#260： Knights of the Razor
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Summary
The barbershop has been an important institution in the African-American community for generations, but what many don t know is that up until about the reconstruction era, pretty much all barbers in the United States, whether they cut the hair of white men or black men, were african-american. And that barbering provided many black men a good enough living to enter the upper middle class even back in the 19th century.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast the barbershop
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has been an important institution the african-american community for generations but
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what many don't know is that up until about the reconstruction era pretty much all barbers the
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united states whether they cut the hair of white men or black men they were african-american and
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that barbering provided many black men a good enough living to enter the upper middle class
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even back in the 19th century well today on the show i talked to historian douglas bristol about
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his book recounting this lost part of american male history it's called knights of the razor black
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barbers and slavery and freedom and today on the show doug and i discussed the rise of the black
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barber in slaveholding states in the south the influence black barbers had in the white community
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and how black barbers paved the way for the modern barbershop we also discussed the factors that
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led to the segregation of the barbershop and why the barbershop maintained a stronger allegiance
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among black men compared to their white counterparts really fascinating show after the show's over
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check out the show notes at aom.is black barber douglas bristol welcome to the show well hi brett i'm glad
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to be here uh so you're a professor of history you got a great book out that i read because barbershops
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are something we're interested here at the art of manliness um but you explore the history of
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barbershops particularly black barbers in american history books called book is called knights of the
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razor um now barbershops have sort of become this idealized american institution um and for the
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african-american community the black barbershop is an important has been like a foundational uh
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community touchstone for men but i thought it was interesting your book you talk about in your book
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is that before the 20th century um black barbers primarily serviced a white clientele and in fact as
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you highlight in your book most barbers in america before the civil war were black so what was the status
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of the barber profession in the late 18th and early 19th century in america that
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caused more black men to go into the profession as opposed to white men wow we've touched on a lot
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of issues that are involved in this book um as you said i want to follow up and just talk about how
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central a place black barbershops are to today's african-american community um you know i'm thinking
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about the movie barbershop and the character everybody loves eddie you know talks about it's the black man's
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country club i mean it's the one place where black men can speak uh freely without being under
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surveillance from whites and think about what they want that's why civil rights protests were planned
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there uh in fact you know i'm in mississippi and there's a there was a barber shop in hattiesburg
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mississippi so many of the men migrated to chicago that the barber moved to chicago and called it the
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hattiesburg barber shop but you know as you pointed out my book is about this forgotten chapter
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in the history of black barbers in the 18th and 19th century uh when they served white men
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rather than black men and what makes it even more curious when you think about it is if you look at
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19th century portraits or whatnot the guys were pretty shaggy they weren't that worried about their
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haircut you went to a barber shop because you wanted to shave and the only way to get that with was with
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a straight edge razor so this is a story of the black man's razor at the white man's throat and of
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course you're asking a great question why why did that become the common thing in the country and
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the answer has a lot to do with understanding uh race relations if you think about it this is still
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true in many ways uh most white men don't really go to barber shops anymore and when we go to a shop
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we tend to have someone with a different status than us cut our hair it's a woman it's an immigrant
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uh and there's a phenomenon that goes on in barbering that traces its roots back to you know 16th century
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europe when one of the ways that people asserted that they were gentlemen is that they had they took
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care of their hair and shaved the whiskers from their face and so uh to groom yourself was originally
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thought of as a way of distinguishing distinguishing yourself in society and you relied on servants to do
