Rights Bill,” New York Times, March 14, 1875; “City and Suburban News—Trenton” and “Civil Rights in Trenton,” New York Times, March 26, 1875. See also the following New York Times articles: “Working of the Civil Rights Bill—A Test Case in this District,” April 22, 1875; “Civil Rights in Pullman Cars,” April 21, 1875; “Colored Children in the Schools—An Important Decision by a Brooklyn Judge,” September 14, 1875; “A Case Under the Civil Rights Act,” November 23, 1883.
64. “Editorial Article 5—No Title,” New York Times, March 7, 1875.
65. See Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 84-88.
66. Benjamin F. Butler, “Gen. Butler on the Civil Rights Bill,” Harper's Weekly, April 24, 1875.
67. Butler, “Gen. Butler on the Civil Rights Bill.”
68. 43 Congressional Record 940 (1875) (statement of Rep. Benjamin Butler), quoted in A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 96.
69. James Bryce, American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 502–503.
70. Higginbotham, Shades of Freedom, 96–97.
71. Reverend J. C. Price, “Does the Negro Seek Social Equality,” Forum 10 (January 1891): 562–564, quoted in Charles Wynes, Race Relations in Virginia, 1870–1902 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1961), 117–118.
72. As Nell Irvin Painter has pointed out, sex most effectively rallied white supremacists, regardless of class, to protect white womanhood from black men in the public sphere (politics, public accommodations, and public communications). To put it another way, the rhetoric of social equality meant race mixing and associating as equals, which would lead to black men having sex with and marrying white women. This widespread sexually charged rhetoric of social equality effectively united whites against equal rights and equal movement. See Nell Irvin Painter, “‘Social Equality,’ Miscegenation, Labor, and Power,” in Norma V. Bartley, ed., The Evolution of Southern Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 47-67.
73. For civil rights cases brought to court regarding jury discrimination, see “The Virginia Civil Rights Cases,” New York Times, April 12, 1879; education, “The Civil Rights Bill—The Mixed School Question,” New York Times, September 15, 1874.
74. Justice John Marshall Harlan was the sole dissenter. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), in Bardolph, ed., Civil Rights Record, 68–72. For newspaper accounts of the decision, see New York Times, “Civil Rights Cases Decided” and “The Civil Rights Act Void,” October 16, 1883, “The Civil Rights Decision Regarded as a Step Backward,” October 17, 1883.
75. In its 1885 Civil Rights Act, the Tennessee legislature made allowances for Jim Crow: “nothing herein contained shall be construed as interfering with the existing rights to provide separate accommodations and seats for colored and white persons at such places.” See Acts of Tennessee, 1885 (ch. 68), 124–125, in Bardolph, ed., Civil Rights Record, 126–127.
76. Massachusetts's 1885 civil rights legislation was amended to its 1865 and 1866 legislation; it was amended again in 1895. New York State passed its civil rights legislation in 1873, and amended it in 1881, 1893, and 1895. Nebraska's 1885 legislation was amended in 1893. Iowa and Connecticut amended their 1884 laws in 1892 and 1905, respectively. Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont did not enact civil rights legislation. See Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 175-217.
77. Illinois, Laws (1885), 64, and (1897), 137, in Spear, Black Chicago, 41–42; Public Acts of Michigan, 1885 (ch. 130), 131–32, in Bardolph, ed., Civil Rights Record, 128–129; Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 53, 59; David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 98. Pennsylvania's law, enacted in 1887, did not list barber shops in its schedule. Laws of Pennsylvania (1887), 130–131; Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 418; Frank Quillin, The Color Line in Ohio: A History of Race Prejudice in a Typical Northern State (Ann Arbor, Mich.: G. Wahr, 1913), 104.
78. “Republican Makes Point Against Race Man,” Cleveland Gazette, October 27, 1883; “J. W. G., Who Can Tell,” Cleveland Gazette, December 1, 1883.
79. “From the Queen City: A Representative of the Gazette Visits Colored Barber Shops,” Cleveland Gazette, June 14, 1884. On Ross's racial classification see 1870 U.S. census, population schedule, Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio, sheet 147, William Ross household; National Archives microfilm publication M593, roll 1211; digital image, Ancestry.com, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed 2 January 2013).
80. Quoted in W. Laird Clowes, Black America: A Study of the Ex-Slave and His Late Master (London: Cassell & Company, 1891), 102. Robinson later became an ardent supporter of Booker T. Washington and publicly supported women's suffrage in the National Baptist Magazine. See Louis Harlan and Raymond Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, 1895–1898 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972); Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 147–148.
81. “From the Queen City: A Representative of the Gazette Visits Colored Barber Shops,” Cleveland Gazzette, June 14, 1884.
82. “From the Queen City: A Representative of the Gazette Visits Colored Barber Shops.” See also “To Whom Shall We Turn?” Cleveland Gazette, April 10, 1886; Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 80–81.
83. “The Detroit ‘Plaindealer’ on Colored Barbers,” Cleveland Gazette, November 17, 1883.
84. Quotes from “Knox as a Race Man,” Indianapolis World, September 24, 1892. On Levi Christy and the Indianapolis World, see Knox, Autobiography, 24-25; Thornbrough, Negro in Indiana, 384-385, 388.
85. R. H. C., “J. V. C., of Pittsburgh, Gets an Answer on the Barber Question,” Cleveland Gazette, December 8, 1883. This letter was in response to J. V. C.'s letter in the Gazette on December 1, 1883.
86. Juliet E. K. Walker uses this term to understand the ways slaves and free blacks navigated the racial constraints of the market economy. See Juliet E. K. Walker, “Prejudices, Profits, Privileges: Commentaries on ‘Captive Capitalists,’ Antebellum Entrepreneurs,” Essays in Economic and Business History 8 (1990): 399–422.
87. C. H. C., “Barber Question—An Answer to R. H. C. by a Fellow Citizen,” Cleveland Gazette, December 15, 1883.
88. “Encouraging,” Western Appeal, St. Paul, April 30, 1887, in Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to Present, Vol. 4: The Black Worker During the Era of the American Federation of Labor and the Railroad Brotherhoods (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 273.
89. Francis H. Warren, comp., Michigan Manual of Freedmen's Progress (Detroit, 1915), 123 quoted in Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 98.
90. George Nash to Harry Smith, August 9, 1897, reel 2, frame 33, George A. Myers Papers, 1890-1929 (microfilm) Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio (hereafter Myers Papers).
91. Richard R. Wright to George Myers, October 9, 1897, reel 2, frame 631, Myers Papers.
92. Myers to Green, January 28, 1903, John P. Green Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (hereafter Green Papers). There is no evidence of the interaction of white and black customers in the barber shop, not to mention the nature and dynamics of the discourse.
93. George Campbell, White and Black: The Outcome of a Visit to the United States (London: Chatto & Windus, 1879), 299.
94. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), 1.
95. Dunbar, Sport of the Gods, 37.
96. Dunbar, Sport of the Gods, 38.
97. Dunbar, Sport of the Gods, 36.
98. Blair Kelley notes a similar point in noticing barbers were key leaders in the Savannah 1906 streetcar boycotts. See Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 175.
99. In addition to Myers, George Knox of Indianapolis was an influential barber who was actively involved in Republican politics. He used his newspaper, the Indianapolis Freeman, as a mouthpiece for both racial equality and the Republican Party. He used his barber shop as a place to gauge the political winds by engaging with his white patrons from the Democratic and Republican Parties.
100. George Myers to James Ford Rhodes, March 8, 1920, and February 16, 1923, in Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, 123, 146; Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 345–347; Felix James, “The Civic and Political Activities of George A. Myers,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 2 (April 1973): 168.
101. James, “The Civic and Political Activities of George Myers,” 169.
102. George Myers to Charles Kinney, July 30, 1896, reel 1, frames 428-429, Myers Papers; Charles Kinney to George Myers, July 31, 1896, reel 1, frame 430, Myers Papers.
103. Carlos Stone to George Myers, September 30, 1896, reel 1, frames 514–515, Myers Papers.
104. Tyler to Myers, October 13, 1896, reel 1, frames 533-534, Myers Papers. In a letter to Myers, Tyler urged him to stop “hustling” as hard in political business and tend to his barbering business. See Ralph Tyler to George Myers, August 3, 1896, reel 1, frames 440-441, Myers Papers.
105. Myers received a flood of letters from northern and southern blacks asking him to put in a good word with Hanna or McKinley. For examples, see Tyler to Myers, October 23, 1896, reel 1, frames 550-551; H. M. Daugherty to Charles Cottrill, July 29, 1897, reel 1, frame 963; J. E. Hawkins to Myers, December 7, 1896, reel 1, frames 640-642; Charles Ferguson to Myers, June 22, 1897, reel 1, frames 209-210; Ralph Tyler to Myers, August 24, 1896, reel 1, frames 472-473; Tyler to Myers, July 28, 1897, reel 1, frames 960-961; E. A. Brown to Myers, August 14, 1897, reel 2, frame 68; Henry Arnett to Myers, August 5, 1897, reel 2, frame 9; Arnett to Myers, August 6, 1897, reel 2, frames 11-12; George Jackson to Myers, August 14, 1897, reel 2, frames 58-67; George Bailey to Myers, August 21, 1897, reel 2, frames 90-91; Samuel Huffman to Myers, September 14, 1897, reel 2, frame 176, all in Myers Papers. Despite Myers's work organizing black voters, Hanna delivered few patronage positions (primarily to black southerners). Myers remained loyal to the party, but he acknowledged the ways the leadership slighted him and black voters. See Henry Vortriede to Myers, September 29, 1897, reel 2, frame 520; George Waldorf to Myers, November 4, 1897, reel 2, frame 764; John Porter (president's secretary) to Myers, November 8, 1897, reel 2, frame 775; John Porter (president's secretary) to Myers, March 23, 1898, reel 3, frame 41; Marcus Hanna to Myers, March 25, 1898, reel 3, frame 49; John Lynch to Myers, March 26, 1898, reel 3, frames 50-51; J. S. Rodgers (Private Secretary of Governor Bushnell) to Myers, February 26, 1897, reel 1, frame 794, all in Myers Papers. See also George Myers to John Green, June 10, 1898, and Myers to Green, May 28, 1901, Green Papers.
106. R. McCants Andrews, John Merrick: A Biographical Sketch (Durham, N.C.: Press of the Seeman Printery, 1920), 39–40; Weare, Black Business in the New South, 32–38.
107. For further discussion of mutual aid societies and the founding of black insurance companies, see M. S. Stuart, An Economic Detour: A History of Insurance in the Lives of American Negroes (New York: Wendell Mallett and Company, 1940); James H. Browning, “The Beginnings of Insurance Enterprise Among Negroes,” Journal of Negro History 22, no. 4 (October 1937); J. H. Harmon, A. G. Lindsay, and C. G. Woodson, The Negro as a Business Man (Washington, D.C.: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., 1929; repr., College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1969); Robert E. Weems, Jr., Black Business in the Black Metropolis: The Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company, 1925–1985 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 119–124; Juliet E. K. Walker, ed., Encyclopedia of African American Business History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999); Juliet E. K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York: Macmillan/Prentice Hall International, 1998), 187–193.
108. Weare, Black Business in the New South, 12–15.
109. Walker, History of Black Business in America, 187–88.
110. Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 123.
