From Outposts to Enclaves: A Social History of Black Barbers from 1750 to 1915

The story of black barbers contributes to the recent effort of business historians to engage the larger culture by bringing together business and African American history. While exploring issues commonly associated with the history of the firm uncovered a tradition of enterprise that stretches back to the early nineteenth century, investigating questions from the repertoire of social history sheds new light on race relations and ideological debates within the African American community. The men whose lives are chronicled by this dissertation also emerge as figures worthy of historical study on their own merit; in addition to becoming the most successful African American businessmen in the nineteenth century, black barbers distinguished themselves through their wit, savoir-faire, and tenacity.

To answer the inevitable question of what prompted a study of black barbers requires a brief historiographical detour. Although a small body of literature on African American business has accumulated over the past thirty years, the topic has labored under the burden of refuting scholars such as Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who concluded that "the Negro lacks a business tradition." Frazier and others argued that slavery and discrimination prevented African Americans from acquiring experience in commerce and industry, which explained why there were no black Rosenwalds or Kennedys.

In the broadest terms, such assertions are true insomuch as they disregard small businesses, particularly in the service sector, where African Americans have historically occupied an economic niche. The literature on black property owners documents a range of small business owners who attained a modest prosperity. Among these proprietors, one group stands out for its consistently high level of success—black barbers. On the eve of the Civil War, for example, one out of eight African Americans in the upper South worth at least $2,000, the standard for affluence at that time, owned a barbershop. A quick review of African American community studies, furthermore, revealed that the prosperity of black barbers held constant over time and space. Individual barbershops routinely flourished for decades after the demise of the founding proprietor, who often left the business to sons, nephews, and grandsons. In addition, black barbers prospered outside the South, achieving as much dominance within the trade in Boston and San Francisco as they did in Baltimore and Charleston.¹ The phenomenon of black barbers, although often noted in passing, has not been studied in depth. This dissertation began as an attempt to understand how black barbers developed into the paragons of African American enterprise and why, generation after generation, they remained successful.

Black barbers amassed substantial wealth in the nineteenth century through a feat unparalleled in the history of African American business: they competed against white barbers for white customers, and they won. From the 1820s to the Great Migration almost a century later, they dominated the upscale market serving affluent white men even as other African American business people lost their white clientele. The accomplishment of black barbers is especially remarkable in light of the fact that shaving, rather than haircutting, was the mainstay of nineteenth-century barbers. Consequently, this is the story of the black man's razor at the white man's throat. Understanding the appeal of black barbers to white customers required turning to literature and travelers' accounts.

In a scene from Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno that describes a slave shaving his master, the protagonist, Captain Delano, articulates commonly held white stereotypes about black barbers. "There is something in the Negro," avows Delano, "which, in a particular way, fits him for avocations about one's person. Most Negroes are natural valets and hairdressers." Describing how black men performed such work, Delano expresses admiration for their refinement. "There is," he says, "a smooth tact about them in this employment, with a marvelous, noiseless, gliding briskness, not ungraceful in its way, singularly pleasing to behold, and still more so to be the manipulated subject of." Delano ascribes these gifts to an innate dependency, "that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors."² In this description, the black barber emerges as a liminal...