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that and it's the association of personal service you know tending to your body by cutting your hair
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and shaving your whiskers uh that makes barbering associated outside the black community uh with low
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status and so in the 18th and 19th century we saw uh the first slave barbers are actually owned by
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planters of large plantations this is a handful maybe 50 planters had enough slaves 100 or more
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where they could actually have house servants who would include what they called a slave waiting
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man who would often not only um cut his master's hair and take care of his clothes and shave him but
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also would serve as kind of his major domo helping keep books supervising other slaves on the plantation
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um what really is key is is and this gets to uh the strange duality of barbers that you really see
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in 19th century black barbers on the one hand because of the racial difference and early on because the
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black men were the property of the people they serve the status is very unequal however uh going back to
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eddie from barbershop you know he points out one of the functions of a barber is to be someone's fashion
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coach and so that really gives that person authority because you go to a barber hoping they're going to make
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you look good look hip and so that gives them power so there's always a tension in relationship
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between uh the white customer and the black barber i thought it was interesting too it's going back to
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this idea of the the slave barbers for these um southern planters um you know they they would often
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pick um one of their slaves to be what you call a waiting what they called a waiting man and they would
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the waiting men would actually become very genteel like they would wear powdered wigs and like have
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like the nice clothes and they would they got to listen in on conversations um with of their masters
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with other white men in the elite circles and so they they did sort of become elite themselves in a way
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um and as you said that their masters relied on their their waiting man to make them look awesome
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so i mean how did that dynamic there play out between master and slave that where you had a slave who was
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in some cases just as genteel as you were um cutting your hair and actually giving you
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information on how to present yourself better well maybe the best way to answer that question is to
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give an example of a very wealthy planner named landon carter who is a third generation planner who
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owned several thousand acres over 100 slaves and his really um up and down relationship with his
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waiting man who was a named nassau uh there's a couple things in this story that really get at
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important issues the key thing with talking about the slave barber has power because he understands how
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to make his master look the right way to acquire status is acculturation one of the main findings in
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the last 20 years in the history of slavery especially in the period before the american revolution
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slaves who had learned uh anglo-american culture were more useful to their masters but at the same
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time they were more troublesome because they understood the master's world and to go back to that
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example of landing carter at nassau uh carter actually allowed nassau to treat he was a basically a folk
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doctor so he treated uh even members of carter's own family uh he collected debts uh he took care of his
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horses but he also had a really bad drinking habit uh that would often let him nassau it seemed to be just
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delighted in thumbing his nose as master's uh face and one of the uh this is all from landing carter's
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diary and one of the stories that i put in the book uh talks about how landon carter goes to a party
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at another plantation house and when he leaves he can't find nassau to drive him home because nassau's
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off drinking somewhere and landon carter ends up getting his carriage stuck in the mud and there
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he's pulling this thing out and then along comes riding by comes nassau and his son you know drunk
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as skunks riding laughing and just leaving him in the mud so there's this sense of the tension
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because of that uh power on both sides of the relationship that had to do with the familiarity
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of culture what did the the slave barbers were they able to gain some respect within elite white
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circles because of their gentility like i think you gave an example of one guy who uh did the hair
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for a lady which i thought i didn't know this like back in the 18th century when everyone wore
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powdered wigs the ladies had to shave their heads i didn't know that right that's how the wigs were
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possible and this of course is really surprising because later in the 19th century uh racial stereotypes
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change and we get the notion that all black men secretly wish to rape white women so you