111. Quoted in Weare, Black Business in the New South, 30–31; Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 117.
112. Quoted in Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 105–106; Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 61–62; Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 312–313; Edmonds, Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina (New York: Russell and Russell, 1951), 158–177.
113. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 106–113; Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 63–65.
114. Andrews, John Merrick, 159–160 quoted in Weare, Black Business in the New South, 23.
115. According to Richard Sherman, McKinley was silent on “sensitive” issues, such as the “southern way of life,” which accepted blacks’ subservience, to create sectional harmony, particularly after the Spanish-American War. See, Richard B. Sherman, The Republican Party and Black America from McKinley to Hoover, 1896-1933 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 12–22.
116. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 113–118; Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 314. Myers believed the government should prioritize domestic affairs over foreign affairs. He believed, “I am under the opinion that this country should demonstrate its ability to protect their own citizens within its own domain—especially when some are a part and partial of this government—(Baker at Lake City, S.C.) before interfering with other Governments about the treatment of their subjects. Plainly speaking that we should ‘first cast the mote out of our own eye.’” See George Myers to John Green, May 3, 1898, Green Papers.
117. Quoted in Sherman, Republican Party and Black America, 13. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 257–258; Barbara Blair, Though Justice Sleeps: African Americans, 1880-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 329. On the Afro-American Council see Shawn Leigh Alexander, An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Benjamin Justesen, Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).
118. Reverdy C. Ransom to George Myers, June 10, 1899, reel 3, frame 527; Ralph Tyler to Myers, November 16, 1898, reel 3, frame 341, both in Myers Papers.
119. George Myers to John P. Green, December 9, 1898, Green Papers. The actual letter to Senator Hanna is in Myers Papers but is unreadable.
120. George Myers to John P. Green, December 28, 1898, Green Papers.
121. Marcus Hanna to Myers, December 15, 1898, reel 3, frame 362, Myers Papers.
122. One hundred and fifty people rallied on Myers's lawn in opposition to McKinley. There is no evidence of the racial mix of the crowd. See George Myers to Charles Dick, August 23, 1900, reel 4, frame 362, Myers Papers. On Myers's continued work for the party, see Myers to Dick, August 21, 1900, reel 4, frames 238-240, Myers Papers. He also looked to shed favorable light on the party as he requested Henry Arnett, of the Recorder of Deeds office, to “examine the records of the War Department for language used by Theodore Roosevelt in complimenting the bravery, valor and commendable conduct of the colored troops which participated in the Cuban campaigns.” Arnett's replied, “THERE is NO SUCH RECORD [his emphasis]. The fact of the matter is, all that Colonel Roosevelt has said he has said outside the official reports.” See Henry Arnett to Myers, September 13, 1900, reel 4, frame 331, Myers Papers.
123. Two months before the election, Henry Arnett informed Myers that black voters in West Virginia and Indiana were gaining interest in the Democratic party because of the “failure of the President to say one word against the lynchings and southern ‘negro eliminating’ laws being enacted in the South.” See Henry Arnett to George Myers, September 1, 1900, reel 4, frames 298-300, Myers Papers.
124. George Myers to John Green, December 7, 1900, Green Papers.
125. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 353-363.
126. George Myers to William McKinley, November 15, 1900, reel 4, frame 420, Myers Papers. He sent a copy of the letter to John P. Green and asserted, “I now feel as if I have done my duty.” November 15, 1900, Green Papers; Sherman, Republican Party and Black America, 12–16. Even after this letter, Myers wrote Charles Dick in the House of Representatives pertaining to an investigation of southern disfranchisement: Charles Dick to Myers, December 16, 1901, reel 4, frame 1007, Myers Papers. Mississippi began the disfranchisement movement among southern states in 1890, followed by South Carolina in 1895, Louisiana in 1898, and North Carolina in 1900.
127. Myers to McKinley, November 15, 1900, reel 4, frames 420-421, Myers Papers.
128. George Myers to John Green, May 17, 1901, Green Papers.
129. “Organization. Prominent Men from Over the State Meet in Columbus to Effect One—George A. Myers Presides and Delivers Opening Address,” Cleveland Journal, May 21, 1904.
130. Tyler to Myers, October 18, 1898, reel 3, frame 315, Myers Papers.
131. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 3-31.
132. Marcus Hanna, Socialism and the Labor Unions: WM. McKinley as I Knew Him (Boston: The Chapple Publishing Co., 1904).
133. Weare, Black Business in the New South, 51–81; Quincy T. Mills, “Black Wall Street,” in Walker, ed., Encyclopedia of African American Business History, 81–82; John Sibley Butler, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black Americans (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Upbuilding of Black Durham,” World's Work 23 (January 1912); Clement Richardson, “What Are Negroes Doing in Durham?” Southern Workman 42 (July 1913); Booker T. Washington, “Durham, North Carolina, a City of Negro Enterprises,” Independent 70 (March 30, 1911).
134. Quoted in Weare, Black Business in the New South, 96.
135. Henderson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company, 13–17 (quote from 17); Merritt, The Herndons, 75–77; Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together, 112.
136. Wade Aaron Aderhold and John Crew were central executives in the Union Mutual Relief Association of Atlanta. W. L. G. Pounds organized and managed the Royal Benevolent Insurance Association. Edward Howell was head of the National Laborers’ Protective Union. Benson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company, 44–45.
137. Benson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company, 46–56.
138. “Postscript by W. E. B. Du Bois,” Crisis 34 (September 1927): 239, quoted in Merritt, The Herndons, 77.
139. Merritt, The Herndons, 72–77. Herndon and Norris are pictured in the photo of the founding members of the Niagara Movement. On the Niagara Movement, see Alexander, An Army of Lions.
140. Atlanta Independent, February 26, 1925, quoted in Benson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company, 42.
141. Carter, The Black Side, 188.
142. Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (New York: Viking, 1948), 9. See also Merritt, The Herndons, 85–86.
143. “In Race Riot Many Negroes Are Killed,” Atlanta Journal, September 23, 1906.
144. Thomas Gibson, “The Anti-Negro Riots in Atlanta,” Harper's Weekly 50 (July–December 1906); Atlanta Constitution, “Chased Negroes All Night,” September 23, 1906; Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together, 156.
145. “In Race Riot Many Negroes Are Killed.” Decatur Street was the black entertainment district. Black-owned shops on this street were more likely frequented by black customers. “Died in Barber's Chair,” Atlanta Constitution, November 6, 1901.
146. “The Atlanta Massacre,” October 4, 1906, Atlanta History Center. The editor believed it was unsafe to print the author's name.
147. “Negro Barber Shops Are Closed,” Atlanta Journal, September 25, 1906.
148. Myers to Rhodes, February 16, 1923, in Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, 146.
149. Merritt, The Herndons, 115–124.
150. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 136.
1. New York Age, June 15, 1905; Alfred Holt Stone, Studies in the American Race Problem (New York: Doubleday, Page, & Company, 1908), 157–58.
2. Wendell P. Dabney, Cincinnati's Colored Citizens: Historical, Sociological and Biographical (Cincinnati: Dabney Publishing Company, 1926), 184–185. Vallombrosa was a monastery near Florence built in 1038 and was surrounded by beech and firs.
3. Henry C. Dotry, New York Age, May 23, 1891.
4. Ninth Census of the United States, 1870; Tenth Census of the United States, 1880; Eleventh Census of the United States, 1890; Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900; Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Vol. 4: Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910).
5. Manuel J. Vieira, The Tonsorial Art Pamphlet: Origin of the Trade, The Business in America and Other Countries, Its Rise and Progress (Indianapolis: Pub House Print, 1877), 57–58.
6. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patters of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 14–15; Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850–1910: A Comparative Perspective (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983), 7–9; Harmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 1–4; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 43–44.
7. Sunday laws generally specified that “all labor on Sunday excepting the works of necessity and charity” was illegal and subject to penalty. On the politics of Sunday laws, see Kyle G. Volk, “Majority Rule, Minority Rights: The Christian Sabbath, Liquor, Racial Amalgamation, and Democracy in Antebellum America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2008). Barber shops were traditionally exempt from Sunday laws because shaves and haircuts were “works of necessity,” “Victory for Sunday Openers: Chicago Barbers’ Shops Need Not Close the First Day of the Week,” New York Times, November 17, 1895; W. Scott Hall, “The Journeymen Barbers’ International Union of America” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1936), 89–91. For cases declaring Sunday-closing laws applicable to barbers, see State v. Frederick (1885) 45 Ark. 348; State v. Nesbit (1898) 8 Kan. App. 104; State v. Sopher (1903) 25 Utah 318; State v. Linsig (1916) 178 Iowa 484. The United States Supreme Court ruled it applicable in Petit v. Minnesota (1900) 177 U.S. 164. For cases declaring Sunday-closing laws not discriminatory, see People v. Bellet (1894) 99 Mich. 151; People v. Havnor (1896) 149 N.Y. 195; Breyer v. State (1899) 102 Tenn. 103; Ex parte Northrup (1902) 41 Ore. 489; State v. Bergfeldt (1905) 41 Wash. 234; McClelland v. Denver (1906) 36 Colo. 486; Stanfeal v. State (1908) 78 Ohio St. 24. For further information, see the American Law Reports, 20 ALR 1114, 1117, and the following articles in the New York Times: “Sunday Shaving in Georgia: Decision of an Atlanta Judge in a Test Case—Prisoners Discharged,” July 14, 1878; “The Liquor Law in Long Branch,” July 1, 1890; “New Rules for Barbers: They Must Now Work Until 6 O'Clock on Sundays and Holidays,” February 3, 1893; “Brooklyn Barbers,” June 2, 1895; “Two Peekskill Barbers Fined” and “Arrested Barbers Discharged: Brooklyn Justices Would Not Consider the Complaints of Violation of the Sunday Shaving Law,” June 4, 1895; “Barbers and the Constitution: In the Hobach Case, in Brooklyn, the Government Defends the Collins Shaving Law” and “Enforce the Law and Get It Changed,” July 6, 1895; “Collins Law Again in Courts: Barber Havnor Argues That It Is Unconstitutional” and “Abuse of Legislative Power,” July 12, 1895; “Barbers Working in Saloons: A Novel Way to Get Around the Sunday Anti-Shaving Law in Brooklyn Tried with Success,” December 9, 1895; “A Question of Wisdom, Not Power,” February 9, 1896; Nelson J. Flowerdew, Sunday Blue Laws and Other Blessings (Los Angeles: Pacific Press, 1914).
8. “‘Barbers First, Americans Always’: Brooklyn Bosses Who Think the Collins Law Will Help Their Dignity,” New York Times, June 14, 1895.
9. “Barbers Want Reforms: Tonsorial Schools and Italian Shops Their Grievances,” New York Times, January 11, 1897.
10. Quoted in Stone, Studies in the American Race Problem, 158; “Exigent Domestic Service Question,” New York Age, September 28, 1905.
11. Garrett Weaver, “The Development of the Black Durham Community, 1880–1915” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1987), 353.
12. Lester C. Lamon, Blacks in Tennessee, 1791–1970 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981) 140–141; John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 38; William A. Crossland, Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in St. Louis, (St. Louis: Press of Mendle Printing Co., 1914), 68; Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson, Negro Wage Earner (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 94–96.
