Barbers, hairdressers, and Black liberation in 19th-century Minnesota
By Alanna Elder, Minnesota GreenCorps Member, Mississippi Park Connection
Roughly 500 feet from the Mississippi River in Saint Paul, near the intersection of Third and Minnesota Street, a man named William Taylor opened a barbershop in 1850. In a newspaper ad, he invited "citizens and strangers" to his business next to the new post office. Today, a small office of the National Park Service is just around the corner.
Long before the 72-mile strip of river and land that includes the Twin Cities became a national park site, the Mississippi propelled job-seekers and tourists to the growing communities of St. Anthony and Saint Paul. Some tourists brought with them people they enslaved, even though slavery was illegal in the territory and, later, the state of Minnesota. National laws and local acceptance reassured enslavers that they would be able to travel freely while holding human beings in forced servitude. Not everyone in Saint Paul accepted this arrangement.
Taylor, a free Black man, used his business and the social standing it afforded to advance the liberty of other Black people. In 1850, he was 29 and lived with his wife, 27-year-old Adeline Taylor, across the street from the barbershop. Their thoughts on the Mississippi, which had been part of their lives since they lived downstream in Galena, Illinois, are not publicly available. What is clear is that the Taylors used the river, too, to defend human rights.
As his nephew, Joseph Farr, later explained to the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Taylor and another barber named James Heighwarden coordinated with a man in Galena to help enslaved people flee north. When a steamboat called Dr. Franklin pulled into Saint Paul from Illinois, the barbers took in freedom seekers and helped with the next phase of their escape. The group also offered a safe place for people who were trying to lose their vacationing enslavers in Saint Paul.
In Farr’s account, which was republished by the Minnesota Historical Society Press and edited by Deborah Swanson, he estimated about 50 or 60 Black people lived in Saint Paul in 1850. Racism did not allow Taylor to serve them and their white neighbors in the same establishment. So, like most other Black barbers at that time, Taylor made a living by tending to white people’s hair.
In the map above you can see the approximate locations for many of the businesses and sites mentioned in this article. Scroll over to Minneapolis to see the Winslow House hotel and the Jarret House.
Barbershops and hair salons are and have been critical social, cultural, and civic spaces for Black communities, but they played a conflicted role in the 19th century. In his book Degrees of Freedom: The Origins of Civil Rights in Minnesota, historian William D. Green describes the “paradox” that ensnared barbers like Taylor. “In order to continue drawing his high-paying customers, the black barber had to accommodate men who benefited from or were complaisant to a society that held African Americans in a perpetual state of inferiority,” he writes.
Some Black leaders criticized barbers for reproducing an image of servitude in their relationships to white clients. Other criticisms reflected ideas about race and gender that charged the space around a barber’s chair. “Through the prism of nineteenth-century republican ideals, especially on the free soil of the North, barbering, despite offering black men the only avenue to personal advancement, was considered an ‘unmanly’ occupation,” Green writes, “one steeped in the application of fine scents and tonics that catered to the vanities of fashion and bourgeois conceits of a privileged few, applied deftly as the barber often indulged, if not in abject racial stereotype, at least with jolly sycophancy.”
Scholars like Douglas Bristol Jr. and Quincy T. Mills have written books about the contradictions and contributions of Black barbers in the 19th century and afterward. While their works focus primarily on men, Black women ran businesses dedicated to hair while investing in their communities during the same period in Saint Paul and elsewhere. Historian Tiffany M. Gill’s book describes how Black beauticians became catalysts for change in the Jim Crow era. A’Lelia Bundles wrote about her great-great-grandmother, Madam C.J. Walker, who became a millionaire by creating a line of hair products and a job training program for other Black women. Walker’s story inspired the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Self Made, starring Octavia Spencer. All this work is still just a snapshot; beyond the frame lies a deep, complex, and continuing story of hair and hair care in Black communities.
Madam C.J. Walker: Madam C.J. Walker channeled her own struggles with hair loss into a beauty empire and training program, becoming a millionaire, philanthropist, and activist. Credit GPA Photo Archive, US Dep. of State.
Here’s another piece of the story, bordered by a section of river corridor. For a few Black community leaders in Saint Paul and St. Anthony, barbershops and hair salons were a unique place of stability from which they could build networks, take on leadership roles in local organizations, and advocate for equality. Many of their businesses were located right next to the Mississippi.
Emily and Ralph Grey
Emily Goodridge Grey does not seem to have been in the business of hair, although she spent her life with people who were. Her father, William Goodridge, spent a childhood in slavery before obtaining his freedom at 16 and eventually becoming a barber. His efforts to help enslaved people travel north through southern Pennsylvania made him a target of Confederates. Goodridge’s home in York, Pennsylvania is now a museum, but, as Patricia Harpole writes in Minnesota History, he and most of his children moved west. His three sons became photographers in Saginaw, Michigan. Emily Grey’s sister, Mary Goodridge Nichols, opened Madame Nichols Wig and Style Shop there and shared her knowledge of the trade with other Black women.
