QUINCY T. MILLS
http://africanastudies.vassar.edu/bios/qumills.html
Quincy T. Mills teaches and conducts research in African
American history. Originally from Chicago, he earned his B.S.
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1997),
his M.B.A. from DePaul University (2004), and his M.A. and
Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2006). He teaches
classes on Martin Luther King, Jr., race and segregation, the
civil rights and black power movement, and consumer culture.
Professor Mills’s research focuses on African American social
movements and financial security. Particularly, he is interested
in how African Americans’ wages, wealth, and overall
financial well-being helped shape black public spaces, political
engagement, and activism. He is author of Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and
Barber Shops in America (2013). This book chronicles the history of black barber shops as
businesses and civic institutions, demonstrating their central role in civil rights struggles
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With Benjamin Talton, he co-edited Black
Subjects in Africa and Its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing (2011). With
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, he coauthored “Truth and Soul: Black Talk in the Barbershop” in
Harris-Lacewell's Barbershops, Bibles and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought
(2004). He is currently at work on his second monograph, tentatively titled The Wages of
Resistance: Financing the Black Freedom Movement, which examines how civil rights and black
power organizations negotiated fundraising imperatives with their political ideologies as
functions of movement building.
Cutting Along the Color Line
Black Barbers and Barber Shops in
America
Quincy T. Mills
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15150.html
336 pages | 6 x 9 | 19 illus.
Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4541-7 | $34.95t | £23.00 |
"Quincy T. Mills's important book provides fascinating
insight into the history of African American barbers. He
vividly captures their culture, traditions, and perseverance to
succeed against tremendous odds. A brilliant overview of this
prestigious tradition."—Zariff, barber to President Barack
Obama
Page 1 of 3
"Cutting Along the Color Line is a singular achievement. Quincy Mills has taken a familiar
institution, the neighborhood barbershop, and revealed an unknown history that utterly
transforms our understanding of what we thought it was. Unpacking the economic, social,
cultural, and political history of black barbering from slavery to the present contributes new
insights to African American studies, American history, and black masculinities. Cutting Along
the Color Line will have a permanent place on my syllabus."—Melissa Harris-Perry, Professor of
Political Science at Tulane University and host of MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry
"Cutting Along the Color Line is a rich and illuminating study of the role of barbers and
barbershops in African American life. Through meticulous research and nuanced historical
analysis, Quincy T. Mills vividly depicts how barbers navigated Jim Crow segregation in ways
that were sophisticated as well as politically and culturally powerful. This imaginative book
deeply enriches our understanding of how African American entrepreneurs were critical agents
in the fight for racial equality."—Suzanne E. Smith, author of To Serve the Living: Funeral
Directors and the African American Way of Death
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 Line chronicles 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.
Quincy T. Mills teaches history at Vassar College.
Page 2 of 3
WAMC Northeast Public Radio
Today, black-owned barbershops 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.
In his book, Cutting Along the Color Line, Vassar History Professor Quincy Mills chronicles the
cultural history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions.
Page 3 of 3