13. George C. Wright, Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 82. Quotes from Stone, Studies in the American Race Problem, 168.
14. “From the Queen City. Mascotte Gives a Glowing Description of Willis B. Ross’ New Tonsorial Parlors,” Cleveland Gazette, January 17, 1885.
15. Dabney, Cincinnati's Colored Citizens, 184.
16. W. W. Snypp, “The Best Barber Shop in America,” Southern Workman 56 (March 1927): 119–122. Booker T. Washington made note of the telephone service and a female stenographer during his last visit to Myers's barber shop. See Washington, The Story of The Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery (New York: Association Press, 1909), 199–200.
17. Snypp, “The Best Barber Shop in America,” 119.
18. See Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). While Hoganson's book focuses on American households, her discussion of the consumption of imports and cosmopolitanism is relevant to barbers’ efforts to create palatial shops for their patrons.
19. Daniel Lucas, “Tonsorial Artists,” in Proceedings of the National Negro Business League: Its First Meeting Held in Boston, Massachusetts, August 23 and 24, 1900 (Boston: J. R. Hamm, 1901), 243.
20. Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 37–38; Alexa B. Henderson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company: Guardian of Black Economic Dignity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 23; Franklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of Its People and Events, Vol. 1 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1954), 609.
21. Nancy Dawson, “Hair Care Products Industry,” in Juliet E. K. Walker, ed., Encyclopedia of African American Business History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 283–284.
22. Russell B. Adams, Jr., King C. Gillette: The Man and His Wonderful Shaving Device (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 49–48.
23. Mic Hunter, The American Barbershop: A Closer Look at a Disappearing Place (Mount Horeb, Wis.: Face to Face Books, 1996), 121; Krumholz, History of Shaving and Razors (Bartonville, Ill.: Ad Libs, 1992); Adams, King C. Gillette, 56.
24. John Moore, interview by Travis Jordan, November 14, 1938, “The Moore Family,” Federal Writers’ Project (microfiche) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International 1980).
25. See Richard Corson, Fashions in Hair: The First Five Thousand Years (London: Peter Owen, 1965).
26. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), esp. 112-150 (quote from 146).
27. “Mass Meeting of the German Journeyman Barbers,” New York Times, June 22, 1869, and “Barbers’ Mass Meeting—Hours of Labor and Wages,” New York Times, March 28, 1870; 1880 U.S. census, population schedule, New York City, New York, New York, Enumeration District 15, sheet 21, family 243, Fred Turrell household; National Archives microfilm publication T9, roll 867; digital image, Ancestry.com, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed 2 January 2013). Tourell's name is spelled “Turrell” in the 1880 census and “Tourelle” or “Tourell” in New York Times articles; “Local News in Brief,” New York Times, April 22, 1870. Like New York unions, barbers organized locally in other states before the JBIUA. For example, see Constitution and By-Laws of the Barbers’ Protective Union of Fall River, Mass. [1885?], Pamphlets in American History, Labor.
28. Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 53.
29. Frank X. Noschang, “Brief History of the Journeymen Barber's International Union of America,” Journeyman Barber 15, no. 8 (September 1919): 354–355.
30. “A. C. Mendell,” Journeyman Barber 7, no. 4 (May 1911): 125.
31. New York Times, December 6, 1887; Hall, “The Journeymen Barbers’ International Union,” 13–17.
32. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor, American Federation of Labor Convention, 1900, pp. 12–13, 22–23, 117, 129; Herbert Hill, “Race, Ethnicity and Organized Labor: The Opposition to Affirmative Action,” New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought (Winter 1987).
33. “No Color Line.”
34. Quote from “Notes and Comments,” Journeyman Barber 14, no. 3 (March 1903), 57; see also Hall, “Journeymen Barbers’ International,” 43–44.
35. Jacob Rheinstadter, “Philadelphia, PA,” Journeyman Barber 5, no. 11 (December-October 1909); David A. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 125.
36. Hall, “Journeymen Barbers’ International,” 16, 44; Spero and Harris note there were 800 black members in the JBIUA in 1900 and 239 black members in 1928; these figures seem significantly low. See Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 76.
37. “No Color Line,” Journeyman Barber 2, no. 9 (October 1906): 220.
38. “Notes and Comments.”
39. Hall, Journeymen Barber's International Union, 43–44; rosters of membership of Ohio from The Barbers’ Journal 12 (September 1901): 208–257; David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 72.
40. “A. C. Mendell,” Journeyman Barber 8, no. 4 (May 1912): 149.
41. “John Hart,” Journeyman Barber 13, no. 6 (July 1917): 261.
42. Journeyman Barber 7, no. 4 (May 1911): 126.
43. W. E. Faverty, “Argenta, Ark.” Journeyman Barber 9, no. 10 (November 1913): 462–463; Joe Pilgreen, “Little Rock, Ark.,” Journeyman Barber 10, no. 4 (May 1914); W. W. Harrison, “Gulfport, Miss.,” Journeyman Barber 10, no. 10 (November 1911): 485; “Shreveport, LA.” Journeyman Barber 13, no. 3 (April 1917): 114.
44. Tennessee Bureau of Labor, Statistics, and Mines, Sixth Annual Report, 1896 (Nashville, 1897), 298–299; James Jones, Jr., “Strikes and Labor Organization in Tennessee During the Depression of 1893–1897,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 52, no. 4 (1993): 262–263.
45. W. O. Pinard, “Success in the South,” The Barber's Journal 10, no. 11 (November 1899): 159
46. H. B. Cheairs, “Journeymen Barbers’ Union No. 79, of Nashville, Tennessee,” in Third Annual Report, 1893, Tennessee Bureau of Labor, Statistics, and Mines (Nashville, 1894), 314–318; Jones, “Strikes and Labor Organization in Tennessee,” 260.
47. Journeyman Barber 13, no. 11 (November 1917): 459.
48. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Strivings of the Negro,” Atlantic Monthly 80 (August 1897): 194.
49. “Dangerous Forces,” Colored American, May 23, 1903.
50. First quote from correspondence from George Myers to James Rhodes, October 28, 1919, in George A. Myers and James Ford Rhodes, The Barber and the Historian: The Correspondence of George A. Myers and James Ford Rhodes, 1910-1923, ed. John A. Garraty (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1956), 98; second quote from George Myers to James Rhodes, August 31, 1920, in Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, 115. Myers's position is opposite his father's ideologies as one of the founders of the Negro National Labor Union in 1869. In 1865, white carpenters in Baltimore refused to work with blacks, so Isaac Myers, along with others, established a black-owned shipyard, the Chesapeake Marine Railroad and Dry Dock Company. At the third annual convention of the National Labor Union in August 1869, Isaac Myers made an appeal for unity between black and white workers. His speech did not receive any attention, and wasting no time, four months later he founded the Negro National Labor Union. “Isaac Myers’ Speech” and “Constitution of the [Negro] National Labor Union” in Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Vol. 2 (New York: Citadel Press, 1951), 628–636; Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, xv–xvi. For a discussion of the Chesapeake Marine Railroad Co., see Scott Woods, “Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company,” in Walker, ed., Encyclopedia of African American Business History, 134–136.
51. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 94–95.
52. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 113–115; Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 75.
53. “Sanitary Regulations of Barber Shops,” Scientific American 89 (October 3, 1903): 245.
54. Isadore Dyer, “The Barber Shop in Society,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal (August 1905): 3.
55. Quote from Dyer, “Barber Shop in Society,” 5–12. See also Hunter, The American Barbershop, 109–110; “Barber Shop Diseases,” Atlanta Constitution, March 6, 1904. Also see F. C. Walsh, “New Dangers Found in Barber Shops,” Technical World Magazine, 19 (May 1913): 354–357.
56. Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 187–218.
57. Hall, “Journeymen Barbers International Union,” 79.
58. Hall, “Journeymen Barbers International Union,” 79.
59. “A College for Barbers,” New York Times, June 15, 1896; “Razor Knights Aroused: Barbers’ War Against Colleges in Their Trade,” New York Times, September 27, 1896; Hunter, The American Barbershop, 109. Interestingly, five of the forty-five students who enrolled in the Manhattan School in 1896 were women.
60. Emil R. Rohr, Greater Richmond Barber College (Richmond, n.d.), Library of Virginia.
61. J. M. McCamant, Mack's Barbers’ Guide: A Practical Hand-Book For Apprentices, Journeymen and Boss, Embracing a Theoretical Course in Barbering, as well as Recipes and Formulas for Toilet Waters, Face Lotions, Crams, Salves, Pomades, Shampoos, Sea Foams, Hair Tonics, etc. (Ogden, Utah: Wasatch Printing Co., 1908), 57–63.
62. General Laws of the State of Minnesota Passed during the Thirteenth Session of the State Legislature, Chapter 186 “An act to regulate the practice of barbering, the licensing of persons to carry on such practice, and to insure the better education of such practitioners in the State of Minnesota” (Delano: Eagle Printing Company, 1897), 346-349.
63. “Law to Regulate Barber Shops,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 1, 1913.
64. Hall, “Journeymen Barbers International Union,” 79–103; Hunter, The American Barbershop, 111; quote from McCamant, Mack's Barbers’ Guide, 60–63.
65. Quotes from House Bill 180, 75th General Assembly of Ohio, 1902, Printed Bills, Legislative Services, State Archives, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio [hereafter cited as H.B., Printed Bills, Ohio]; Seventy-fourth General Assembly, The Ohio Manual of Legislative Practice in the General Assembly, Part V, “Official Directory of the House of Representatives of the 74th General Assembly (Columbus: Fred J. Heer, State Printer, 1900), 481; Doug Bristol, “The Victory of Black Barbers over Reform in Ohio, 1903–1913,” Essays in Economic and Business History 16 (1998): 253–54.
66. Myers to Marcus Hanna, February 4, 1902, reel 5, frame 21, George A. Myers Papers, 1890-1929 (microfilm) Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio (hereafter Myers Papers).
67. Unsigned to Joseph B. Foraker, February 11, 1902, reel 5, frame 44; Unsigned to Governor George Nash, February 11, 1902, reel 5, frame 46; and quote from Myers to H. M. Daugherty, February 17, 1902, reel 5, frame 53-54, all in Myers Papers. The unsigned letters are likely from Myers. See also Bristol, “The Victory of Black Barbers over Reform in Ohio,” 255–256.
68. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 357; Richard Sherman, The Republican Party and Black America: From McKinley to Hoover, 1896–1933 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 1–4. Northern black politicians were aware of the importance of black voters in the Midwest in swaying an election along party lines. In correspondence with Myers, Jere Brown noted, “Our [northern blacks'] votes perpetuate and keep the party [Republican] in power in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.” Jere Brown to George Myers, June 30, 1900, reel 2, frame 66, Myers Papers.
69. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 231.
70. Ralph Tyler to Myers, February 7, 1902, reel 5, frame 32, Myers Papers.
71. The Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio for the Regular Session of the 75th General Assembly, 1902 (Columbus, 1902), 563, 694.
