Quincy T. Mills, “Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America” (UPenn Press, 2013)

Business. Community. Politics. That’s the making of a barbershop. In Cutting Along the Color Lines: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Dr. Quincy Mills chronicles the history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions, demonstrating their central role in Civil Rights struggle throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dr. Mills says what’s most intriguing to him about barbershops is people forget the barbershop is a business first before community and politics. He states, “Barbershops, beauty salons and churches are the remaining institutions rooted in black culture production.” When Mills is not engaged in teaching, reading, writing or teaching he’s running; a space that provides him solitary time to think and work out his ideas.

Dr. Mills is an associate professor at Vassar College. He teaches courses on African American history, specifically, Dr. Martin Luther King, race and segregation, black power movement, and consumer culture.

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