Emily Goodridge married a barber named Ralph Grey and followed him to the St. Anthony riverfront during the rainy spring of 1857. In July of that year, Emily Grey wrote to her father about waiting for flood waters to recede on her journey through Wisconsin, wallpapering her new home in Minnesota, and planting a garden: “the weeds grow faster than the vegetables, but we will soon be enjoying fresh beans and carrots and potatoes.” The letter, as well as a memoir that was republished by the Minnesota Historical Society, offers a first-person glimpse into her life as a settler in Minnesota and a Black woman living here before statehood.
Grey made friends in her new community, began working as a seamstress, and joined social organizations. The Greys became the only Black members of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers, a group of settlers who arrived before statehood. She shopped around for churches and picked one where a pastor named Charles Secombe was willing to condemn slavery. “There were many who, in their enmity, denounced this procedure [as] ‘preaching politics’ in the pulpit,” she wrote, but they only ever made that complaint “when the sinfulness of slavery was exposed, its patrons characterized as moral lepers, or their livelihood in any way placed in jeopardy by awakening the conscience of the nation.”
In 1860, Emily Grey launched a plan to help a woman named Eliza Winston escape her enslavers.
Winston had been waiting a long time for Colonel Richard Christmas and his family to fulfill their promises of freeing her, as she shared in an affidavit published in newspapers. A trip to Minnesota gave her an opportunity to end the wait herself. The Christmases moved into a room in the Winslow House, next door to a Republican party office and the Jarrett House, where the Greys lived and worked. Winston shared her story with Emily Grey, whose network brought it to the courtroom of judge Charles E. Vanderburgh, a white man.
When Vanderburgh ruled that Winston had every right to walk away from Colonel Richard Christmas and his family, the judge disregarded the decision the Supreme Court made three years earlier in Dred Scott v. Sanford. Winston’s case exposed tensions over Minnesota’s laws against slavery and the money that tourists like the Christmases carried into the local economy. The backlash to her freedom was swift and went on for days, as Green explains in his book, Degrees of Freedom.
“Shops and homes of known abolitionists, including the seamstress shop that Emily Grey owned, were destroyed,” he writes. “For weeks, the residents of Minneapolis and St. Anthony walked the streets with weapons cocked, poised for civil war over the issue of slavery.”
As for Ralph Grey’s barbershop, Green writes, “He lost everything.” But in the years after the Civil War, Grey would go on to petition for Black men’s suffrage in Minnesota along with other barbers, and help found influential organizations like the Golden Key Literary Society and Sons of Freedom. In 1869, he read the Emancipation Proclamation at the Convention of Colored Citizens.
Emily Grey, too, remained active in the community. She helped open a job center for women in Minneapolis in 1885. Ahead of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, she chaired a group of Black women who were involved in planning a women’s exhibit. Prominent leaders like Ida B. Wells would end up boycotting the event, which was supposed to celebrate the anniversary of Columbus landing in the Americas, for its dehumanization and erasure of African Americans.
As Green wrote for MNopedia, the names of the Greys’ three younger children leave a message about what made the couple proud. Toussaint L’Overture Grey was named after a Haitian general who led a revolution of enslaved people against France, becoming an international symbol of liberation; Ralph Banneker Grey, after a Black astronomer who helped design Washington, D.C.; and Harriet Martineu Grey, after an English intellectual and abolitionist. Harriet Grey became a hairdresser and an active part of a literature group in the community, according to Patricia Harpole. The Greys’ oldest son’s name was William, probably after Emily Grey’s father who moved to St. Anthony in 1865 and was buried in Minneapolis.
Maurice Jernigan
Maurice Jernigan was a man the Greys and William Taylor likely knew well. He and Ralph Grey worked together in advocating for the rights of Black men and equal education of Black children after the Civil War. Green speculates that years earlier, Jernigan may have escaped slavery with Taylor’s help.
By 1863, Jernigan had a barbershop in the Merchant’s Hotel, which stood at the corner of Third (Kellogg) and Jackson streets, near the river. Green describes him as the top barber in town. That same year, he signed up for the draft despite the fact that it, like other aspects of citizenship, was closed to Black men. They could enlist but not be drafted.
Over the following decades, Jernigan would foster relationships with other Black barbers and their white clients, many of whom were decision makers of some kind who would soon face questions about which civil rights to extend. Yet, tangled in the barber paradox, he did not make his shop an example of equality.
“While he encouraged white employers to hire black laborers, he deferred to attitudes of his customers and the hotel owner and did not serve black men in his barber shops,” Green writes in Degrees of Freedom.
