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Introduction IN October 1838, the Colored American, a black newspaper based in New York City, published a letter to the editor from a black man who, while traveling in Orange County, New York, had a disturbing experience at a black-owned barber shop in Newburgh. “I went out to get my hair cut and my beard taken off,” he explained, “and for this purpose I called at the shop of Mr. . . . [sic], a colored barber, and sir, he would not touch my face with the handle of his razor, nor my head with the back of his shears! When I entered Mr. . . .’s shop, he had just finished shaving a white man. I asked him as politely as I could, if I could get my beard shaved off. He turned his eye with a slavish and fearful look toward the white man, and groaned out, ‘no sir, we don’t shave colored people.’”1 Although the writer reproved other black barbers who had similar policies, he did not identify the barber in question and identified himself only as “Long Island Scribe.” Considering New York had abolished slavery more than a decade earlier, in 1827, Long Island Scribe understood this rejection as an attack on his “right as a man, citizen, and a traveler” and was stunned at the barber’s unmanly display of submission. “What a class we ‘colored people’ are,” he exclaimed, “so black and degraded that we cannot touch each other! How can we condemn the whites, so long as such a state of feeling exists among ourselves.”2 In an editorial appearing below Long Island Scribe’s letter, Samuel Cornish, the paper’s editor, defended the barber and excused this policy as one of racial and economic necessity. Cornish had been a long-time journalist and key figure in New York’s abolitionist community, therefore Long Island Scribe probably did not expect the allowances Cornish gave to this barber.3 He explained that black barbers were “delicately situated,” without the “same independence that white men” enjoyed, and that therefore “we should feel more 2 Introduction lenity towards them.” Cornish’s answer to this dilemma was to practice “a measure of policy and forbearance” and “when traveling, whether the barber be a white or colored man, make it a rule to shave ourselves . . . [then] we are always politely served with a good razor, box, and towel, without any hesitancy .”4 Cornish’s response shed light on the practical necessities of navigating the urban and racial environment of the antebellum North. While New York had indeed abolished slavery, African Americans experienced a rather tenuous freedom.5 Black travelers expected northern black business people to exercise their freedom by not capitulating to the wishes of white patrons and, in the case of some men, accommodate them with a hot towel and sharp razor. Cornish, though, urged readers to account for the limits of freedom in the antebellum period. Long Island Scribe’s experience in nineteenth-century New York runs counter to contemporary perceptions, made famous in popular culture such as the hit movie Barbershop, of black barber shops as public spaces where black men can congregate, socialize, and air opinions without repercussions .6 Indeed, the shop from which Long Island Scribe was excluded bears little resemblance to the one that Joseph Bibb, a Pittsburgh Courier columnist , described in 1943. “The theme song of the colored American barber shop chord is a jingle of discontent,” Bibb wrote in the opening lines of his article. “Well-trained reporters and news analysts well know that they can get a fairly accurate slant on how the masses are thinking by listening in on the arguments and discussions carried on in the countless tonsorial parlors that dot every colored community in America. It is there that the issues of the times are considered at all hours of the day and night.” Bibb was not exaggerating. Reporters from the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender regularly printed debates and conversations they participated in or overheard at a barber shop in their respective newspapers, reflecting the democratic ideals of World War II and the realities of Jim Crow America. For Bibb, there were “evidences in the barber shops that there is a sort of resignation toward an ignoble fate. The philosophy expressed in these semi-private assemblies is alarming and disconcerting .”7 Bibb’s assessment indicates that at least by the 1940s, the barber shop served as a public space where African Americans gathered to critique both white...

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