Regional Identity, Black Barbers and the African American Tradition of Entrepreneurialism

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2006 by Bristol, Douglas W Jr

The ribbon-cutting ceremony in 2005 for the latest National Park Service site in Natchez, the antebellum home of the black barber William Johnson, was bittersweet for students of the African American experience. According to the site's Congressional sponsor, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, the new house museum introduced the theme of "black history in the antebellum South" to the Natchez National Historical Park, which previously had consisted of one restored plantation home. He continued, saying that Johnson - born a slave, freed in his youth, successful as a barber with an affluent white clientele - represented the opportunities available to free blacks during the time of slavery. However, as Senator Lott noted, Johnson was known less for his wealth than for his meticulous diary in which he recorded the events of Natchez at the apex of his hometown's influence on regional and national politics, society, and trade.

This two-thousand page record of Johnson's personal and business affairs had been discovered by two white scholars in 1938, and its subsequent publication along with a biography of Johnson's life and times in the 1950s was heralded by one reviewer as providing "a commentary on the question as to whether the Negro can be assimilated into American society."1 In other words, because Johnson made his peace with antebellum planters, African Americans could find some common ground with the segregated South. The National Park Service, by making William Johnson the representative for African Americans in Natchez before the Civil War, chose to play only the light interlude in an otherwise somber composition. It did not ring true. For example, some of Johnson's descendants who attended the opening ceremonies wondered aloud if they should honor someone they perceived as accommodating the institution of slavery and, therefore, the oppression of their people. All of this begs the question of how William Johnson fits into African American history and what he actually represents.

This article challenges the premise that William Johnson was representative of free blacks in general and black barbers in particular. For evidence that this impression is widely held, one need look no further than the 2005 Natchez Literary and Cinema Festival, which adopted the theme of free blacks to honor the opening of the Johnson house museum. The larger issue at stake is how regional differences in the antebellum United States created distinctive free black populations with their own characteristics, values, and strategies for advancement. In the case of free black barbers, the circumstances of the Upper South fostered a tradition of black enterprise that adapted itself to serving the African American community not only through barber shops but also through what became the largest black-owned corporations during the era of Jim Crow. William Johnson, by contrast, sought to abandon that tradition of enterprise and instead aspired to enter the ranks of planters. After providing an overview of the success of black barbers and their tradition of enterprise, this article will examine how their experiences varied by region before addressing other explanations for why their values diverged. This project contributes to the growing field of African American business history by underscoring the need to pay attention to the significance of regional identity.2 Moreover, researching the influence of place on African American life during the antebellum period could offer insights as significant as those gained by the "Atlantic Turn" in colonial studies that has uncovered the impact of African ethnic heritage in the New World.

William Johnson did share one thing in common with black barbers elsewhere in the antebellum United States: success. In the South, their ubiquity inspired one English traveler to describe barbering as "the birthright of the free Negro." By 1850, African American men comprised the majority of barbers in Baltimore, Charleston, Mobile, and Richmond. Black barbers enjoyed the same predominance north of the Mason-Dixon Line in Philadelphia as well as on the farthest reaches of the western frontier. San Francisco was home to sixteen black-owned barber shops as early as 1854, and during the 1860s, a former slave named Peter Briggs enjoyed a monopoly as the sole barber in Los Angeles. From their success at capturing the high-end of the market, black barbers amassed considerable wealth. One out of every eight African Americans in the Upper South worth at least $2000 in 1860, the standard for affluence at that time, owned a barber shop. Northern black barbers enjoyed prosperity as well, most notably by becoming the wealthiest African American residents in Cleveland, Ohio and New Haven, Rhode Island.3 They flourished, moreover, in spite of growing competition from European immigrants and deteriorating race relations that called into question how natural it was for African Americans to work in barber shops. In a feat unparalleled in the history of African American business, black barbers competed against white barbers for white customers, and they won. To understand how they met these challenges requires examining the tradition of enterprise that they created.