Public spaces are vital sites for Black public life and community-driven engagement through resistance and removing barriers of “unsafety.” The lessons we learn from the past about public space being the center of social and political identities informs our current public realm policy about the need to reduce barriers and expand our access to public spaces.
In Black American tradition the regular Saturday trip to the hair salon or barbershop is essential for hygiene and it comes in preparation for the religious tradition of attending church on Sunday, the next day. What happens when these spaces are used for more than just their intended purpose?
Public spaces and small businesses for gathering do not always take the same shape or form for everyone, especially for groups that have been historically barred from enjoying them. Beauty salons/barbershops and churches historically and present day serve as non-traditional public spaces to gather safely for many Black Americans. The political, economic and social ideologies of Black people are shaped by these public spaces and the people who use them. These spaces of resistance have shaped the way Black Americans have advocated for civil rights, formed their own cultural aesthetic and further protested harsh treatment through acts of public leisure.
Hair salons and barbershops have long served as spaces of beauty and self care but for Black Americans they are often seen as “sanctuaries.” In hair salons and barbershops you get a range of political jargon, local gossip and an understanding of the major events happening in the community.
Due to existing fears of lynchings, being harassed and killed for simply existing in a public space, many famous Black activists and political leaders would travel to local hair salons and barber shops to present their platform to mass Black audiences. They discussed issues within the community in a space where they knew they were safe from outside influences.
Hair salons also provided women the opportunity to hold space in a political and economic realm in a way that they were unable to before due to sexism. Madam CJ Walker used her own hair salon as a cross between both self care and political activism. Women often were the driving forces of the civil rights movement, but are not credited because they lacked political and social power in spaces such as the church. Beauty salons offered a space free of sexism for women to form their own political ideas and social expressions.
Churches served as spaces of “unfathomable resiliency” for those whose lives were stripped from them by slavery. The church became a public space that forms what the “Black Aesthetic” was/is. The Black Aesthetic is defined as the cultural and physical characteristics that give meaning to the Black community. The Black church afforded for both religious and secular expression to exist in the same space and helped to craft the understanding of Blackness as a culture rather than simply a race defined by discrimination. The idea of Black church women learning to dress in their finest “Sunday's’ Best” and the theatrics that go along with preaching, and singing in the church all point towards signs of placemaking. Along with contributing to the culture the Black church also contributed to the political life of Black Americans. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and social organizing groups such as Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), have all used the Black church as a public space to form and disseminate their ideas.
Both the hair salons/barbershops and the Black church are public spaces which have conventional uses but their secondary uses contribute to the political and social life of Black Americans particularly during the civil rights era. During Black History Month it is important to highlight these spaces to not only further the conservation of public space access but to recognize how in the face of exclusion, people find more than one meaning of place through their safe spaces.
Commercial and religious spaces become essential for small businesses and communities. They give culture and life to the five boroughs as shown by our Neighborhood Commons report. Our 2021 Photo Urbanism Fellow Barnabas Crosby examined the ways Black-owned small businesses serviced their community in creative ways through the 2020 pandemic. Barnabas wrote “The pandemic has made me witness to the fragility and necessity of small businesses. Beyond goods and services, small businesses offer a central meeting place, a rally point, and a hub of connectedness. Without small business; the mortar of community, neighborhoods in which they occupy become only mountains of bricks with strangers living inside.”
Our upcoming publication Untaped: Removing Barriers for Public Space Programming identifies major barriers to public space access and community-led programming, which informs the work we have done in the past and continue to do for the future of the public realm.