72. “Hurt Barbers. Bill in Legislature That Will Affect Those of Our Race,” Cleveland Journal, February 27, 1904; “Homage to Lawmakers—The Banquet Last Week a Truly Brilliant Affair,” Cleveland Journal, May 7, 1904; H.B. 160, 76th General Assembly, Ohio, 1904; H.B. 332, 81st General Assembly, Ohio, 1915; H.B. 294, 82nd General Assembly, Ohio, 1917; H.B. 334, 86th General Assembly, Ohio, 1925; H.B. 73 and 268, 87th General Assembly, Ohio, 1927; H.B. 62, 88th General Assembly, Ohio, 1929; S.B. 129, 90th General Assembly, 1933, Printed Bills, Ohio; Bristol, “The Victory of Black Barbers over Reform in Ohio,” 256–258.
73. Victor H. Kleabe, “Austin, Tex.,” Journeyman Barber 2, no. 12 (January 1907): 296.
74. See William Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1997).
75. New York was the only northern state that had not passed a licensing law at this time.
76. Con. J. Coyle, “A. C. Mendell,” Journeyman Barber 9, no. 8 (September 1913): 355; “C. F. Foley,” Journeyman Barber 17, no. 3 (April 1921): 111.
77. “C. F. Foley,” Journeyman Barber 17, no. 3 (April 1921): 111; A. M. Simons, “The Barbers’ Union,” Journeyman Barber 13, no. 5 (June 1917); “Leon Worthall,” Journeyman Barber 13, no. 6 (July 1917); “C. F. Foley,” Journeyman Barber 17, no. 4 (May 1921): 159.
78. “William Hubbell,” Journeyman Barber 6, no. 12 (January 1911): 372.
79. “More Barber Shops in Norfolk than in any other City in the South, Veteran Declares,” Journeyman Barber 21, no. 2 (March 1925): 48; John J. Lloyd, “Norfolk, VA.,” Journeyman Barber 22, no. 1 (February 1926): 23.
80. Byrd was a key architect in Virginia's “Massive Resistance” against racial integration. See Keith Finley, Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938–1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
81. J. A. Panella, “Virginia Barbers Form Association,” Journeyman Barber 25, no. 8 (September 1929): 34.
82. Panella, “Virginia Barbers Form Association.”
83. H. B. Hubbard, “Virginia Convention a Success,” Journeyman Barber 25, no. 8 (September 1929): 30.
84. F. H. Norris, Letter to the Editor, Pittsburgh Courier, February 8, 1930.
85. “Not a Bill for Amendment,” Richmond News Leader, January 21, 1930.
86. “Barbers Accept Substitute for Their Measure,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 25, 1930; “Barbers to Continue to Fight,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 22, 1930.
87. “To Fight Barber Bill in Virginia: Silent Action Taken,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 6, 1932.
88. Maryland was the earliest (1904), and North Carolina and Tennessee are the most recent (1929). Virginius Dabney, “Negro Barbers in the South,” The Nation 131, no. 3393 (July 16, 1930): 64–65.
89. Dabney, “Negro Barbers in the South.”
90. See R. Volney Risner, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890-1908 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University, 2010); Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
91. “Straight Razor for the Barber Bill,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 14, 1956; “Put the ‘Barber Bill’ to Sleep,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 2, 1960.
92. Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 96–97.
93. “Voice of the People,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 3, 1932 reprinted in and quotes from W. C. Birthright, “Answering Scurrilous Attacks Upon the Virginia License Law and Virginia Barbers,” Journeyman Barber 28, no. 2 (March 1932): 14.
94. See the following articles in the Atlanta Constitution: “Negro Barber Ban Will Be Enjoined by City Chamber” and “Reconsider It,” February 3, 1926; “Council to Act on Barber Ban: Reconsideration of Measure to be Sought at Special Meeting Today” and “Methodist Women Protest Barber Act,” February 4, 1926; “Council Votes Public Hearing on Barber Bill: Ordinance Committee to Air Proposed Ban on Negro Shops Next Thursday” and “Citizens Protest Against Recent Barber Ordinance,” February 5, 1926; “Commendable!” February 6, 1926; “An Unfair Rebuke,” February 9, 1926; “Hearings on Negro Barber Ban Move Will Begin Today,” February 11, 1926; “Compromise Seen on Barber Bill,” February 12, 1926; “Lawyers Attack Barber Ordinance,” February 13, 1926; “Abe Martin,” February 15, 1926; “Negro Barber Ban Limited to White Women, Children,” February 16, 1926; “Mayor Urged to Vote Negro Barber Bill,” February 17, 1926; “Atlanta Chamber Plans to Enjoin Barber Measure,” February 19, 1926.
95. “An Unfair Rebuke,” Atlanta Constitution, February 9, 1926.
96. Armand May, “Citizens Protest Against Recent Barber Ordinance,” Atlanta Constitution, February 5, 1926.
97. M. Ashby Jones, D.D., “The Negro Barber Shop and Southern Tradition,” Atlanta Constitution, February 21, 1926.
98. See Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
99. “Compromise Seen on Barber Bill,” Atlanta Constitution, February 12, 1926; “Negro Barber Ban Limited to White Women, Children,” Atlanta Constitution, February 16, 1926; “Atlanta Chamber Plans to Enjoin Barber Measure,” Atlanta Constitution, February 19, 1926; “Court Enjoins Barber Measure,” Atlanta Constitution, February 24, 1926; “Barber Bill Writ Hearing is Put over to March 12,” Atlanta Constitution, March 7, 1926; “Colored Barber Ordinance Invalid,” Atlanta Constitution, September 15, 1927.
100. “See Motive in Atlanta Barber Bill,” Chicago Defender, February 27, 1926.
101. Birthright, “Answering Scurrilous Attacks upon the Virginia License Law and Virginia Barbers,” 43.
102. Work Projects Administration, The Negro in Virginia (New York: Hastings House, 1940), 319.
103. Quote from “Norfolk, Va., City Council Passes Ordinance Regulating Barbers: The Barbers’ Ordinance,” Journeyman Barber 29, no. 6 (July 1933): 6; see also “Norfolk, VA.,” 21–22.
104. Ordinances and Resolutions of the Council of the City of Richmond, Commencing with [the] Month of September 1934, and Ending with the Month of August, 1936 (Richmond: Old Dominion Press, 1936), 105–106; Annual Report of the Department of Public Welfare of the City of Richmond, Va. for the Year Ending December 31, 1935 (Richmond: William Byrd Press, 1936), 151-152; “Barber Regulations Also Approved by Council, Effective at Once,” Richmond News Leader, June 29, 1935.
105. Quote from “Norfolk, Va., City Council Passes Ordinance Regulating Barbers,” Journeyman Barber 29, no. 6 (July 1933): 6. See also “Norfolk, VA.,” Journeyman Barber 29, no. 6 (July 1933): 21–22; On Panella's ethnicity see 1930 U.S. census, population schedule, Norfolk, Norfolk (Independent City), Virginia, Enumeration District 79, sheet 3, dwelling 66, family 56, Joseph Panella household; National Archives microfilm publication T626, roll 2471; digital image, Ancestry.com, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed 2 January 2013).
106. “Norfolk Barbers Improve Under Ordinance,” Journeyman Barber 31, no. 5 (June 1935): 6.
107. “Will Enforce Sanitary Law,” Richmond News Leader, August 26, 1935; “Close Check Kept on Barbers,” Richmond News Leader, November 30, 1936; Annual Report of the Department of Public Welfare of the City of Richmond, Va. for Year Ending December 31, 1936 (Richmond: Clyde W. Saunders and Sons, 1937), 151–153. The Annual Report indicated that they inspected 3,207 barber shops. Because I do not believe there were over 3,200 barber shops in Richmond in 1936, I suspect the report was referring to initial visits and return visits.
108. Quote from “Richmond, Va., Barbers Try for Ordinance Amendments,” Journeyman Barber 33, no.1 (February 1937): 4; first reported in “Negro Barbers Hauled to Court in Health Drive,” Richmond News Leader, January 15, 1937.
109. See Annual Report of the Department of Public Welfare, 1936, 153; Annual Report of the Department of Public Welfare of the City of Richmond, Va. for the Year Ending December 31, 1937 (Richmond: Virginia Stationery Co., 1938), 152; Annual Report of the Department of Public Welfare of the City of Richmond, Va. for the Year Ending December 31, 1938 (Richmond: Virginia Stationery Co., 1939), 147-148.
110. Ordinances and Resolutions of the Council of the City of Richmond, Commencing with the Month of September, 1938, Ending with the Month of August, 1940 (Richmond: Williams Printing Company, 1940), 297-300.
111. Quote from “Committee Approves Tests for Barbers,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, August 18, 1939; Annual Report of the Department of Public Welfare of the City of Richmond, Va. for the Year Ending December 31, 1939 (Richmond: Virginia Stationery Co., 1940), 139–140; Annual Report of the Department of Public Welfare of the City of Richmond, Va. for the Year Ending December 31, 1940 (Richmond: Virginia Stationery Co., 1941), 77.
112. “Finds 94 Infectious Cases,” Richmond News Leader, June 10, 1940.
113. “Denies Need of Syphilis Exams for Public Jobs,” Chicago Defender, November 11, 1939. Other states confronted similar claims about disease-ridden barber shops. In 1930, the Massachusetts legislature ordered an investigation of barber shops by questioning doctors to find out the number of cases of diseases attributable to barber shops. The report indicated that “only a negligible amount of skin infections could be traced to [barber shops], and there seemed to be no evidence indicating that further legislation regarding licensing, regulating, or inspecting of barber shops was needed at this time in Massachusetts.” The report also indicated that syphilis was not a major issue. Quoted in “Editorial, Barber Shops and Barbering,” American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health 21, no. 2 (February 1931), 186. See also New England Journal of Medicine 202 (January 9, 1930), 89-90.
114. Pippa Holloway, Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
115. “‘Barber's Bill’ Is Sent Back to Committee,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 8, 1936; “Council Kills ‘Barber Bill’ by Single Vote,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 5, 1937; quote from “Barber Bill Goes the Way of All Others,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 5, 1938.
116. “Barber Bill Goes the Way of All Others,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 5, 1938. See also “Preposterous Barbers’ Bill,” Richmond News Leader, March 3, 1938.
117. “Richmond Firemen Ordered to Stop Giving Free Haircuts to Poor Children,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 27, 1940.
118. “New Barber Bill Ready,” Richmond News Leader, February 5, 1940; “Barbers to Seek Standards,” Richmond News Leader, August 14, 1958; “Hold Fast Virginia,” Richmond News Leader, August 6, 1959; “‘Barber Bill’ Passes House by 58–25 Vote,” Richmond News Leader, February 12, 1960; “Senate Unit Barber Examiner Bill,” Richmond News Leader, February 17, 1960, “Kayo for ‘Baber Bill,’” Richmond News Leader, and “He Sees No Need for a Barber Law,” Richmond News Leader, February 19, 1960.
119. Acknowledging the problems in Richmond's black community, Mayor Ambler authorized the creation of a public housing authority, an agency Bright flatly refused. Christopher Silver and John V. Moeser, The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 58–59; Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 69–70.
120. “Barber Bill Action Delayed by Assembly's Committee,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 11, 1944.
121. Holloway, Sexuality, Politics, and Control, 121.
122. “Barber Bill Action Delayed by Assembly's Committee.”