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do everything possible it's the whole foundation for segregation to keep them separate and yet
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in the years just after uh the haitian slave revolt uh pierre truissant who was a slave who left with
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his master's family after the haitian slave revolt he was part of this middling class of people of
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color who were mixed race who were essentially the the middlemen the supervisors the managers on
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plantations in haiti so they had to flee uh the island when they're when they have this successful
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slave revolt and he ends up supporting his master's family living in new york city and his real appeal
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is that people thought he was the perfect gentleman so much so that one of his customers actually wrote
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an admiring biography of tucson yeah it's nuts and i thought it was crazy too where the the slave
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or the former slave or the slave was supporting the the master's family from his own pocket well and as i
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discuss in the book it really makes sense for him because um great black skin was associated with
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being degraded and he actually there are some letters uh that he corresponds with friends where he talks
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about his frustration that whites just are incapable of really understanding that he's a thinking person
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just like themselves um so with tucson he needed to support his um master because he needs to have
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some claim to polite society and so uh by living with his master he was respectable which made it
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acceptable for him to take care of these first class women uh who he was serving later on uh when he
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his masters passed away he actually continues to hold dinner parties for his customers but he will not
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sit and eat with the white people so he's maintaining that distance but by have by entertaining
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he keeps that connection to elite uh gentile society right and i think you you talk about this too it's
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sort of related that after the revolution there began to be this emancipation of slaves in the north
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and in the upper south um you talk about how the former barber slaves would maintain connections with
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their former masters even if they were freed in order to i don't know transition more smoothly to being a
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freedman right and that that relationship is important to think if we think of emancipation
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means freedom the uh slaves you can free and go off and have a completely independent life
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that was not possible because free blacks in the south had very limited legal rights for example if
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you own a business you need to be able to collect debts but since black people couldn't testify against
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whites in courts it was a very practical matter that you had to have some kind of a white patron
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who would act on your behalf and circumstances such as that and so yeah so many of them maintained uh
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connections with them um now before the civil war we mentioned this earlier most barbers were black and
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served primarily a white clientele and because barber was considered a low status position white people
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thought it was beneath them to do that so black people stepped in to fill that position but as you said
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earlier at the very beginning there's this weird uh power social dynamic going on you had a black man
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who was seen as subservient degraded um with a razor blade to the throat of a white man who thought who
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was in power i mean so what what was the social dynamic like in the barber shops between a black business
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owner and a white patron during the you know before the civil war uh i mean that's a an excellent
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question because it's a real ritual power uh when the white customer would come in no matter if he
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was speaking to the shop's owner no matter if he had known the the barber for years he would feel free
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to command to know whether he had washed his hands recently or if the towel was clean and so clearly
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asserting his authority over a black man but then he gets in the chair and of course leans back and
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exposes his throat um once he's lathered up he can't even speak because he opens his mouth would
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be full of shaving cream and my understanding of that is that it reaffirmed their greater power by being
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white because they had no question that black men were inferior to them so that demonstrates their
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mastery to put the their lives at risk by exposing the throat to a black man and knowing nothing
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would ever happen and did the social dynamics differ depending on what part of the country
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where you were in if you were in say the northern states or the mid-atlantic states or the deep south
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uh well there's two things to talk about that first is people often assume this is a southern story
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uh because most african americans live in the south and it's not black barbers were the most
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consistently successful black businessmen throughout the entire country and in fact uh there's good