Perhaps the most well-known result of that long game was a petition Jernigan, Ralph Grey, a barber named Thomas Jackson, and others sent the legislature in support of Black men’s suffrage. It was 1865, the last winter of the Civil War, and Charles Griswold, a white Republican state representative, was proposing an amendment to Minnesota’s constitution. His bill would ask the white men of the state whether to remove the word “white” from the section about voting rights. The bill passed, but a majority of voters (55%) answered no.
Green writes that even after his public stand for suffrage, Jernigan’s barbershop continued to thrive, making him “the senior leader” of Minnesota’s Black business community. Meanwhile, he quietly advocated for voting rights. In 1868, the state held a third referendum, which passed.
The months after the vote were hectic for Jernigan. He and a few colleagues wrote the state House in support of ending segregation in schools. The International Hotel where Jernigan worked burned to the ground just before an anti-segregation bill became law. About a month later he was in court taking part in another citizenship exercise: jury duty. Jernigan, along with fellow barber Jackson, Reverend Robert Hickman, and Henry Moffitt, became Minnesota’s first African American jurors in a criminal trial. They received summons after 35 out of 36 white potential jurors showed racial bias during jury selection, according to Green, amid an effort by politicians to court newly enfranchised Black voters.
Jernigan began working out of the Metropolitan Hotel on Washington and Third, again, just off the river. In 1873 he quit, according to Green, perhaps out of exhaustion with the contradictions of his trade. It was around the same time that Frederick Douglass came to speak at the Saint Paul Opera House and the owner of the Metropolitan, a white man, offered him a room. But white front desk attendants at both that hotel and the Merchant (home of Jernigan’s first barbershop) turned Douglass away.
Amanda & Thomas Lyles
Not long after two of Saint Paul’s popular hotels refused to accommodate one of the most famous authors and orators in the country, a Black man named Thomas Lyles opened a new barbershop, which Green locates at Fourth and Wabasha Street. He began trading in real estate and became quite wealthy, using his money and social standing to create better opportunities, resources, and access to information in the Black community. He convinced the city to allow African American men to work as police and firefighters. He also persuaded a Black doctor and a Black lawyer to move to Saint Paul, where they made an impact greater than their claim to being “firsts” – for instance, both were influential in the beginning of the NAACP.
Lyles also co-founded the city’s first Black newspaper, the Western Appeal, which later became the Appeal. Unlike much of the press at the time, the paper published articles in which African Americans were central subjects and their humanity was not in question. That left more room to debate potential routes to building a more just society. It also offered visibility that businesses, churches, and organizations in the community had not had prior.
Thomas Lyles used space in the paper to advertise his “shaving parlors and bath rooms”; Amanda Lyles, his wife, used it to invite clients to her business, the Hair Bazaar, on Third street. (She later renamed the business Mrs. T.H. Lyles Hair Emporium and moved to Fifth.) The ads suggest circumstances around barbering and hairdressing were changing, or that the Lyles were attempting to change them by offering services in Black- and white-run newspapers. Maybe attitudes had shifted, or the local African American population had grown enough that the businesses could survive without catering to racism. The couple had other income sources, too, such as the aforementioned real estate and a funeral parlor she would take over after his death.
Amanda and Thomas Lyles make frequent appearances in other local papers, the Minneapolis Tribune and the Saint Paul Daily Globe, through real-estate transactions, visits from esteemed guests, musical performances (she played piano and both sang), fundraisers, and other initiatives. She seems to surface more frequently than he does, nearly always as “Mrs. T.H. Lyles”. Were she speaking at an event today, her program bio would be long.
Amanda Lyles helped found James AME Church, according to the Minnesota Historical Society, and in her organizing “exemplified the bond between Black churches and Black activism.” She also held active roles in a long list of civic groups, including the NAACP and the National Women’s Party. In the 1890s, while leading a campaign to create a memorial for abolitionist John Brown, Lyles spoke at a convention for the National Association of Colored Women and a gathering in Harper’s Ferry. The statue went up two years before her death in 1937.
Each person described above lived and worked within or just outside what is now labeled the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. Long before that designation, the river was an important character in the lives of William Taylor, Emily and Ralph Grey, Maurice Jernigan, Amanda and Thomas Lyles, as well as many people that they knew. It created the scenery and atmosphere that drew visitors, enslavers among them, to the Twin Cities; then it physically carried them here. It shuttled enslaved people all along its banks from one horror to the next and sometimes, to a new start. The river powered the industry that fed the incomes of people with money to spend on a shave, haircut, or even a bid for state office. It was part of daily life, in ways obvious and unseen.
When Emily Grey and her son William took care of their vegetable garden in the morning, they must have used water from the river, however indirectly. As the water made its regular leap over its banks and a razor flashed in the sun, maybe Maurice Jernigan and his clients made amateur flood predictions. Or maybe they just cursed the flooding, avoiding or warming up for what really needed to be discussed. Perhaps the songs William Taylor and Amanda and Thomas Lyles liked to perform mentioned this river or another. The Mississippi was a part of all their stories, just as they are part of its history.