123. Quoted in Frank Quillin, The Color Line in Ohio: A History of Race Prejudice in a Typical Northern State (Ann Arbor, Mich.: George Wahr, 1913), 148; See also Greene and Woodson, Negro Wage Earner, 99.
124. “A. C. Mendell,” Journeyman Barber 7, no. 2 (March 1911): 57.
125. Quoted in Wright, Life Behind a Veil, 84.
126. Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, xxiii; “His Heart Broken? It Would Seem,” Cleveland Gazette, February 8, 1930.
127. Ronald S. Barlow, The Vanishing American Barber Shop: An Illustrated History of Tonsorial Art, 1860-1960 (El Cajon, Calif.: Windmill Pub. Co., 1993), 13.
128. Journeymen Barbers, Hairdressers, Cosmetologists, and Proprietors’ International Union of America, Textbook: Practical and Scientific Barbering (Indianapolis: Journeymen Barbers, Hairdressers, Cosmetologists, and Proprietors’ International Union of America, 1958); Sherman Trusty, Art and Science of Barbering (Los Angeles: Press of the Wolfer Printing Co., 1956); S. C. Thorpe, Modern Textbook of Barbering: A Practical Course on the Scientific Fundamentals of Barbering for Students and Practicing Barbers (New York: Milady Publishing Corp., 1941).
1. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Naperville, Ill.: J. L. Nichols, 1907), 415.
2. The vast literature on the rise of Jim Crow runs wide. I will not attempt to reference that entire literature here, but I will cite the scholarly material that has informed my thinking on what Rayford Logan termed the “nadir” in African American history. See Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954); Charles Lofgren, The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Jane Dailey, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Casebook in History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); David Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1997); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Blair Murphy Kelley, Right to Ride: Street Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
3. For a discussion of black ethnology, see Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 189–202.
4. George Myers, “The Business World,” Cleveland Journal, January 21, 1905. Ten years later, he made very similar statements. See Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 126; George Myers, “Envy Is Race's Scourge,” Cleveland Advocate, January 29, 1916; “Be Superlative,” Cleveland Advocate, July 3, 1915.
5. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 95; Booker T. Washington to George Myers, June 22, 1900, George A. Myers Papers, 1890-1929 (microfilm) Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio (hereafter Myers Papers). See also Washington to Myers, July 6, 1901, reel 2, frame 784, July 25, 1901, reel 2, frame 800, December 2, 1903, reel 5, no frame number, February 17, 1904, reel 5, no frame number; Emmett Scott to Myers, July 15, 1905, reel 5, no frame number; Washington to Myers, June 11, 1907, reel 6, no frame number, and July 9, 1908, reel 6, no frame number; all letters in Myers Papers. Washington's continuous invitations suggest that Myers did not share his opinions of the League with him, but simply declined to participate.
6. Three hundred African American businesspeople and professionals attended the first meeting held in Boston. African Americans in various cities organized local chapters. Beyond the emphasis on individual business achievement, the NNBL provided a model for black business organizations. Organizations such as the National Negro Insurance Association, the National Negro Bar Association, and the National Negro Undertakers Association grew out of the Business League. See Booker T. Washington, “The National Negro Business League,” World's Work 4 (October 1902); Kenneth Hamilton, ed., Records of the National Negro Business League (microfilm) (Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America, 1994); John H. Burrows, The Necessity of Myth: A History of the National Negro Business League (Auburn, Ala.: Hickory Hill Press, 1988); Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Juliet E. K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America (New York: Macmillan, 1998). W. E. B. Du Bois actually conceived of the idea a black business league at the 1899 Atlanta Conference. See Elliot M. Rudwick, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Atlanta University Studies on the Negro,” Journal of Negro Education 26 (Fall 1957): 475; August Meier, “From Conservative to Radical: The Ideological Development of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1885–1905,” Crisis 66 (November 1959): 531; Julius Lester, ed., The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1971), 251; Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne, 1986).
7. George Myers, “‘Be Superlative,’” Cleveland Advocate, July 3, 1915 quoted in Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 126. See also David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 465.
8. See Jacqueline M. Moore, Leading the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation's Capital, 1880–1920 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999); James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 121; Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000); Joe W. Trotter, River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 109.
9. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 176.
10. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 66.
11. “Starkville, Miss., May 28, 1917” in Emmett J. Scott, “More Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918,” Journal of Negro History 4, no. 4 (October 1919): 436. See also “Shreveport, LA. April 20, 1917,” in Scott, “More Letters of Negro Migrants,” 430-431.
12. “Greenwood, Miss. April 22, 1917,” in Scott, “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918,” Journal of Negro History 4, no. 3 (July 1919): 311–312.
13. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro in Chicago, 176.
14. For population shifts, see Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Vol. 4: Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910); Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Vol. 4: Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920); Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Vol. 5: Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930). For major works on the Great Migration, see Grossman, Land of Hope; Kimberley Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Gregory, The Southern Diaspora; Beth Tompkins Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
15. Walker, History of Black Business in America, 213–217.
16. J. H. Harmon, “The Negro as a Local Business Man,” Journal of Negro History 14 (April 1929): 116–155; Lynne B. Feldman, A Sense of Place: Birmingham's Black Middle-Class Community, 1890-1930 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 9.
17. Chrisopher Silver and John V. Moeser, The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 21, 54.
18. Silver and Moeser, The Separate City, 20–34.
19. For work on African American migration to the Midwest during World War I, see Grossman, Land of Hope; Darlene Clark Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915–1945,” in Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996); Phillips, Alabama North.
20. Phillips, Alabama North, 127–136.
21. Robert Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia's African Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890–1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 25–28.
22. Richard R. Wright, Philadelphia Colored Directory, 1908 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Colored Directory Co., 1908), 52-55, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter HSP); Richard R. Wright, Philadelphia Colored Directory, 1910 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Colored Directory Co., 1910), 39-41, HSP; Richard R. Wright, Philadelphia Colored Directory, 1914 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Colored Directory Co., 1914), 26-29, HSP.
23. Grossman, Land of Hope, 66, 95; Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Quincy T. Mills, “Truth and Soul: Black Talk in the Barbershop,” in Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). For black barber shops in Chicago in 1915, see Ford S. Black, compiler, Colored People's Guide Book for Chicago, 1915-1916 (Chicago: White Print, 1916), 7-8.
24. Grossman, Land of Hope, 66.
25. For example, in West Virginia, the material gains of the black middle class were tied to black coal miners’ wages. When the state's black coal miners expanded in the 1920s, so too did the black middle class. See Joe Trotter, Coal, Class and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). For other examples of the symbiotic relationship between the black population and black business community, see Feldman, A Sense of Place, 87; and Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 38–39.
26. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1945), 450–451.
27. Julia Lucas, interview by Leslie Brown, September 21, 1995, transcript, Behind the Veil Collection, John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American Documentation, Duke University (hereafter BTV), 14; Hill's Durham (Durham County, N.C) City Directory, 1938 (Durham: Hill Directory Co., 1937), 812. Lucas interview reprinted in Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 145-146. Also see Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 305. Charles Herndon does not appear to be related to Alonzo Herndon of Atlanta.
28. Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Walker, Black Business in America, 208–211; Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 54–90; A'Lelia Perry Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (New York: Scribner, 2001).
29. Quoted in Julie Willett, “‘Hands Across the Table’: A Short History of the Manicurist in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women's History 17, no. 3 (2005): 63. See also “Prize for Fastest Barber,” Chicago Defender, November, 1, 1919.
30. “It's Alive, Boys,” Chicago Defender, May 25, 1918.
31. Quotes from John L. Clark, “Wylie Avenue,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 3, 1923.
32. Julie Willett, Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 40–41.
33. Willett, Permanent Waves, 41.
34. Mme. Roberta Creditte-Ole, “Beauty Chats,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 26, 1926.
35. “Wore Best Bob,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 11, 1926.
36. “Southern Barber Parlor,” Richmond Planet, August 29, 1925.
37. Chandler Owen, “Craziness, Masculinity and Desire to Cook, Young Cited as Cause for Big Fad,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 28, 1925.
38. “The Rising Tide of Prejudice,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 13, 1926.
39. Donald L. Grant and Jonathan Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia (Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1993), 218.
40. Enoc P. Waters, Jr., “Interview of the Week,” Chicago Defender, September 7, 1935.
41. Waters, “Interview of the Week.”
42. Beginning in the 1920s, the black beauty industry was a burgeoning field for black women looking to leave domestic service for more professional lives. Madam C. J. Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone were two pioneering black women in the beauty culture industry who provided the infrastructure for training black beauty culturalists. For information on Walker and Malone, see Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996); A'Lelia Perry Bundles, Madam C. J. Walker: Entrepreneur (New York: Chelsea House, 1991); Julia Blackwelder, Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003). On the rise of beauty shops, see Willett, Permanent Waves.
43. Waters, “Interview of the Week.”
44. “Tonsorial Artist,” Chicago Defender, November 18, 1944.
45. Walter Barnes, “Felix Jenkins, Oil King in Monroe, LA., Banquets Walter Barnes and Band,” Chicago Defender, December 19, 1936.
46. D. L. Batts, “Cincinnati,” Chicago Defender, March 9, 1940.
47. James Ford Rhodes to George Myers, February 14, 1920, in Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, 99. See also Rhodes to Myers, July 15, 1920, in Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, 113.
48. Myers to Rhodes, March 8, 1920 in Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, 101.
49. Myers to Rhodes, August 31, 1920, in Myers and Rhodes, Barber and Historian, 115.
50. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Class Struggle,” The Crisis (June 1921), quoted in David Levering Lewis, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 555–556.
51. William H. Jones, Recreation and Amusement Among Negroes in Washington, D.C.: A Sociological Analysis of the Negro in an Urban Environment (1927; reprint Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 88-91 (first quote from p. 88, second quote from p. 91).
52. Joseph Richburg, interview by Mary Herbert, June 26, 1995, transcript, Behind the Veil Collection, John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American Documentation, Duke University, 8 (hereafter BTV).
53. H. M. Morgan, Affidavit, August 18, 1944, in Project for Business Among Negroes, Box 2, Folder 23, Atlanta University Center.
54. K. K. Lambert, “Alabama State News,” Chicago Defender, April 20, 1935.
55. “50 Cent Haircuts are Upheld by Court,” Chicago Defender, December 25, 1937.
56. W. Lloyd Warner, Buford H. Junker, and Walter A. Adams, Color and Human Nature: Negro Personality Development in a Northern City (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1941), 49–50.
57. Warner, Junker, and Adams, Color and Human Nature, 50.
58. Patti Sutton, “People and Events,” Chicago Defender, February 15, 1936; “Editor Rhodes in Speech to Hamptonians,” Chicago Defender, February 29, 1936; “Master Barbers Meet: Plan for State Conclave,” Chicago Defender, March 7, 1936; “Philly Barbers in New Era,” Chicago Defender, June 20, 1936.
59. Lawrence Gordon, “A Brief Look at Blacks in Depression Mississippi, 1929–1934: Eyewitness Accounts,” Journal of Negro History 64, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 380.
60. Lucas, interview, transcript, BTV, 5.
61. Trotter, River Jordan, 134.
62. Trotter, River Jordan, 133–134.
63. Frank Crosswaith et al., “Attention Harlem Barbers,” March 1939, Box 3, Folder 12, Frank Crosswaith Papers, Schaumburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter Crosswaith Papers).