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evidence that suggests the first black men to live in chicago los angeles and seattle were black barbers
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because this niche was so well established that they could go anywhere and open up a shop but did that
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uh did the dynamic change between black uh business owners and their white clients depending on what if
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they were in chicago or new york or uh charleston um before the civil war you really don't see any
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difference and in fact some british visitors who are really they're very curious about this phenomenon
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because you know as one uh english traveler wrote um you know under most circumstances you know white
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men avoid being around black men and then in this circumstance they seem to love going to the
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barbershop and they've noticed that was even true in new york city and one traveler gave the
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explanation that it allows them to be you know play the master in a society where there really aren't
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slaves anymore because you white simply could get away with a certain demeanor with with black servants
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that white servants would not tolerate now after the war civil war everything changes because of course
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the republican party is dominant in the north and it was the party of emancipation and uh especially
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the best example is uh george myers uh the famous barber of cleveland ohio who was uh a close friend of
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mark hannah he got enough black votes at the convention to get william mckinley nominated uh for the
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republican party's uh nomination for president and so he there were barbers like myers
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that played an active role in patronage politics because of course what would be the main thing the
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white men would talk about in the shop was politics politics and business and so they were in in a
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context where republican party politics in the north made it acceptable for black men to participate
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um the relationship was completely different because they were partners unequal partners um in making
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sure that the republican party rode to victory at every election and in the south it was probably
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not like that no not at all although interestingly enough um john rapier senior who lived in
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florence alabama had several of his sons became barbers uh and one of his sons actually became a
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reconstruction congressman but john senior was the first african-american official in the state of
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alabama and there's a petition so we know why they decided to pick him he was a voting registrar of
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all things in alabama and people in the whites supporting this appointment wrote that you know
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we can trust our barber john to be conservative so a southern barber could be trusted to be discreet
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and to never challenge the social order in front of whites i thought was interesting too i had no idea
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about this but you know before the civil war um despite being seen as a subservient occupation black
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barbers became some of the wealthiest men uh in antebellum america i mean some of them were leaving
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estates of a hundred thousand dollars behind i mean any notable examples of financially successful
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black barbers that you came across um well you know the interesting thing i can tell you the names
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of people who had a lot of money but they tended not to be people who were famous in other regards
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um so i didn't focus on them as much i think the the larger issue is that um collectively what the
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knights of the razor as i like to call themselves did is they were able to invent something new they
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were you know a real entrepreneur where they're uh not only risking their money but they're coming
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up with a new innovative idea and that idea was the first class barbershop and what they were doing
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with this uh in the 1820s this fad hit american cities of having hotels that had what were referred
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to as saloons which was a corruption of of salon which is a public room that you would find in an
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aristocratic house and these were going to be palaces of the people and the idea was that americans
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can celebrate their equality and their prosperity by mingling together in these public settings where they
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were clearly very genteel um so barbers by adopting some of the trappings of a victorian parlor the
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drapes the so the the very first barber's chairs that we would recognize were adopted by black men
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they'd have upholstered chairs that would recline which was a considerable advance over what came before
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it and of course these are large establishments centrally located often in the town's leading hotel
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and it's their development of of service and that included the experience of luxury
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that made them able to fend off white competitors for the rest of the 19th century and of course that's
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what led to the profit but i thought was interesting too so you know they were able to fend off white
