LIVE: Author Mills Explores History Of Black Barber Shops In “Cutting Along the Color Line”

LIVE: Author Mills Explores History Of Black Barber Shops In “Cutting Along the Color Line”

Vassar College Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies, Quincy Mills, Ph.D., writes about the history of barber shops as businesses, social centers, and civic institutions in his book  “Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America”.

“There is a way in which barbershops provide a way of that intimate history of a neighborhood of a community, intimate history of customers, patrons, barbers and so forth,” Mills says, “and so there is a way in which digging deep into the history of black barbershops was in some ways digging deep into the history of black communities and history of service labor.”

Mills was in Providence giving a book talk at the Providence Public library as part of the HairBrained exhibition that explores the ways in which hair can reflect culture, self-identity, and politics.