64. Crosswaith et al., “Register Harlem Barbers,” undated, Box 3, Folder 12, Crosswaith Papers.
65. Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 69. For additional work on racial and gender exclusions in the Social Security Act, see Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
66. George DeMar, “For Immediate Release,” December 4, 1939; Crosswaith et al., “Register Harlem Barbers,” undated, Box 3, Folder 12, Crosswaith Papers.
67. Robert Kinzer, The Negro in American Business: The Conflict Between Separatism and Integration (New York: Greenberg Press, 1950); United States Department of Commerce, Sixteenth Census of the United Staes: 1940 Census of Busines Vol. 3, Service Establishments, Places of Amusement, Hotels, Tourist Courts and Tourist Camps, 1939 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), 114.
68. Robert E. Weems, Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 14–30.
69. W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Negro Nation Within the Nation,” Current History 42 (June 1935): 265–270, cited in Lewis, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois, 563–570.
70. On economic boycotts in Cleveland, see Phillips, Alabama North, 190–225.
71. Suzanne E. Smith, To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 48-49.
72. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 41–53.
73. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), 153-173.
74. “Realty Owner Sued in Vice Probe,” Chicago Defender, January 12, 1935.
75. “Deacon Is Caught in Lottery Raid,” Chicago Defender, April 6, 1935.
76. “Barber Held for ‘Numbers,’” Pittsburgh Courier, October 17, 1936.
77. “Held for Numbers,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 24, 1938.
78. For a discussion of African Americans’ participation in the numbers business, see Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 93–130; and Victoria Wolcott, “Culture of the Informal Economy: Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit,” Radical History Review 69 (Fall 1997): 46–75.
79. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 122–123.
80. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 480.
81. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 470–494.
82. “Texas State News,” Chicago Defender, November 16, 1935; “Huttig, Ark.,” Chicago Defender, June 13, 1936; and James Ferrell, “Parkin,” Chicago Defender, March 15, 1941.
83. “Defender Has Bulletin Board for War News,” Chicago Defender, October 19, 1935.
84. For work on the black press, see Ann Field Alexander, Race Man: The Rise and Fall of the “Fighting Editor,” John Mitchell Jr. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Armistead S. Pride and Clint C. Wilson II, A History of the Black Press (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1997); Henry L. Suggs, ed., The Black Press in the South, 1865–1985 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996); Roi Ottley, The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: Regnery, 1955).
85. “Camden, Ark,” Chicago Defender, June 8, 1935; “San Mateo, Calif.,” Chicago Defender, June 1, 1935; “Brady, Tex.,” Chicago Defender, October 19, 1935; “Leland, Miss.,” Chicago Defender, October 26, 1935; “Columbus, GA.,” Chicago Defender, November 30, 1935; “Augusta, Ark.,” Chicago Defender, December 7, 1935; “Hattiesburg, Miss.,” Chicago Defender, December 7, 1935; “Itta Bena, Miss.,” Chicago Defender, December 21, 1935; “Huttig, Ark.,” Chicago Defender, February 15, 1936.
86. Direct quote from Lucas oral history in Valk and Brown, Living with Jim Crow, 145-146; also see unedited transcript in Lucas, interview, transcript, BTV, 15.
87. John Wilson, “Brown Bomber Again Race's No. 1 Hero,” Chicago Defender, September 26, 1936; Allan McMillan, “Hi Hattin’ in Harlem,” Chicago Defender, September 7, 1935; Al Monroe, “Speaking of Sports,” Chicago Defender, December 14, 1935.
88. “Joe Louis Entertains,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 7, 1935.
89. Direct quote from Lucas oral history in Valk and Brown, Living with Jim Crow, 145; also see unedited transcript in Lucas, interview, transcript, BTV, 14.
90. Charley Cherokee, “National Grapevine,” Chicago Defender, August 17, 1946, and “Father Divine Marries?” Chicago Defender, August 17, 1946. Many Divine followers questioned whether his former wife had actually died as he reported. For work on Divine, see Kenneth E. Burnham, God Comes to America: Father Divine and the Peace Mission Movement (Boston: Lambeth Press, 1979); Robert Weisbrot, Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); and Jill Watts, God, Harlem USA: The Father Divine Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
91. Lucius C. Harper, “Dustin’ Off the News,” Chicago Defender, July 22, 1944.
92. Direct quote from Lucas oral history in Valk and Brown, Living with Jim Crow, 145; also see unedited transcript in Lucas, interview, transcript, BTV, 15.
93. Hill's Durham (Durham County, N.C.) City Directory, 1942 (Durham: Hill Directory Co., 1942), 437.
94. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 161.
95. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 95.
96. Wendell Willkie, “Citizens of Negro Blood,” Collier's Weekly, October 7, 1944, p. 11; Walter White, “Will the Negro Elect Our Next President?” Collier's Weekly, November 22, 1947, pp. 26–27; Charley Cherokee, “National Grapevine,” Chicago Defender, October 21, 1944.
97. Once Mitchell was elected to office, he distanced himself from African Americans. He first alienated the black population by insisting that he was not in Congress to represent his race and he would not dole out patronage positions. He charged Howard University with teaching communism on its campus and called for an investigation. Although African Americans’ reception of Mitchell's bill was mixed, his tendency to deflect the pressures of racial representation caused many African Americans to distrust him and his legislative agenda. For a full discussion of Mitchell's life and political career, see Dennis S. Nordin, The New Deal's Black Congressmen: The Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).
98. Enoc P. Waters, Jr., “The Mitchell Bill, Bane or Blessing?: How It Is Regarded by Kelly Miller, NAACP, Barber Shop Forum,” Chicago Defender, August 10, 1935.
99. Waters, “The Mitchell Bill.”
100. Waters, “The Mitchell Bill.”
101. Waters, “The Mitchell Bill.”
102. Waters, “The Mitchell Bill.”
103. On anti-lynching legislation, see Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (New York: Viking Press, 1948); Mary Jane Brown, Eradicating This Evil: Women in the American Anti-Lynching Movement, 1892–1940 (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000); Nancy Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
104. Mitchell's bill did not pass because of his contentious battle with the NAACP, continuous outburst, and a lack of support from the Roosevelt administration to pick sides in a black political conflict.
105. Andrew Dobson, “From Uncle Joe Dobson's Journal,” Chicago Defender, May 18, 1935.
106. “Editorial Letter by Marcus Garvey, New York, 6 February 1923,” in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Volume V, September 1922-August 1924 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 225-226. On W. A. Domingo, see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 61-62.
107. Charley Cherokee, “National Grapevine,” Chicago Defender, July 22, 1944.
108. Carter G. Woodson, “Is the Educated Negro a Liability?” Chicago Defender, May 21, 1932. Woodson explored these issues further in his Mis-education of the Negro (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1933).
1. James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical Pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 31; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 12; George M. Houser, Erasing the Color Line (New York: Fellowship Publications, 1945), 26-27.
2. To be sure, the YMCA Racial Equality Committee had been meeting with local barbers since 1952 to accept black customers with no success. In late spring of 1953, the S-CHRC voted unanimously to work with the YMCA Committee and make the opening of campus barber shops to all students the top priority for the fall semester. “Cutting Color Line Gets Top Priority for Next Year,” Daily Illini, June 17, 1953, Folder: Scrapbook 1, Harry Tiebot Papers, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (hereafter Tiebot Papers).
3. “Cutting Color Line Gets Top Priority for Next Year.”
4. “‘J. C.’ Caroline Thrown for Loss by Campus Barbers,” Flyer, November 7, 1953, Box 3, Folder: S-CHRC, Barbershop Issue, Scrapbook 1, Tiebot Papers.
5. “The Barbershop Issue,” Daily Illini, November 20, 1953, Box 3, Folder: Scrapbook 1, Tiebot Papers.
6. “The Barbershop Issue.”
7. Earl S. Rappaport to ACLU, undated, Box 9, Folder 3, Chicago Division, American Civil Liberties Union Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (hereafter ACLU Papers).
8. Edward H. Meyerding to John Langdon, October 12, 1954, Box 9, Folder 3, ACLU Papers.
9. “Haircut Rules Are Posted by Barbershops,” Daily Illini, May 2, 1954, Folder: Scrapbook 1, Tiebot Papers.
10. Folder: Scrapbook 1, Tiebot Papers.
11. Langdon to Meyerding, October 1, 1954, Box 9, Folder 6, ACLU Papers.
12. Lawrence Rubin, “On Serving Justice for Hair-raising Racism,” Jewish Daily Forward, August 20, 2007, http://forward.com/articles/10548/on-serving-justice-for-hair-raising-racism/.
13. “Judge Dumps Law Forcing Barbers to Serve Negro,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 7, 1963.
14. Otha Nixon, interview with author, May 30, 2009 (hereafter Nixon interview).
15. Nixon interview.
16. Quotes from Nixon interview; “Ohio Barber Quits After Bias Protests,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 17, 1964.
17. Nixon interview.
18. On the Birmingham campaign, see Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
19. Thanks to Thomas Fisher, M.D., for this brief explanation on hair, heredity, and genetic makeup. Scholars of science and race say very little about hair and heredity.
20. Bernie Phillips, “Jailed for Haircut!” Roosevelt Torch, February 14, 1949, and Report on Foodin-Stewart case, untitled and undated, Chicago Division of ACLU, Box 9, Folder 6, ACLU Papers.
21. Notes on Stewart-Fooden Case, January 26, 1949; ACLU Organization Secretary to Editor of Roosevelt Torch, February 18, 1949; and Bernie Phillips, “Conflicting Stories Told in Stewart Case,” Roosevelt Torch, February 21, 1949, Box 9; all in Box 9, Folder 6, ACLU Papers.
22. Douglass Brinkley, Rosa Parks (New York: Viking, 2000); Herbert Kohl, She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (New York: New Press, 2005); Beatrice Siegel, The Year They Walked: Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (New York: Four Winds Press, 1992).
23. It would be another fourteen years, until August 12, 1963, before CORE announced plans of a large-scale campaign to desegregate white barber shops, and churches. CORE planned for one black customer a day to attempt to get a haircut in a white shop. In accordance with the organization's direct action policy, they were willing to “talk things over” with the barbers before launching a public demonstration. These plans tapered off because the planning for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, scheduled for August 28, consumed their time and energy. It appears they did not revisit these plans after the march because there is no mention of a campaign to desegregate white shops in the city newspapers or CORE's organizational records. “Plan Drive Against Bias in Chicago Barbershops,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 12, 1963. See also Meier and Rudwick, CORE; Congress of Racial Equality Papers, microfilm, ed. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1983).
24. Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 133–135.
25. See Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Victoria W. Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
26. Langston Hughes, “Haircuts and U.S.A.,” Chicago Defender, December 29, 1962. On Hughes and his use of Simple in the Chicago Defender, see Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II: 1941-1967, I Dream a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. 62-67; Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-1962, ed. Christopher C. De Santis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
27. Quote from Horace Cayton, “Personal Problem,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 31, 1946. On black community formation in Saratoga Springs prior to the 1940s, see Myra B. Young Armstead, “Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August”: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
28. Cayton, “Personal Problem.”
29. Cayton, “Personal Problem.”
30. Cayton, “Personal Problem”; Horace Cayton, “Around the World,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 6, 1954.