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competitors we'll get into more about how um white barbers kind of broke monopoly on the barber trade
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later on but you talk about some of these individuals who made lots of money um but they
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seem sort of ambivalent about their occupation they're like yeah i made a lot of money
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but they still felt the sting of you know low status because they were a barber i think uh you might be
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uh referring to some of the comments made by black leaders such as frederick douglas or martin
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delaney or or david walker who all at different points criticized barbers for pulling down the race
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uh by reinforcing the stereotypes that black people are are servile uh this is something i'm actually
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having students write a paper about this where they're looking at these editorials and debating
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you know writing a paper talking about you know was that a fair criticism or not and you know one of the
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things that came up in discussion with the students is there are some similar comments about rap stars
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today like flavor flame many black people thinks make blacks look ridiculous he's mainly selling
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albums to teenage white men um so it's a similar phenomenon we can we can understand it by comparison
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right that is an interesting uh comparison yeah i thought that was interesting that black barbers had
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um this very i mean sort of in the african-american community they had they were sort of ambivalent
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about barbers on the one hand they were proud of the the knights of the razor because they were
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entrepreneurial they were business owners they were it was a path to middle class living but yeah at the
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same time as you said frederick douglas criticized them because they were doing this um through the
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the role of a barber which was a subservient position well and you have to well like i do in the book you
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have to look at what douglas was asking to see if it's reasonable because you can get the idea that
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um you're not as people would say representing well to to play the fool and um shuck and grin for white
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customers but what douglas in a series of editorials that he published in his newspaper
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called for parents to make their children mechanics and not waiters and barbers and other forms of
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servants the problem with that is that you know it was not possible for the overwhelming majority
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of free black people to learn a trade because they the white skilled craftsmen refused to train them
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as apprentices um frederick douglas himself was a skilled ship's caulker uh when he ran away from
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maryland and gained his freedom and he was unable to gain employment in that trade in the north i mean
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part of what's going on is just it's an aspiration for the african-american community again to kind of
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draw a parallel to the present uh that would be like a black leader today saying people in south
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central la need to become computer programmers because that's you know the cutting edge technology
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it's the kind of expertise that's going to gain lots of money that that makes sense on the face of
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it but it's unlikely that people have the skills or the access that they could actually do that so that's
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why in the book i agree with barbers who defended themselves and said that look you have to realize
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we are the majority of business owners and business ownership allows us to build churches and keep our
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wives at home and send our kids to school and promote a more respectable black elite and you know going
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back to this idea of uh job training right i mean to telling uh to become a mechanic that was probably
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impossible because white people wouldn't train them but within the knights of the razor as they
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called themselves they had they created a a journeyman's process right an apprenticeship process
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to train other black men on how to become a barber yeah and that's uh really something i think is really
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key to understanding not only why they were successful because this is a book about business success by small
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entrepreneurs but it's also about uh why they've established a a tradition of men supporting other
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men of mutual aid that continues to exist in today's barbershop um one of the best sources for
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understanding antebellum traditions of working with apprentices and supporting them comes from an
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extraordinary document which is the diary of william johnson william johnson was a free black man he was
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a leading black barber in natchez mississippi when it was the heart of the cotton kingdom in the 1830s and
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1840s he left behind a 2000 page diary which is the longest single narrative written by any african-american
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before the civil war um because he knew everyone it's the best single source on the history of natchez at
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that time but for our purposes it's really interesting to see what he wrote about he he had over 20 young
