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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 Linechronicles 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.

In 1898, recent law graduate Lutie A. Lytle-a black woman born to formerly enslaved parents-accepted a position as instructor of law at a law school in Tennessee. In doing so, she became the first black woman law professor in the world. Over the following four decades, despite suffering persistent racial and gender discrimination, Lytle committed her life and work to, in her words, \"mak[ing] a sincere and earnest effort to improve [black Americans'] condition as citizens.\" This Article details Lytle's life as an advocate, activist, and attorney, and argues that her work places her squarely within the ranks of the black feminist intelligentsia that emerged in the late nineteenth century. In addition, the Article highlights Lytle's disappearance from public life (and the public record) in the early 1940s, and suggests that her pioneering career warrants additional research into her final years.

Cutting Along the Color Line chronicles the cultural history of barber shops as businesses and civic institutions, demonstrating their central role in civil rights struggles throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The story of black barbers contributes to the recent effort of business historians to engage the larger culture by bringing together business and African American history. While exploring issues commonly associated with the history of the firm uncovered a tradition of enterprise that starches back to the early nineteenth century, investigating questions form the repertoire of social history sheds new light on race relations and ideological debates within the African American community. The men whose lives are chronicles by this dissertation also emerge as figures worthy of historical study on their own merit; in addition to becoming the most successful African American businessmen in the nineteenth century, black barbers distinguished themselves through their wit, savoir-faire, and tenacity. Black barbers amassed substantial wealth in the nineteenth century through a feat unparalleled in the history of African American business: they competed against white barbers for white customers, and they won.

Some 70 percent voters in Ohio approved a ballot measure in November to create a bipartisan commission to draw legislative districts that are compact and do not favor one party or the other -- and that has zero shot at happening in Pennsylvania.