31. Hughes, “Haircuts and U.S.A.”
32. Hughes, “Haircuts and U.S.A.”
33. Hughes, “Haircuts and U.S.A.”
34. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 18–19.
35. The Negro Motorist Green-Book (New York: Carson and Smith, 1937); Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 132.
36. On Jim Crow signs, see Elizabeth Abel, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
37. [Photo of Flott and mother in front of SCAD office, with caption] Crisis 67, no. 9 (November 1960): 584; “Clip N.Y's $5 ‘Kinky’ Haircuts,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 18, 1961.
38. “A Mistake? Deny Indian Haircut for Negro Looks,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 30, 1960.
39. Photo insert, April 8, 1961, Pittsburgh Courier; Samuel O. Regalado, Viva Baseball! Latin Major Leaguers and Their Special Hunger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 176–177.
40. “‘Shave-Ins’ Run into $5 Fee,” Chicago Daily Defender, February 19, 1962.
41. George E. Barbour, “African Doctor Refused Service by Hotel Barber,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 18, 1959.
42. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 152–153. See also Phillip E. Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
43. “Diplomats in Capital Report Discrimination by Barbers,” New York Times, June 9, 1963.
44. Marguerite Cartwright, “World Backdrop,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 4, 1961.
45. Baker Morten, “No Barber Can Refuse Customer Because of Race,” Washington Afro-American, March 21, 1964.
46. “African Prince Rebuffed Seeking Haircut in D.C.,” Washington Star, March 19, 1964.
47. Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 78-79.
48. “Digs Presses to End Barber Discrimination,” Washington Post, March 19, 1964.
49. Morten, “No Barber Can Refuse Customer.”
50. Morten, “No Barber Can Refuse Customer.”
51. Morten, “No Barber Can Refuse Customer.”
52. “Barber Changes Policy After Snubbing African,” Washington Post, May 26, 1964.
53. “Failure to Cut Negro's Hair Costs Barber $200,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 9, 1957.
54. “State Commission Orders Barber to Cut Negro's Hair,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 27, 1965.
55. “D.C. May Use License Power on Barbers,” Washington Post, June 29, 1963.
56. Paul A. Schuette, “Barbers Expected to Pack Hearing on Anti-Discrimination Proposals,” Washington Post, August 16, 1963.
57. Paul A. Schuette, “Rule Barring Discrimination Splits Barbers,” Washington Post, August 17, 1963.
58. Schuette, “Rule Barring Discrimination Splits Barbers.”
59. Charles D. Pierce, “White House Holds Up Anti-Bias Barber Rule,” Washington Post, November 10, 1963.
60. “Ky. Governor Bans Race Bias in Public Places,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 27, 1963.
61. “Wallace to Continue Fight Against Rights,” Chicago Daily Defender, January 13, 1964.
62. On the Civil Rights Act of 1964, see Clifford M. Lytle, “The History of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964,” Journal of Negro History 51, no. 4 (Oct., 1966): 275-296; Charles W. Whalen and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Cabin John, Md.; Washington, D.C.: Seven Locks Press, 1985); Hugh Davis Graham, Civil Rights and the Presidency: Race and Gender in American Politics, 1960-1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Rebecca Zietlow, Enforcing Equality: Congress, the Constitution, and the Protection of Individual Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 97-127; Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southernerns in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 182-237.
63. “D.C. Barbers Ordered to Give Haircuts to All,” Washington Star, June 11, 1965.
64. “D.C. Barbers Ordered to Give Haircuts to All.”
65. Leonard Downie, Jr., “Barbers Schooled on Negro Haircuts,” Washington Post, June 25, 1965.
66. “Barbershop Anti-Bias Ruling Goes into Effect Tomorrow,” Washington Star, September 12, 1965.
67. “White Barbers and Negro Hair,” Crisis 73, no. 3 (March 1966), 143.
68. “SCLC Protesters Sit at Negro Barbershop,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 28, 1965; “Herndon Barber Shop Closes after Picket by SCLC Members,” Atlanta Daily World, November 28, 1965.
69. “GA Negro Barbers Finally Agree to Clip Negroes’ Hair,” Jet 29, no. 10 (December 16, 1965), 18.
70. Ralph W. Johnson, David Played a Harp: A Free Man's Battle for Independence (Davidson, N.C.: Blackwell Ink, Inc., 2000), 8.
71. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 354.
72. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 355–356.
73. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 355–356.
74. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 355–356.
75. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 361.
76. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 363–373.
77. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 400.
78. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 414.
79. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 413.
80. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 416.
81. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 434, quote from Dick Anderson, “Negro Leaders Call off Boycott, Johnson Serves Negro Customers,” Davidsonian, May 17, 1968 reprinted in Johnson, David Played a Harp, 435.
82. Johnson, David Played a Harp, 438–449.
83. Charles M. Payne, “‘The Whole United States Is Southern!’: Brown v. Board of Education and the Mystification of Race,” Journal of American History 91 (June 2004): 83-91.
84. Ella Baker, “Bigger Than a Hamburger,” Southern Patriot, June 1960.
1. Stokely Carmichael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] (New York: Scribner, 2003), 73.
2. Carmichael, Ready for Revolution, 73.
3. Carmichael, Ready for Revolution, 73–74.
4. James Farmer, Freedom, When? (New York: Random House, 1965), 111-128; Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 42-43; Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Ethical Demands for Integration,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: HarperSanfrancisco, 1991), 117-125.
5. Joseph A. Pierce, Negro Business and Business Education: Their Present and Prospective Development (New York: Harper, 1947), 71, 78, 82, 99.
6. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 113–141. For additional work on the G.I. Bill, see Michael J. Bennett, When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (McLean, Va.: Brassey's, 1996); Theda Skocpol, “The G.I. Bill and U.S. Social Policy, Past and Future,” Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (Summer 1997).
7. Paige West, Jr., interview by author, August 11, 2004, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (hereafter West interview).
8. H. M. Morgan, Affidavit, August 18, 1944, in Project for Business Among Negroes, Box 2, Folder 23, Robert Woodruff Library, Special Collections, Atlanta University Center.
9. Ernest Myers, interview with author, April 10, 2009, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Myers interview). L. Tyson said that most of the men at Armstrong studying barbering were there on the G.I. Bill. L. Tyson, interview by author, April 9, 2009, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Tyson interview).
10. Earl M. Middleton, with Joy W. Barnes, Knowing Who I Am: An Entrepreneur's Struggle and Success in the American South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 23–62.
11. Middleton, Knowing Who I Am, 65.
12. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 166–173.
13. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984).
14. Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 54–55.
15. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 49–50. On the experiences of black returning WWII veterans and civil rights activism, see Jennifer Brooks, Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Christopher Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Stuggle Against White Supremacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
16. Armstrong was also very active in local efforts to integrate the public schools. On August 22, 1957, Armstrong and seven other black families responded to Shuttlesworth's call for families to volunteer to request that their children be reassigned to all-white schools. Armstrong's daughter and three sons could not attend Graymont Elementary, which was one and a half blocks from their home. The challengers met mob violence as they attempted to integrate the schools; all were turned away. They filed a lawsuit for school integration, and Armstrong was the number-one plaintiff. For six years, the case went through numerous delays before the U.S. district judge issued his decision. Finally, in the fall of 1963, the Graymont, Ramsay, and West End schools were ordered to desegregate. On September 3, Dwight and Floyd Armstrong registered for classes, but Governor George Wallace instructed the Alabama state troopers to close down the school. Lawyers won several injunctions preventing Wallace from continuous resistance. On September 10, the intent of Brown v. Board of Education was finally realized in Birmingham. Although Dwight and Floyd told their father about the daily harassment they received from white students, Armstrong was encouraged by their tenacity to stay enrolled. Frye Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 127–129, 191–193; Townsend Davis, Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 84–85.
17. Black beauticians made similar claims. See Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 111-112.
18. John Brunson, interview by Charles Houston, Jr., July 26, 1994, transcript, Behind the Veil Collection, John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American Documentation, Duke University (hereafter BTV), 27. Septima Clark was one of the teachers in the South fired for working with the NAACP. Still committed to education and resistance, she began working with the Highlander Folk School. See Septima Clark and Cynthia Stokes Brown, Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro, Calif.: Wild Tree Press, 1986); Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jacqueline Rouse, “‘We Seek to Know in Order to Speak the Truth’: Nurturing the Seeds of Discontent—Septima P. Clark and Participatory Leadership,” in Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
19. Brunson, interview by Houston, 27–28, 46. In 1966, John Brunson became president of the local NAACP.
20. William Hughes, interview with author, September 2, 2003, Durham, North Carolina (hereafter Hughes interview).
21. Black beauticians regularly offered black women free hairdos after messy battles of sit-in protests in the 1960s. See Gill, Beauty Shop Politics, 98.
22. SNCC members also met in Reverend Aaron Johnson's church. Reverend Johnson, a barber, and according to historian Charles Payne “the most reliable minister of the period,” was the first minister to open his church to organizers for meetings. Reverend Johnson was an army veteran, an active member of the Greenwood chapter of the NAACP, a founding member of the local chapter of the Freedom Democratic Party, and a leader in the boycotts that forced downtown merchants to desegregate. White employers pressured his congregants when he allowed SNCC members to meet in his church. As his congregation dwindled, even his barbering income was insufficient to sustain him and his family. However, his church headquarters in Indianapolis started sending him money in support. See Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 151–152, 157, 177, 188–192; Davis, Weary Feet, Rested Souls, 278–279.
23. Myers interview.
24. Brunson, interview by Houston, 23–24. In 1936, Brunson began his apprenticeship and continued in this position until a chair became available in 1938.
25. Paul Robeson, “We Can't Sit Out This Election,” Freedom, August 1952 in Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974 ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1978), 323-325; Robeson, “Africa Calls—Will You Help?” Freedom, May 1953 in Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks, 349-351.
26. C. C. Bryant, interview by Jimmy Dykes, November 11, 1995, transcript, Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi Digital Collections (digilib.usm.edu) (hereafter Bryant interview; MOHP); quote from Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 111–113. On Bryant, see John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Aaron Henry, The Fire Ever Burning (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 81-103.
27. Joe Martin, interview by Jimmy Dykes, November 1, 1995, transcript, MOHP.
28. Bryant interview; Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 111–113. On Bob Moses, see also Robert P. Moses and Charles Cobb, Jr., Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Dittmer, Local People; and Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
29. Julia Lucas, interview by Leslie Brown, September 21, 1995, transcript, BTV.
30. Dr. William Ferguson Reid, interview by Ronald E. Carrington, March 21, 2003, p. 8, Digital Collections, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, available from http://dig.library.vcu.edu/u?/voices. On the Crusade for Voters see Christopher Silver and John V. Moeser, The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 178-181; Lewis A. Randolph, Rights for a Season: The Politics of Race, Class, and Gender in Richmond, Virginia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003).
31. William Lomax, interview by author, June 18, 2007, Richmond, Virginia (hereafter Lomax interview). Black beauticians also actively encouraged their clients to register to vote. See Gill, Beauty Shop Politics, 111.
