Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: In the nineteenth century, white men sat in the barber’s chair and submitted to the sharp straight razor at the hands of black barbers. Shaving-time—the moment when barbers shaved their patrons and men waited their turn in the chair—illuminates the racial and masculine ambiguities of black entrepreneurship inside and outside of black-owned barber shops. Slaves and free blacks capitalized on, and negotiated barbering in the
antebellum South and North to gain more control of their time, to escape their master’s surveillance, and to accumulate income and establish businesses. After the Civil War, black barbers who exclusively catered to white men, or “color-line” barbers as they were frequently called, lived ambiguous lives as they capitalize on the racial stigmas of barbering to achieve class mobility while staying connected to black communities.

This paper examines the contested racial and masculine meanings of the “color-line” barber in Northern and Southern communities at the end of Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was the last of the Reconstruction acts to ensure African Americans’ rights to equal access to public accommodations. But, was the barber shop a public or private place? White opponents to the Act received unexpected allies in color-line barbers who feared that if black customers gained entry into their shops, then their white customers would no longer patronize them. Whether one was for or against racial exclusion policies in black barber shops, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the acts passed in the North after 1883, demonstrate the paradox inherent in black barbers’ ideologies of self-interest during a period of exclusion and the emergence of Jim Crow. Furthermore, the framing of the Civil Rights Act raised paramount questions over whether barber shops were public or private spaces. The struggle over the Act illustrates the implications of racial deference in 19th century service work and the unexpected consequences of emancipation when black barbers’ self-interests deviated from the interests of the larger black community. Shaving-time, then, was about much more than a shave, it revealed black and white men’s expectations of freedom.