audiobook Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters; Artisans; and Patrons in Early America (Early American Studies) by Margaretta M. Lovell in History

Description

Today; black-owned barber shops play a central role in African American public life. The intimacy of commercial grooming encourages both confidentiality and camaraderie; which make the barber shop an important gathering place for African American men to talk freely. But for many years preceding and even after the Civil War; black barbers endured a measure of social stigma for perpetuating inequality: though the profession offered economic mobility to black entrepreneurs; black barbers were obliged by custom to serve an exclusively white clientele. Quincy T. Mills traces the lineage from these nineteenth-century barbers to the bustling enterprises of today; demonstrating that the livelihood offered by the service economy was crucial to the development of a black commercial sphere and the barber shop as a democratic social space.Cutting Along the Color Line chronicles the cultural history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions. Through several generations of barbers; Mills examines the transition from slavery to freedom in the nineteenth century; the early twentieth-century expansion of black consumerism; and the challenges of professionalization; licensing laws; and competition from white barbers. He finds that the profession played a significant though complicated role in twentieth-century racial politics: while the services of shaving and grooming were instrumental in the creation of socially acceptable black masculinity; barbering permitted the financial independence to maintain public spaces that fostered civil rights politics. This sweeping; engaging history of an iconic cultural establishment shows that black entrepreneurship was intimately linked to the struggle for equality.