'Color -line' barbers and the emergence of a black public space: A social and political history of black barbers and barber shops, 1830--1970.

摘要

Barber shops have historically been male grooming places where commerce, culture, masculinity, and politics intersect. Black entrepreneurship and black public spaces have multiple meanings that illuminate the tenuous boundaries between black elite and working-class culture and community. This dissertation outlines the politics and economy of black-owned barber shops from the antebellum period to the beginning of the black power movement in order to examine the evolving relationship between black barber shops and black communities. For black barbers, the barber shop symbolized economic autonomy and for black male communities it symbolized a space for grooming, congregation, and conversation.;The politics and economy of the barber shop was based on the public intimacy of commercial grooming, yet that intimacy was based on the selective privacy of bodily care and conversation among patrons. It is because of this intimacy that barber shops stand apart from traditional debates about segregation and separation, which differentiates black barber shops from other spaces in the black public sphere. At stake were alternative class formations and contested ideologies of race and manhood.;This dissertation examines the external and internal space of barber shops in the North and South, from downtown business districts to black business districts in segregated black neighborhoods, and from predominately white to predominately black patrons. Black barbers occupied a tenuous position as they attempted to balance the social and political implications of forced segregation and willing congregation---in the shop and the city---with their own expectations of class mobility and economic autonomy. Black barbers' participation in the market economy had social and political implications for the position of black entrepreneurs in the black public sphere, the kind of space that emerged inside barber shops, and the class dynamics within black communities. From the nineteenth through the twentieth century, black barber shops were spaces where black men sought shaves and haircuts, made money and spent money, worked and rested, talked and listened, and defined what it meant to be men. Black barbers owned democratic public spaces, but their own class ambitions determined how democratic the barber shop would be.