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men live in his house as apprentices so this is uh not the community college experience that we might
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picture with an apprentice now um families often single mothers uh would drop their kid off with
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william johnson when they were 10 11 12 years old and the understanding was johnson would not only
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teach them the barber trade or the tonsorial arts as they were called but uh make sure they grew up to
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be respectable men who could read and write who went to church um and and it it's very interesting
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to see johnson is a figure he's he had a white father and a black mother so he's a man who's kind
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of in between he doesn't fit in with the the slave community but the whites won't accept them some of
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these apprentices represent the only people that he could identify because they would come often white
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fathers would place their illegitimate uh mixed-race son with him and so uh he has for example one of
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those apprentices was william winston uh who was named after lieutenant governor winston of mississippi
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who was his father and johnson really takes a shine to winston and and being amused at him fighting back
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against the older boys or that he would not attend darky parties that he he was a more reserved dignified
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person and ultimately ends up uh helping winston uh gain his own shop as so he can be an independent
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black barber and this is of course the real tradition of mutual aid teach people to trade but teach them how
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to be strong black men help them become their own businessmen and then when you know when other barbers
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would grow older provide them with employment now at the end of the 19th century this undergoes a
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dramatic transformation and it has to do with the rise of black owned business for black customers with
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urban migration african americans finally have enough disposable income they can support first off their
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own black barbershops most african americans before then had simply cut each other's hair at home
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but more importantly they can support um insurance companies and i think maybe before you were want me
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to talk about alonzo herndon and john merrick who were two very wealthy barbers herndon in atlanta
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merrick and durham north carolina each man established uh insurance companies to sell insurance to blacks at a
00:26:53.800
time when prudential insurance for example simply refused to write policies to black customers they said
00:27:00.280
they died their have mortality rate was too high the reason i'm i'm talking about these companies
00:27:05.240
though is i've argued that herndon and merrick um made their businesses so successful and by the way
00:27:12.520
merrick's north carolina mutual life insurance company became the largest black owned business in the world
00:27:18.500
uh up through the 1960s and it was successful though because they were able to translate that tradition of
00:27:24.320
mutual aid to selling insurance to how they recruited and groomed and mentored young salesmen
00:27:32.100
made them district managers have gathered social gatherings that reflect what we saw barbers doing
00:27:38.800
50 years earlier and so you know there is a direct connection between black business in the present
00:27:45.800
especially black barbershops where it's about um making sure that members of the community help each
00:27:51.680
other and economic self-help and the traditions of these barbers in the 19th century who had very
00:27:57.640
different lives because they served white customers what i thought it was interesting too so in the
00:28:02.320
sort of the in tail end of the 19th century you started seeing a large increase of immigration from
00:28:08.380
europe from germany from italy and these people a lot of the men they were barbers they came to be
00:28:14.920
barbers and they started competing with black barbers in america but you talk about in the book that
00:28:20.300
even though there are these white men who are barbers offering the services a lot of white men still
00:28:25.700
prefer to be barbered by black barbers um why was that an immigrant was a white man and that was not a
00:28:34.440
clear marker of difference in status white men preferred to be weighted by on by someone who is
00:28:40.720
clearly their inferior um also especially in the north with this competition the farther south he went
00:28:48.900
the stronger was the hold of black barbers over white customers uh but in the north um the other
00:28:55.740
facet is the in first class shops the barbers had much more in common with their customers than
00:29:03.520
an italian immigrant the turns out the skill that italian immigrants in the late 19th century were
00:29:09.320
most likely to bring from italy was barbering uh but so a black barber who's involved in republican
00:29:16.720
party politics uh who has extensive business interest of his own it's going to have more in
00:29:22.220
common with well-to-do white customers than a recent immigrant off the boat um of course this is all
00:29:28.220
going to change one thing i was hoping we'd have a chance to talk about is the impact of licensing
00:29:32.040
and how that was used by uh unions to exclude african americans ultimately from the trade yeah let's
00:29:39.900
talk about that because yeah in every state you have to be licensed to be a barber right and the origins of
00:29:44.980
that um two things really contributed to that and this both happens in the 1880s the first is we
00:29:51.700
start to get a more widespread understanding that germs cause disease and a french scientist publishes
00:29:58.940
an article that scandalizes people because he looks at a stipic pencil which is what you use after you cut
00:30:05.200
your face shaving and found 60 000 different kinds of germs living on on this and there's this sense that
00:30:11.960
barber shops are cesspools of of uh contagious disease um at the same time there's concerns about
00:30:21.160
the sanitation of barber shops we also see the first of the barber schools so for-profit commercial
