Abstract
Curious acquaintances often posed some form of the following statement when they learned of my research: “It is interesting that you are researching barber shops and you have such long hair.” In 1999, one year before I began historical research on black barbers and barber shops in the United States, I vowed not to cut my hair and submitted my head to a friend’s dexterous hands. She twisted my hair in sections to form what would become the birth of my locks. Year after year, those locks tangled, some merging to join as one. As each lock grew longer and longer down my back, I plunged deeper and deeper into the archives in search of African Americans who labored as barbers and ran their own shops. In essence, my hair took me farther from the space that my research brought me closer to. But, no, it was not interesting to me that I was researching a business I had not patronized. The historical research seemed much bigger than me, much more significant than my own hair. At no point did I feel less qualified or committed to represent the history of black barbers and the development of their shops in black communities. When I looked to interview barbers in Atlanta, Georgia and Durham, North Carolina, this question of my personal and professional connections to barber shops proved to be more than a curiosity.
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Notes
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© 2011 Benjamin Talton and Quincy T. Mills
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Mills, Q.T. (2011). “You Don’t Look Groomed”: Rethinking Black Barber Shops as Public Spaces. In: Talton, B., Mills, Q.T. (eds) Black Subjects in Africa and Its Diasporas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119949_6
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