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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.

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.

Since its inception in 1934 by the legendary Dr. Wilder Penfield, the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) has provided world-renowned instruction in neurosurgery and related neurosciences, training many of the most prominent figures in the history of neurosurgery. Less well known is the role of the MNI in training the first African-American board-certified neurosurgeons. A comprehensive review of pertinent modern and historical records spanning the past century was performed. From 1947-1965, the MNI trained the first African-American board-certified neurosurgeon, and three of the first four. The first, Dr. Clarence Greene, Sr., trained at MNI from 1947-1949. The next, Dr. Jesse Barber, Jr., trained at MNI from 1958-1961. Like Greene, Barber received his MD from the Howard University College of Medicine, was on the general surgery faculty at Howard before training at MNI under Penfield and returned to Howard following his training. The third, Dr. Lloyd Dayes, matriculated at MNI in 1960 after receiving his MD from the Loma Linda University School of Medicine and trained from 1961-1965 under Dr. Theodore Rasmussen, after which he returned to Loma Linda. Greene, Barber and Dayes were certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery in 1953, 1963 and 1967, respectively, as the first, third and fourth African-American neurosurgeons. The willingness of the world-renowned MNI to train the first African-American neurosurgeons during a time of intense racial segregation in the United States played a major role in enabling subsequent African Americans to enter and enhance the field of neurosurgery.

Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America by Quincy T. Mills is reviewed. Mills offers an unprecedented assessment of the complexities of black barbers and barbershops in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Across six chapters, Mills looks at how barbering shaped black and white experiences of chattel slavery, how it bounded the possibilities of black self-determination after Emancipation, and how it affected the development of public and black counterpublic spaces during and after formal racial segregation. Something as apparently simple as a haircut was no simple matter at all. Readers will notice that barbershops, as institutions, and their clienteles change considerably over time. Not only have barbers played a special role in the development of small business and black politics, but the continued inroads African Americans have made into U.S. civil society, especially since the 1970s, have also given haircuts a special and unprecedented significance in American public life.