From outposts to enclaves: A social history of black barbers from 1750 to 1915

Enterprise and Society

Volumn 5, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 594-606

  Bristol Jr , Douglas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25844508466     PISSN: 14672227     EISSN: 14672235     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/es/khh079     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (55)

1. The scholarship that diminished the accomplishments of black business includes Abram L. Harris, The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business among American Negroes (1936; College Park, Md., 1968);
2. M. S. Stuart, An Economic Detour. A History of Insurance in the Lives of American Negroes (1940; College Park, Md., 1969);
3. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (1957; New York, 1990);
4. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 30-37;
5. Eugene P. Foley, "The Negro Businessman: In Search of a Tradition," Daedalus 95 (Winter 1966): 107-44;
6. Ivan Light, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks (Berkeley, Calif., 1972).
7. For a discussion of how the negative views about black businessmen has dampened interest in the history of black business, see Robert E. Weems, Jr., "Out of the Shadows: Business Enterprise and African American Historiography," Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 200-12.
8. Quotation from Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 165.
9. Notable books that have worked to disprove Frazier include Walter B. Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (1973; Durham, N.C., 1993);
10. Juliet E. K. Walker, Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington, Ky., 1983);
11. Elsa Berkley Brown, "Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke," Signs 14 (Spring 1989): 610-33;
12. Alexa Benson Henderson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company: Guardian of Black Economic Dignity (Tuscaloosa, Ala.,1990);
13. Richard A. Plater, African American Entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The Story of R. C. Scott (New York, 1996);
14. Robert E. Weems, Jr., Black Business in the Black Metropolis: The Chicago Metropolitan Insurance Company, 1925-1985 (Bloomington, Ind., 1996);
15. Robert C. Kenzer, Enterprising Southerners: Black Economic Success in North Carolina, 1865-1915 (Charlottesville, Va., 1997);
16. Juliet E. K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York, 1998);
17. Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1750-1915 (Urbana, III, 1990), 121.
18. Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales (1856; New York, 1979), 73.
19. The fact that most antebellum whites failed to perceive the true character of African Americans is the fulcrum of Melville's story. In actuality, Delano is taken in by the act of Babo, who poses as a devoted slave although he is the leader of a slave mutiny. For a discussion of this point, see Sterling Brown, The Negro in American Fiction (New York, 1969), 12.
20. For an overview of white Americans searching for distinction as genteel people, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1993).
21. DuBois defined double-consciousness as the sense "of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Nathan Irving Huggins observes that there was a corollary to double-consciousness, "a unique insight into the vulnerable and unfulfilled soul" of white people. In her study of black female domestics, Darlene Clark Hine identifies a similar strategy, a "culture of dissemblance" that "created the appearance of openness and disclosure" to their employers while shielding themselves from debilitating racial and gendered stereotypes. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver (1903; New York, 1999), 11;
22. Nathan Irving Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), 244-45;
23. Darlene Clark Hine, "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance," Signs 14 (Summer 1989): 342-47.
24. New York Post obituary and correspondence reprinted in Hannah Farnham Lee, Memoir of Pierre Toussaint: Born a Slave in St. Domingo (1854; Westport, Conn., 1970), 96-98, 119-22.
25. I examined household-level entries for occupation, real property, and personal property in the manuscript census returns for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Mobile to compare the North, the upper South, and the lower South. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850.
26. Population, Slave, and Manufacturing Schedules, Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, D.C. In one directory, businesses were listed by their addresses, which made it possible to determine what establishments conducted business on a given block: The Philadelphia Shopping Guide and Housekeeper's Companion (Philadelphia, Pa.,1859).
27. Katherine Grier examines the development of such commercialized parlors in Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850-1930 (Amherst, Mass., 1988), 22-59, 61-63.
28. The ad for Roberson's barbershop is contained in the Rapier Family Papers, Series D - Cards, Box 84-2, File 108, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. Massive purchases of cigars and cologne are recorded in Jacob White's business records, John C. White, Sr.; B & R; 1839-1841; American Negro Historical Society Collection; Reel 5; frames 12, 103, 117, 153; Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
29. For an overview of the dramatic changes in retailing at the end of the nineteenth century, see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993).
30. W. E. B. DuBois, ed. The Negro in Business; Report of a Social Study Made under the Direction of Atlanta University Together with the Proceedings of the Fourth Conference for the Study of Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University, May 30-31, 1899 (Atlanta., Ga., 1899), 6-9, 16, 37-38.
31. John A. Garraty, ed., The Barber and the Historian: The Correspondence of George A. Myers and James Ford Rhodes, 1910-1923 (Columbus, Ohio, 1956), xvi-xvii;
32. Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, 111., 1976), 76;
33. David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana, 111., 1976), 308.
34. The decline of the artisan system is traced in W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York, 1986).
35. Weekly Anglo-African, 20 Aug. 1859, p. 3.
36. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1979), 277;
37. David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (University Park, Pa., 2000), 29.
38. For an overview of this debate, see Patrick Reel, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002).
39. Frederick Douglass' Paper, 22 April 1853, 23 Dec. 1853, and 28 Dec. 1853;
40. Pennsylvania Freeman, 27 June 1850.
41. For background on Woodson, see Floyd J. Miller, "The Father of Black Nationalism: Another Contender," Civil War History 17 (Dec. 1971): 310-19.
42. For an overview of regional differences among free blacks, see Ira Berlin, "The Structure of the Free Negro Caste in the Antebellum United States," Journal of Social History 9 (Spring 1976): 297-318;
43. Julie Winch, ed., The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis by Cyprian Glamorgan (Columbia, Mo., 1999), 49;
44. Various entries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. Census, 1860, reel 1157, pp. 71, 72, 84, 87, 94, 122, 149, 207, 268, 523, 537, 711, 715, 757;
45. David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 111., 1973), 14;
46. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana before 1900 (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 42;
47. Loren Schweninger, James T. Rapier and Reconstruction (Chicago, 1978), 1-4.
48. Merrick quotation in Robert McCants Andrews, John Merrick: A Biographical Sketch (Durham, N.C., 1920), 159.
49. Alexa Benson Henderson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company: Guardian of Black Economic Dignity (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1990), 17, 24, 29;
50. Paulette Davis-Horton, Davis Avenue: The Place, the People, the Memories (Mobile, Ala., 1991), 115, 166;
51. James P. Hall (grandson of Edgar Harney), interview with author, Mobile, Ala., 13 and 14 Aug. 1997. I identified all barbers in Mobile through the manuscript census returns. Barbershop ownership and shop location were determined by looking the men up in Mobile City Directories and referring to Sanborn Fire Insurance maps.
52. I discuss the licensing movement in Douglas Bristol, Jr., "The Victory of Black Barbers over Reform in Ohio, 1902-1913," Essays in Economic and Business History 16 (1998): 251-60.
53. For a case study that examines the association of African Americans with tuberculosis, see Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), chap. 9.
54. Another book that examines how racial ideas defined issues of black health is Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001).
55. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has established a well-regarded theoretical framework for studying what she dubs "emotional labor" in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, Calif., 1983).