By The Art of Manliness
Published December 13, 2016 9:48am
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.
Today on the show, I talk to historian Douglas Bristol about his book recounting this lost part of American male history. It’s called "Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slav...