Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America

Preface

Preface IWAS inspired to write this book while sitting in the Truth and Soul Barber Shop on the South Side of Chicago in the summer of 2000. I was not there to get a haircut—and despite the jokes of imminent attacks by rogue hair clippers, I never did—because I had just started growing dreadlocks one year earlier. But more about my hair later. I was in Truth and Soul to observe the conversations and interactions among the barbers and customers. Melissa Harris-Perry (formerly HarrisLacewell ) employed me to do this work for her book Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. She was concerned that, as a woman, had she hung out in the shop, she would have altered the nature of the conversations. But even as a black male from the South Side, I have no doubt that I, too, altered the space in some way.1 While she was interested in how African Americans develop their political worldviews through collective discourse, I could not help but think historically about the space. As I learned more about the owner, how he entered barbering, and how his entrepreneurial activities had shaped his political thought, I had more questions, and I had to go back farther in time. That fall, I plunged into the archives and stumbled upon George Myers, a black barber in Cleveland, Ohio, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He groomed William McKinley before he was elected president. In fact, Myers boasted of a large customer base of white, wealthy businessmen and politicians, and the Ohio Historical Society housed eight reels of microfilm of his personal papers. Why would a barber have such extensive papers? And why did he shave only white men in his shop? While few black barbers could say they had shaved a future president of the United States, as I discovered , Myers’s practice of shaving white men was by no means an aberration. x Preface Very early in my project, in September 2002, the movie Barbershop came out in theaters, striking a chord with millions of people, but not for the same reasons . Barber shops had long served as central institutions in black communities , so it was no hard sell to black moviegoers. The film grossed $20.6 million in the first weekend and ranked first at the box office. Yet, while many walked in with excitement and left after the movie’s end with equal joy, others walked out of the theaters completely stunned. The film put civil rights leadership on trial for the world—particularly the white world—to witness. A controversy ensued, and black America found itself engrossed in heated debates about cinematic stereotypes and historical representation. The controversial scene is iconic for its representation of barber shop talk, or the kinds of debates that take place in black barber shops among barbers and patrons. In many ways, these conversations are meant to be private. “I wouldn’t say this in front of white folks,” Eddie prefaced to the other barbers and customers in Barbershop, “but Rosa Parks ain’t do nuthin’ but sit her black ass down. There was a whole lotta other people that sat down on the bus, and they did it way before Rosa did.” The barbers and patrons were completely outraged that he would challenge Parks’s actions that led to the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Eddie’s statement upset not only the shop patrons, but some black movie patrons as well. Although Eddie did not make his statements in front of white folks in the barber shop, they had front-row seats in the theaters. Earlier in the movie, Eddie proclaimed to Calvin, the owner, that the barber shop is “the place where a black man means something , the cornerstone of the neighborhood, the black man’s country club.” As the men in the shop sternly disagree with Eddie for his statements about Parks, Eddie questioned, “This is the barber shop, ain’t it? If a man can’t talk straight in the barbershop, then where can he talk?”2 The film lifted the veil of what happens in black barber shops, to the chagrin of many, but I grew frustrated that the public was still talking about barber shops in the same ways they had for decades. Though my research for this book was still in its early stages, I knew there had to be more to these shops than our public discourse has allowed...