32. Leander Blount, interview by author, July 28, 2004, Brooklyn, New York.
33. The Yankees were among the last four of sixteen major league teams to integrate their squads, in addition to the Philadelphia Phillies (1957), the Detroit Tigers (1958), and the Boston Red Sox (1959). See Neil Lanctot, Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 345–349, 386–391 (Robinson quote from 391). The Boston Red Sox's slow pace to integrate its team was not lost on black Bostonians either. Howard Bryant remembered his grandfather admonishing him in the 1980s for “rooting for the Red Sox instead of the National League Cardinals and Dodgers, teams that had embraced integration while the Red Sox had not.” His grandfather scoffed, “We don't care for the Red Sox around here, because the Red Sox have never had any niggers.” Though not true, his statement does highlight the team's tenuous history with black players. See Howard Bryant, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston (New York: Routledge, 2002), vii–viii. Also see Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), and Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Brad Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2003).
34. James N. Gregory, “The Second Great Migration: A Historical Overview,” in African American Urban History Since World War II ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 19-38; James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Joe W. Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Arnold R. Hirsh, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983);.
35. Henry Jones, interview by author, August 4, 2004, Brooklyn, New York (hereafter Jones interview).
36. Robert Dexter, interview by author, July 20, 2005, Cleveland, Ohio (hereafter Dexter interview); James C. Crawford, interview by author, August 16, 2005, Cleveland, Ohio (hereafter Crawford interview); Marva Wimberly, interview with author, July 26, 2005, Cleveland, Ohio (hereafter Wimberly interview); Eugene Parker, interview with author, July 26, 2005, Cleveland, Ohio (hereafter Parker interview); Leroy Wilcox, interview with author, July 23, 2005, Cleveland, Ohio (hereafter Wilcox interview). Beauticians were also required to attend a licensed beauty culture school, so some colleges housed both a beauty and barber college. Erma Lee and her husband, Clarence Lee, received a license for the Erma Lee School on October 8, 1934, and in 1936 established the Erma Lee Beauty School. Erma Lee's beauty college was an outgrowth of Elso Polo Beauty College, founded by her mother Goldena Edwards in 1918 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The school was opened to teach “scientific beauty culture” to black women. During the World War I era, the family closed the school and moved to Cleveland. In 1927, Erma Lee opened a beauty shop at 4728 Woodland Avenue. She built a sizable clientele and later moved to a larger space at 5512 Woodland Avenue, but her growing business needed additional operators. When the Ohio State Board of Cosmetology passed regulations, Lee saw an opportunity to train not only black beauticians, but also black barbers. See “Business Personalities You Ought to Know,” Cleveland Eagle, February 14, 1936, Container 3, Folder 1, The Future Outlook League Records, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio; Regennia Williams, Cleveland, Ohio, Black America Series (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2002), 73.
37. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1900; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1995); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
38. James Spruill, interview by author, April 11, 2009, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Spruill interview).
39. Lloyd Howerton, interview by author, April 9, 2009, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Howerton interview).
40. Richmond barbers William Lomax, Benjamin Thompson, and Eugene Fleming noted they took the vocational course at Walker High School. Thompson and Lomax majored in barbering, while Fleming majored in bricklaying and plastering. Lomax interview; Eugene Fleming, interview by author, June 19, 2007, Richmond, Virginia (hereafter Fleming interview).
41. Fleming interview.
42. Maxine Craig, “The Decline and Fall of the Conk; or, How to Read a Process,” Fashion Theory 1, no. 4 (November 1997): 404.
43. Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 45.
44. Williams quote in Nick Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 199.
45. Some of Paige West's customers included Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, and the Drifters. West interview.
46. Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 112.
47. West interview.
48. Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray: The Sugar Ray Robinson Story (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 213.
49. West interview; Hortense Williams, interview by Kisha Turner, July 17, 1995, transcript, BTV, 14–15.
50. For a critique of the conk, see Susan Willis, “I Shop Therefore I Am: Is There a Place for Afro-American Culture in Commodity Culture?” in Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 992–1008; and Craig, Ain't I a Beauty Queen?
51. Craig, “The Decline and Fall of the Conk,” 405–413.
52. West interview.
53. Lomax interview.
54. Lomax interview.
55. Benjamin Thompson, interview by author, June 20, 2007, Richmond, Virginia (hereafter Thompson interview).
56. Thompson interview.
57. Fleming interview.
58. “In the Senate,” Richmond News Leader, March 5, 1962; “Once Again—the Barber Bill,” Richmond News Leader, February 2, 1962; “House Committee Clears Barber Examiner Bill,” Richmond News Leader, February 14, 1962; “Assembly Complete Barber Bill Action,” Richmond News Leader, March 10, 1962; Virginia Department of Professional and Occupational Registration, “An act to regulate the practice of barbering…[and] to establish a Board of Barber Examiners…Approved April 7, 1962 (Richmond: Department of Professional and Occupational Registration, 1962), Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.
59. The other appointees included Walter Trelbley of Richmond, president of the Virginia Association of Master Barbers, and J. S. Hall of Roanoke, for three-year terms, and Charles Valentine, chairman of the Alexandria Barber Board, and Edward Dancy of Petersburg, for two-year terms. For the beauticians, the term limits were also staggered: Bertrude Wooldridge of Wise, president of the Virginia Hairdressers Association, for a five-year term; Mary Hutchins of Hampton, former president of the State Association and operator of a hairdressing school, for a four-year term; Garnett Hurt of Roanoke, for a three-year term; and Mary Davis of Richmond, owner of training schools in Richmond and Roanoke, for a two-year term. “Barber, Hairdresser Boards Are Appointed,” Richmond News Leader, June 10, 1962.
60. Virginius Dabney, interview by Daniel Jordan and William H. Turpin, June 10–13, 1975, interview A-0311-1, transcript, 71–72, Southern Oral History Program Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (docsouth.unc.edu).
61. Malcolm X, Autobiography. See also Richard B. Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 182; Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life in Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011).
62. West interview.
63. Hank Ballard, “How You Gonna Get Respect (When You Haven't Cut Your Process Yet)?” (1968), on James Brown, James Brown's Funky People, Part 3, compact disc (UMG Records, 2000).
64. William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 201; Jeffery O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 93-110; Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).
65. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004); Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1999); Marable, Malcolm X; Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 68-69; Miriam Ma'at-Ka-Re Monges, “‘I Got a Right to the Tree of Life’: Afrocentric Reflections of a Former Community Worker,” in Black Panther Party Reconsidered, 140–141; Cleveland Sellers with Robert Terrell, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), 187-188.
66. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Nap Time: Historicizing the Afro,” Fashion Theory 1, no. 4 (November 1997): 341–344.
67. Phyl Garland, “The Natural Look,” Ebony 21 (June 1966): 143–146; Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001), 55; Lloyd Boston, Men of Color: Fashion, History, Fundamentals (New York: Artisan, 1998).
68. Craig, Ain't I a Beauty Queen, 87–91, 97, 99, 106–107; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963; repr., New York: Grove Press, 1965); Malcolm X, Autobiography. On the Watts riots, see Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995).
69. Kelley, “Nap Time,” 346.
70. West interview. The Afro went through many names: the “freedom,” the “bush,” and the “Afro.”
71. Byrd and Tharps, Hair Story, 55, 65, 87.
72. Jones interview.
73. Howerton interview.
74. Albert Hillman, interview by author, April 12, 2009, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Hillman interview). Other barbers offered similar assessments. Spruill interview; Wilcox interview; Hughes interview.
75. Byrd and Tharps, Hair Story, 86–87.
76. Clinton Simpson, interview by author, June 8, 2009, Birmingham, Alabama; Spruill interview.
77. Crawford interview; Wimberly interview; Parker interview; John Fort, interview with author, August 14, 2004, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
78. Randolph Arthur, interview by author, July 30, 2004, Brooklyn, New York.
79. Fleming interview.
80. Hillman interview; Tyson interview; Spruill interview.
81. Phyl Garland, “The Natural Look,” Ebony 21 (June 1966): 146; Margaret Williams Neal, interview by Rhonda Mawhood, July 19, 1993, transcript, BTV, 94–95.
82. Arletta Claire, “Naturals Can't Be Just ‘Natural’ They Require Grooming, Cutting,” Chicago Defender, October 7, 1969; “Natural Reduces Barbershop Trade,” Chicago Defender, March 28, 1970; “Some Advice for Young Men with Longer Hair,” Chicago Defender, August 12, 1970; Spruill interview.
83. Quotes from James Alan McPherson, “The Faithful,” in Elbow Room: Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 67, 78. See also Herman Beavers, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Earnest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 56–57. White barbers faced similar challenges as black barbers when the Beatles popularized long hair.
84. On the passing of Afros, see Phyl Garland, “Is the Afro on Its Way Out?” Ebony, February 1973, 128–136.
85. Jones interview. James Spruill also mentioned the shortage of barbers after the Afro; Spruill interview.
86. Harry Ferguson, “Gains, Setbacks in Rights Fight,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 29, 1963.
87. Al Duckett, “Know the Negro,” Chicago Defender, April 4, 1964.
88. Duckett, “Know the Negro.”
89. “Black Business Feels Integration Sting,” Chicago Defender, June 22, 1968.
90. Karla F. C. Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 25–26; Smith, To Serve the Living.
91. Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 53-90; Kathy Peiss, “‘Vital Industry’ and Women's Ventures: Conceptualizing Gender in Twentieth Century Business History,” Business History Review 72, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 235.
92. Walker, History of Black Business in America, 302–308; Nancy Dawson, “Hair Care Products Industry,” in Juliet E. K. Walker, Encyclopedia of African American Business History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 282–290; Susannah Walker, “Black Dollar Power: Assessing African American Consumerism since 1945,” in African American Urban History Since World War II, 400-402. For a larger discussion of black consumption and white competition in the post-civil rights era, see Robert E. Weems, Jr., Desgregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twenieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
93. Fleming interview.
94. Spruill interview; Howerton interview.
95. Fort interview; Parker interview; Wilcox interview. On the 1968 rebellions sparked by Martin Luther King's assassination see Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 93-99; Clay Risen, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009). On buisness ownership and the rebellions see, Jonathan J. Bean, “‘Burn, Baby, Burn’: Small Business in the Urban Riots in the 1960s,” Independent Review 5, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 165-187.
96. Hughes interview.
97. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 432.
98. Fleming interview.
99. Hugh Hollins, interviews by Eddie Faye Gates, May–August 1994, in Alan Govenar, African American Frontiers: Slave Narratives and Oral Histories (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000), 214.
100. See Robert E. Weems, Business in Black and White: American Presidents and Black Entrepreneurs in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Timothy Mason Bates, Black Capitalism: A Quantitative Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1973). Early critiques of black capitalism include E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957); Earl Ofari, The Myth of Black Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); Ronald W. Bailey, ed., Black Business Enterprise: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Basic Books, 1971), esp. 99-179.
101. Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig, ed., The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2012).
1. Barbershop 2: Back in Business, directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan (Beverly Hills, Calif.: MGM Home Entertainment, 2004)
2. Barbershop 2.
3. The Black Barbershop Health Outreach Program, blackbarbershop.org.
4. South Carolina for Barack Obama Beauty and Barber Shop Program, https://my.barackobama.com/page/s/beautyandbarber.
5. Susan Kuczka and John McCormick, “Security to Keep Obama from Favorite Barbershop,” Chicago Tribune, November 12, 2008.