Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (review)

Book Reviews Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom. By Douglas Walter Bristol Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. x, 216 pp. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-8018-9283-7. The struggle of black barbers across both class and racial lines is skillfully outlined in Douglas Bristol Jr.’s well-written exploration of the lives of so-called knights of the razor. In a study that stretches from the colonial era to the early twentieth century, Bristol employs a host of public records, private writings and correspondence, and even nineteenthcentury fiction to uncover contemporary images of barbers’ lives and to argue that regional location was critical to how black barbers were able to live their lives and to hold a stake in the larger black community. In doing so, he contributes much to our understanding of race relations in early America. This book will be of interest to specialists in several areas, notably labor studies and race relations, and to those who want to broaden their understanding of nineteenth-century America. In the South, African American barbers, free or enslaved, worked almost exclusively in shops that served white customers. They toiled in close contact with whites and were forced to adopt a subservient posture to be successful in their trades. Some black leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, were openly critical of the passive acceptance of roles in the service sector, but many southern barbers were able to carve out a unique self-identity. Bristol notes, “rather than seeing themselves as despised menials occupying a marginal economic niche, black barbers conceived of themselves as heirs to a tradition that made them men of the world” (p. 4). Black barbers cultivated relationships with particular white men, helping to ward off some of the effects of prejudice. They also walked a fine racial line through identification with the slave-owning class, thereby inviting the criticism of black leaders. Overtly concerned with their role in the community, black barbers cultivated respectability and viewed themselves first as businessmen. Their experiences differed depending on their location in the upper or lower South. Lower South barbers, like other free African Americans in the skilled trades, were able to practice their occupation with fewer objections from white workers. In Charleston, South Carolina, for example , free black men held 80 percent of barbering posts and owned several “first class” barber shops located in elite hotels. Free business- July 2011 225 men often competed with enslaved barbers, who sometimes operated their own shops or hired out their time. Their identification with the slave-holding class often led free black barbers to buy slaves as their own hallmark of success in southern society. In cities of the lower South such as Charleston, the majority of black barbers owned slaves and often employed them in their shops. Their connection to the class of slave owners kept many from forging fraternal bonds with other African Americans in the region. Upper South barbers faced a different reality, being less connected overall to the slave-owning class. In upper South cities such as Baltimore, black barbers were much more able to negotiate the “tensions between their class and racial identity,” particularly during Reconstruction (p. 175). Northern black barbers, although given less attention than their southern counterparts, also appear in Bristol’s account. Generally less likely to serve an all-white clientele overall, northern barbers were particularly vulnerable to competition posed by the influx of European immigrants in the late antebellum period. By 1855, to some degree in the South but certainly in northern cities, white barbers began to outnumber African Americans. Northern black barbers, however, were more connected to activities in the region’s growing black community that helped to create separate black institutions and support moral reform, and were therefore less likely to lose their overall status in the black community. They took an important leadership role in the National Negro Convention movement after 1830 and were prominent among other black leaders in organizations such as the American Moral Reform Society. Yet, like their southern brethren, black barbers in the North were loath to challenge some tenets of race relations. While they endorsed the strategies of racial uplift, most black...