00:30:29.280
barber schools it was manned by a man named ab moeller set these up all over the country wrote
00:30:35.160
textbooks so he wrote the first text for barber colleges and this created a flood of what were called
00:30:40.460
cheap barbers because they were not very well trained and consequently couldn't charge much and so they
00:30:46.280
ruined the trade in a sense that they drove down prices for shaves and haircuts and so
00:30:52.500
there was a union the journeyman barbers international union of america that was associated
00:30:59.560
with the american federation of labor the leaders mostly second third generation german americans saw their
00:31:08.700
opportunity to seize on the issue of sanitation to limit competition and while they're at it finally
00:31:16.640
exclude the blacks in the first class barber shops and the the pretext for licensing laws
00:31:24.400
was to ensure the sanitation of barber shops and protect public health and the idea was and they
00:31:32.580
really traded on gross stereotypes about italian immigrants or african americans being disease
00:31:39.240
carriers because they were unclean sexually promiscuous and um so starting in the 1880s we see the first
00:31:48.460
laws being passed and for a while i had mentioned george myers the barber the kingmaker uh that helps
00:31:57.160
william mckinley become president who's barber in cleveland men like him are able to fight back by
00:32:03.280
buying you know retrofitting reinventing the barber shop one more time so it's something really closer
00:32:09.320
to today where there's lots of sinks and uh you sterilize combs and barbicide and uh they had
00:32:17.900
elaborate steamers to uh sterilize the razors and whatnot so for a time being black the black barbers that
00:32:26.660
owned the best shops were able to update to this new regime but all in the long run licensing driven by
00:32:34.920
concerns about sanitation will exclude them and then of course one thing i didn't get a chance to talk
00:32:40.620
about in my book is when william gillette invents his razor he claims that this is the most sanitary
00:32:49.360
option is to not have to go to the barber shop at all and there are early ads that say isn't it annoying
00:32:55.300
when you go to the barber shop and your barber's hand smell like garlic and cheap cigars and wouldn't
00:33:01.340
you rather just shave yourself at home so again an appeal greater sanitation and a chance to not
00:33:08.060
associate with people who you consider your social inferiors so besides licensing what other factors
00:33:14.300
eventually led to the segregation of the barber shop in america where you have black barbers servicing
00:33:19.740
primary african-american men and white barbers servicing primarily white men and even now i mean
00:33:25.540
the white barber shops kind of it's kind of making a resurgent but it's kind of defunct yeah it's really
00:33:30.460
the the african-american community that's been loyal to its barber shops uh it really has to do with the
00:33:36.440
rise of segregation at the end of the 19th century um it's ironic you know the barbers were criticized by
00:33:43.860
black leaders because they wouldn't serve other black men they had they ran and affect segregated
00:33:47.880
institutions um but uh as historians have shown you know the real fundamental change in race relations
00:33:55.660
in the 1890s that's when we see the height of lynching for example and increasingly younger
00:34:01.780
generations of white men do not want a black barber um i actually found a gentleman named george hall in
00:34:08.620
mobile back in the 1990s and in the 20s he had served in his uncle's barbershop in mobile where they
00:34:15.200
still served white men but he said at that point it was all very old men and the younger men didn't
00:34:20.300
come in the shop so as race relations grew worse whites became more reluctant younger whites became
00:34:27.440
reluctant to go to black barbershops but at the same time um the opportunity i discussed before the
00:34:32.880
greater earning power of wage earning urban black people meant that many of the barbers i studied
00:34:39.100
simply just switched to serving black men which you know in the long run was a more satisfying
00:34:45.400
situation for them anyways and why do you think that the black barbershop has endured while
00:34:50.620
the barbershop for you know in the white community hasn't fared so well well it's that tradition of
00:34:56.920
mutual aid and i think it's reinforced so there's this sense that a barber is something more than someone
00:35:03.000
who's going to give you a haircut this is a a coach a counselor and financial advisor uh so their idea
00:35:12.680
of taking care of barbers taking care of each other it extends to their customers especially now that
00:35:17.400
they have so much in common they're the same race they live in the same community i think too though
00:35:22.940
another reason why this is so particular to the african-american community is black barbershops
00:35:29.280
reaffirm the masculinity of black men which is questioned in many places that there are real men
00:35:35.920
a lot of stereotypes for example critical of people on public assistance that men don't black men don't
00:35:43.280
make good uh providers and whatnot so in mainstream life where they're worried about police profiling
00:35:49.840
them in a black barbershop they get respected as a man and taken seriously as a man which is you know
00:35:57.580
there are a few other places where they're going to find that well douglas this has been a great
00:36:01.780
conversation is anywhere where people can go to learn more about the book yeah they sure can uh if
00:36:06.340
they look at the johns hopkins university website uh there's a couple links for videos i've made about
00:36:13.300
the book and of course you can get it on amazon.com it came out last year in paperback so i hope people
00:36:18.340
will take the opportunity to look at the book themselves i hope they do it's really it's a really
00:36:22.660
fascinating part of history that gets overlooked well douglas bristol thank you so much for your time it's been
00:36:27.440
a pleasure hey brett it was really nice talking to you thanks for your time my guest today was
00:36:31.260
douglas bristol he's the author of the book knights of the razor black barbers and slavery and freedom
00:36:35.920
it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere check it out also check out our show
00:36:40.100
notes at aom.is slash black barber where you can find the links to resources where you can delve deeper
00:36:45.140
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:37:01.340
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at art of manliness.com if you enjoy the show i'd
00:37:06.000
appreciate you to give this review on itunes or stitcher our show is edited by creative audio lab
00:37:09.820
here in tulsa oklahoma if you have any audio editing needs check them out at creative audio lab.com
00:37:14.440
and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly