Author Quincy Mills points out that the American public cared little about where a presidential candidate got his hair cut until the campaign of Barack Obama. Mills takes this seemingly mundane observation and demonstrates how black barber shops have been central to our understanding of race, gender, citizenship, and enterprise since at least the 1830s. Like the above anecdote, Cutting Along the Color Line takes a cultural practice that we take for granted (grooming), combines it with a story we think we know (the African American journey from bondage to freedom), and offers a fresh, creative, yet profoundly archival portrait of the “long twentieth century” that we have yet to see.
Cutting Along the Color Line covers over a century of history, tracing the changing meaning of the black barber shop from a commercial space exclusively for white patrons to a site of black consumption and civic engagement. By historicizing black barber shops, Mills presents a learned yet lucid account of the constructed nature of racial formations and the central role commercial exchange has played in the making of Jim Crow, community formation, and national identity. He powerfully demonstrates why “shaving time” matters through a dynamic array of sources—from newspapers, interviews, and memoirs to court records, fiction, and advertisements (p. 5).
If there is any place we assume that racial segregation is not only culturally justifiable but also sustainable, it has, until recently, been the church. But one place that has still rarely come under scrutiny as a “segregated” space remains the world of personal grooming. Seemingly uncomplicated references to hair “style” and “type” become shorthand for what Mills reveals to be a complicated social history that has traveled along paths we may never have expected. Each chapter uses “shaving time” to present the reader with a familiar story from an unfamiliar vantage point, forcing us all to “take it on the chin” and confront submerged nuances in the long trek from slavery to freedom. The barbering work of the “masterless slave,” especially in the context of slave master hiring-out practices, reveals the strained power of entrepreneurship as a rite to republican citizenship and freedom (p. 31). Still, the relative mobility of barbering could also serve as a refuge for African American men to cultivate white networks, cut a slave catcher, or even steal away to the North.
The color-line barber also highlights how the relegation of black men to the industry of service did not always signify a feminized role of subservience. To be sure, tracking black men to service trades did speak to national desires for racial hierarchy, but service could also become a strategy for relative economic autonomy and political power after slavery. But this emergence of a service-based black entrepreneurship also exposed how class has long shaped visions of racial belonging. Mills speaks to the blurred line between strategic entrepreneur and racial servant when many barbers fought against the Civil Rights Act of 1875 because such a law would undermine the selective economic benefits of a black entrepreneurial class in exclusive service to a white market. George Knox becomes an archetypal paradox in this moment, as both a color-line barber that denied black patrons access to his shop and publisher of the Indianapolis Freeman, where he fought for equal rights.
This work also adds the small business of the barber shop to the more studied sites of real estate, education, and industrial labor as a place where the state managed the racial realignment between U.S.-born white people and European immigrants in the making of a modern white identity of civic exclusion and resource accumulation. The age of the “barber bills” showcases the state's selective enforcement of hygiene regulations, professional standards, and modern facilities as a medium by which to create a white profession for new immigrants and exclude black barbers from what had historically been a black vocation (p. 128). Decades later, fights for “equal rights” barber shops were an unheralded and even ambivalent arm of the civil rights movement, alongside fights against segregated lunch counters and restrooms. The demand for equal access to white barbers was shaped by a politics of convenience as much as equality, primarily highlighting the class realities of mobility faced by college students in rural towns or African diplomats in unfamiliar surroundings.
Concurrently, segregated black grooming houses became physical conduits through which organizers networked, raised money, and secured space to build the Black Freedom Movement. In fact, the barber shop's economic independence from white power was predicated on an all-black consumer base that allowed them the autonomy to house and nurture the protests against Jim Crow—a circumstance that illustrates what Mills poignantly terms the “difference between separation and segregation” (p. 217). Certainly, the dynamic complexity of black life could never be relegated to the world of enterprise, but Mills shows how the barber shop—like other realms of commercial exchange—used the connective tissues of capitalism against its own intentions to turn shaving time into a site of male bonding, public debate, bodily regeneration, movement organizing, and black culture making.
Mills's dynamic and historical rendering of black barbering can help us understand the changing racial economy of the present. Indeed, the mass incarceration of black youth finds many entering one of the few trades available in prison: barbering. The new linkages between blackness and barbering recall the postbellum production of a low-wage service class, giving added resonance to the concept of the “new Jim Crow.” At the same time, many black barbers along the Eastern Seaboard are losing their clientele to Latino barbers, not due to any targeted regulation but because of a cultural facility with the straight razor. Though perhaps beyond the scope of Mills's historical work, it would have been interesting to see his more nuanced synthesis of culture and economy better applied to the last portion of the book. Also, given the wonderful convergence here between culture and economy, I would have loved to see more analysis of the skill and style of barbering alongside the focus on barbering as a trade. To be sure, the cultivation, marketing, and adaption of style in the tonsorial arts profoundly shapes any analysis of the social significance or profit motive. Still, Mills's ability to take barbering—as a site of commercial exchange—and explore its changing racial meaning, makes this an important book. But his ability to embed the racial meaning of the barber shop within the material act of grooming and the material aspirations of entrepreneurial self-sufficiency is what makes this a landmark study.
