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From Outposts to Enclaves: A Social History of Black Barbers from 1750 to 1915

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Douglas Bristol Jr.
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Abstract

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Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , December 2004 , pp. 594 - 606
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2004. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

References

1. The scholarship that diminished the accomplishments of black business includes Harris, Abram L., The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business among American Negroes (1936; College Park, Md., 1968)Google Scholar; Stuart, M. S., An Economic Detour: A History of Insurance in the Lives of American Negroes (1940; College Park, Md., 1969)Google Scholar; Franklin Frazier, E., Black Bourgeoisie (1957; New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 30–37 Google Scholar; Foley, Eugene P., “The Negro Businessman: In Search of a Tradition,” Daedalus 95 (Winter 1966): 107-44Google Scholar; Light, Ivan, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks (Berkeley, Calif., 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of how the negative views about black businessmen has dampened interest in the history of black business, see Weems, Robert E. Jr., “Out of the Shadows: Business Enterprise and African American Historiography,” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 200-12.Google Scholar Quotation from Frazier, , Black Bourgeoisie, 165.Google Scholar Notable books that have worked to disprove Frazier include Weare, Walter B., Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (1973; Durham, N.C., 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, Juliet E. K., Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington, Ky., 1983)Google Scholar; Brown, Elsa Barkley, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke,” Signs 14 (Spring 1989): 610-33Google Scholar; Henderson, Alexa Benson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company: Guardian of Black Economic Dignity (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1990)Google Scholar; Plater, Richard A., African American Entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The Story of R. C. Scott (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Weems, Robert E. Jr., Black Business in the Black Metropolis: The Chicago Metropolitan Insurance Company, 1925-1985 (Bloomington, Ind., 1996)Google Scholar; Kenzer, Robert C., Enterprising Southerners: Black Economic Success in North Carolina, 1865-1915 (Charlottesville, Va., 1997)Google Scholar; Walker, Juliet E. K., The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Schweninger, Loren, Black Property Owners in the South, 1750-1915 (Urbana, Ill., 1990), 121.Google Scholar

2. Melville, Herman, Billy Budd and Other Tales (1856; New York, 1979), 73.Google Scholar 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 Brown, Sterling, The Negro in American Fiction (New York, 1969), 12.Google Scholar For an overview of white Americans searching for distinction as genteel people, see Bushman, Richard L., The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

3. 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. DuBois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Oliver, Terri Hume (1903; New York, 1999), 11 Google Scholar; Huggins, Nathan Irving, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), 244-45Google Scholar; Hine, Darlene Clark, “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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar New York Post obituary and correspondence reprinted in Lee, Hannah Farnham, Memoir of Pierre Toussaint: Born a Slave in St. Domingo (1854; Westport, Conn., 1970), 96–98 Google Scholar, 119-22.

4. 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. Population, Slave, and Manufacturing Schedules & Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. 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).

5. 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. 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. For an overview of the dramatic changes in retailing at the end of the nineteenth century, see Leach, William, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

6. DuBois, W. E. B., 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.Google Scholar Garraty, John A., ed., The Barber and the Historian: The Correspondence of George A. Myers and James Ford Rhodes, 1910-1923 (Columbus, Ohio, 1956), xvi–xvii;Google Scholar Kusmer, Kenneth L., A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1976), 76 Google Scholar; Gerber, David A., Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana, Ill., 1976), 308.Google Scholar

7. The decline of the artisan system is traced in Rorabaugh, W. J., The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York, 1986).Google Scholar Weekly Anglo-African, 20 Aug. 1859, p. 3.

8. Foner, Philip S. and Walker, George E., eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1979), 277 Google Scholar; Walker, David, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Hinks, Peter P. (University Park, Pa., 2000), 29.Google Scholar For an overview of this debate, see Rael, Patrick, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002).Google Scholar

9. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 22 April 1853, 23 Dec. 1853, and 28 Dec. 1853; Pennsylvania Freeman, 27 June 1850. For background on Woodson, see Miller, Floyd J., “The Father of Black Nationalism: Another Contender,” Civil War History 17 (Dec. 1971): 310-19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. For an overview of regional differences among free blacks, see Berlin, Ira, “The Structure of the Free Negro Caste in the Antebellum United States,” Journal of Social History 9 (Spring 1976): 297–318 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winch, Julie, ed., The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis by Cyprian Clamorgan (Columbia, Mo., 1999), 49 Google Scholar; 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; Katzman, David M., Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1973), 14 Google Scholar; Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana before 1900 (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 42; Schweninger, Loren, James T. Rapier and Reconstruction (Chicago, 1978), 1–4.Google Scholar Merrick quotation in Andrews, Robert McCants, John Merrick: A Biographical Sketch (Durham, N.C., 1920), 159.Google Scholar

11. Henderson, Alexa Benson, Atlanta Life Insurance Company: Guardian of Black Economic Dignity (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1990), 17, 24, 29 Google Scholar; Davis-Horton, Paulette, Davis Avenue: The Place, the People, the Memories (Mobile, Ala., 1991), 115, 166 Google Scholar; 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.

12. I discuss the licensing movement in Bristol, Douglas Jr., “The Victory of Black Barbers over Reform in Ohio, 1902-1913,” Essays in Economic and Business History 16 (1998): 251-60.Google Scholar For a case study that examines the association of African Americans with tuberculosis, see Hunter, Tera W., To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)Google Scholar, chap. 9. Another book that examines how racial ideas defined issues of black health is Wailoo, Keith, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001).Google Scholar

13. 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).