Antebellum Ohio’s Black Barbers in the Political Vanguard

26 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Antebellum Ohio’s Black Barbers in the Political Vanguard Ann Clymer Bigelow F or five January days in 1852, a convention of African American leaders from throughout Ohio met in Cincinnati. The event was not unique. African Americans regularly held conventions like this in many states during the second half of the nineteenth century to call public attention to the issues of greatest concern to the black community. The 1852 convention, held January 14 through 19, drew forty-five delegates. Among the identifiable attendees were two blacksmiths, two plasterers, a livery business owner, two teachers, a cabinet maker, two farmers, two hucksters, a newspaper compositor, a stevedore, a cooper, and thirteen barbers. This group appears an unlikely amalgam, but it was not. The delegates had in common “a belief in the value of hard work, thrift, education, morality, religion, and family.” Largely self-made and self-employed, the men most often had families and owned real estate, and as historians William and Aimee Lee Cheek note, they “were restless and willing to risk themselves.” Year after year the barbers and other convention-goers rose up in heartfelt protest against slavery and race discrimination in all its forms.1 Black barbers’ political activism is all the more remarkable because of the racial dynamics of their livelihood. Unlike other black artisans, these men depended on intimate physical contact with a white clientele. Apart from the few “independent ” barbers in “equal-rights shops,” they shaved only white men. As a rule, if a barber consented to serve blacks, the white patrons turned away and went elsewhere . As historian Douglas Bristol asserts in Knights of the Razor: “The lives of black barbers reveal an ongoing negotiation with their white customers over race relations. These men catered to white vanity in order to wrest from a repressive society a significant degree of control over their own lives.” Many then took advantage of their growing financial independence to promote the civic interests of their fellow African Americans. So important was the barbering trade in Ohio’s black communities, urban and rural, that a parade in 1850s Columbus featured floats depicting a giant razor and a plow. Yet barbers had to tread carefully with their white clientele, engaged in what historian Patrick Rael characterizes as “constant sniping . . . guerrilla warfare directed at [the] edges” of the prevailing racial ideology . In so doing, they formed a vanguard in the struggle for black civil rights.2 ANN CLYMER BIGELOW SUMMER 2011 27 The barbers who came to Cincinnati in January 1852 represented the socioeconomic elite of their profession in Ohio. In 1850, African American men operated barbershops in ninety-five Ohio towns. The census for that year, the first to show occupations, recorded that nearly 90 percent of Ohio’s barbers were black, including all four in Lancaster and Lebanon, all five in Mansfield, all seven in Circleville and Troy, thirteen of sixteen in Zanesville, and all eighteen in Chillicothe. The pattern held in the larger cities as well. Fifteen of nineteen barbers in Dayton were black, nineteen of twenty-three in Cleveland, and forty of forty-four in Columbus. Cincinnati, with its large population of German immigrants , was a special case. Of 227 total barbers, 142 (or some 63 percent) were black. About five hundred African American barbers plied their trade in Ohio in 1850, of whom 135 were born free in the state. Some 275 others migrated from slaveholding states, the largest portion of them (168) from Virginia, including its mountainous western section. The proportion of freeborn to those either born in slavery or fugitives or to those who purchased their freedom or had it purchased for them, is not known.3 The narratives of a few individuals survive. Cleveland’s “John Brown the Barber,” as contemporaries called him, was born free in Virginia and came west with a party of Hicksite Quakers. Born in slavery in Maryland, Urbana’s Windsor Hawkins traveled west as a boy with his then-master, John B. McGruder. William W. (“Willie”) Watson, also born in slavery, was put up for auction in Lexington, Kentucky, at the age of twenty-six but turned the tables on his master by...