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Redeeming dignity

KNIGHTS OF THE RAZOR:
Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom
By Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr.
232 pp. Johns Hopkins University Press $50

Reviewed by Joe Short

No book ever had a more riveting first sentence than Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom by Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr.: “With a flick of the wrist, nineteenth-century black barbers could have slit the throats of the white men they shaved.” Bristol says that even though there is no record that any barber ever did slice and dice those who sat in their chairs—they had good reasons not to. Not the least of these was that they wanted paying white customers, and, after slavery, the ongoing protection of white patrons against the worst of racism.

Who were the Knights of the Razor? In this truly engaging social and business history, Douglas Bristol, associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi, traces the rise of black barbers from colonial times, when they were “waiting men” to their slave masters. By the nineteenth century, they comprised a pervasive and influential national occupation which embraced the poorest of journeymen and the most successful of elite barbers, businessmen, and African-American community leaders.

The 1890 census showed that there were 17,480 black barbers. They predominated among the free African tradesmen. In Richmond, Virginia, half of all skilled black workers were barbers. Black barbers developed the barbershop as a business and created the very concept of the elite and luxurious barbershop. Some rose to considerable affluence or even wealth. While most remained poor, many attained a lower middle class lifestyle. John Merrick, once the personal barber to Washington Duke of the American Tobacco Company, became wealthy by establishing a string of barbershops for urban blacks and then by establishing the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company.

Socially, the leaders of the black barbers advocated self-help and middle class values like thrift and the work ethic. They sought “respectability,” which would help them cope with the perils and constraints of racist society and politics. As Bristol makes clear, the barbers vigorously sought national solidarity and fraternity among themselves—barber Cyprian Clamorgan of St. Louis took a name for them already gaining usage in the nineteenth century and dubbed them “Knights of the Razor.” The Knights’ tradition evolved from master-slave relations in colonial times.

In the eighteenth-century society of Southern planters, Bristol says, the enslaved man typically got on track to barbering and freedom as a personal servant. But they truly began their “journey to freedom and a secure economic niche by getting off the plantation,” notably in the period of the American, French, and Haitian (1793) revolutions. Those upheavals enabled many black barbers to move to urban areas like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, to hire themselves out, and then to buy their freedom.

As their ties to their slave masters ended, free black barbers sought to continue their service to affluent white men. They accomplished this at first by creating and transmitting a distinct tradition of expert African American barbering that attracted a large white clientele. They sustained this tradition by passing on expertise and skills to succeeding generations. And they also passed on the “social wiles” to accommodate affluent and powerful white men in a highly unequal society. They did this by becoming a kind of guild or fraternal order that tapped community and family resources to pass on the tradition, often through apprenticeships.

The first-class barbershop was the other major Knight’s innovation for expanding their ties to affluent white men. By “combinations of upscale décor and masculine conviviality,” writes Bristol, “these establishments quickly became a favorite destination for white men, a place where they stopped by to debate and swap tales as well as to get a shave.” Black barbers and their up-scale barbershops became firmly established on Main Streets and in luxurious hotels, throughout the North and South, during the antebellum period. They set the gold standard for barbershops nationally to this day.

There was, of course, a huge and controversial price for these advances by black barbers: “With the exception of a small group of northern black men,” explains Bristol, “they legitimated segregation by refusing to serve black customers in their shops.” This lasted into the twentieth century, when a black, urban middle class arose. Until then, few black men could afford to pay for a haircut and shave. Of course, “black leaders,” as Bristol writes, “deeply resented being excluded from a black-owned business.” In 1852, a black convention in Ohio passed a resolution saying that a colored man who refused to shave a colored man, just because he was colored, was worse than a white man who refused to eat, drink, or be educated with a colored man.

Douglas Bristol shows deep compassion and respect for the black barbers in American history, whom he says have not received their due from historians, mainly because they made compromises which “they regretted but saw as unavoidable.” Throughout this book, based on prodigious research and interpretation, Bristol helps us to know and understand who the black barbers really were and what they felt. To the claim that the barbers hopelessly compromised themselves by operating whites-only shops, he responds in this incisive and eloquent passage:

Black barbers sought to define themselves as enterprising, self-made men. Out of this decision flowed different tactics. Instead of attempting to persuade white Americans to grant more rights, black barbers ingratiated themselves with affluent white men in order to obtain financial and social capital necessary for upward mobility, even if this meant adopting the politics of subterfuge and accommodating white racial stereotypes. They regretted the need to wear masks to earn a living and worked to create a society that would judge them according to standards of class [and “respectability”] instead of race.

The Knights of the Razor definitely get their due in this wonderfully crafted and highly entertaining book. It is a cornucopia of themes, insights, data, and mini-biographies about fascinating characters. I loved Bristol’s descriptions of some of the palatial barbershops—at Alonzo Herndon’s in Atlanta, customers entered through two sixteen-foot tall mahogany doors with beveled glass and walked a vast expanse of marble to reach one of twenty-three black barbers.

What Douglas Bristol accomplishes in this book is to give black barbers real faces and personalities, and their profession much redeeming dignity beyond the stereotypes of racial and ideological politics. He restores them to American history, and I am convinced, to a much more sympathetic place in African American history.

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Joe Short is an adjunct professor in the Sustainable International Development Program (SID) of The Heller School, Brandeis University. He has served as executive director of Oxfam America, president of Bradford College, and as management and educational consultant to many NGOs, UN agencies, and universities. He has resided or worked in many countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia.

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