As Benjy Rosenbaum told me, he looked up from his Batman comic book for a second when a tall muscular teenage boy opened the door of the barber shop. The boy was a Negro. (This was the autumn of 1956, and we would never have used the words “Black” or “African-American” back then.) With a swagger in his step, the boy walked in front of one of the chairs and addressed Leo, one of the barbers: “I need a haircut; can you give me one?”
Leo paused a moment from cutting Benjy’s hair. In his slightly Yiddish-accented English he answered, “No, Quenton, I cannot cut your hair.”
Quenton made a sound that was like a soft grunt, then turned and walked out. Later, Benjy told me that nothing else happened, and he went back to reading his comic book. He did remember Leo turning to his partner, Tony, and asking, “What do you think that was about?”
“I dunno,” Tony answered.
They both went back to cutting hair, but Frank, the shoeshine and clean-up man, looked worried. He muttered to himself loud enough for Benjy to hear. Benjy thinks he said something like, “Quenton, my boy, just can’t figure him, just can’t.”
Leo’s Barber Shop was the place to go in the 1950s for all of us Jewish teenage boys. We had been getting our hair cut there for years. The shop was in the South Avondale neighborhood of Cincinnati, and the neighborhood was largely a Negro one. The Jews had moved from there to...
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