Home of William Johnson - Free Black Barber of Antebellum Natchez, Mississippi

There are more than 50 antebellum homes which can be toured in Natchez. The first one of the seven that we personally visited on our trip to Natchez was the William Johnson House. William Johnson was a prosperous businessman and the owner of 16 slaves.

He was also a free black man. Those with only a superficial knowledge of the American South often think that all blacks were slaves and all (or at least most) whites were slave owners. In fact, only 4.08 percent of free southern whites owned slaves, while there were literally thousands of free blacks, and among them 28 percent were slave owners.

Far more free blacks lived in the south than in the north, and they owned slaves in disproportionate numbers to the white population.A National Park Service employee in Natchez told us that when the William Johnson house was being restored, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was very actively and enthusiastically involved in the process. Then, when the NAACP discovered that Johnson had been a slave owner, they immediately withdrew from the project. It seems that the NAACP is only interested in perpetuating their own "politically correct", albeit incomplete, story of the black man in the antebellum South.

William Johnson was born a slave but freed by his master as a young man. He became a barber, and eventually owned four barber shops in Natchez. He hired others to work for him, and he also bought slaves who worked in his home and businesses. The slave quarters are in a separate building behind his home, which is now owned by the National Park Service. Inside the house are exhibits which tell Johnson's story. William Johnson kept a detailed diary for many years and quotes from those journals provide an amazing source of information about the often misunderstood realities of what it was like to be black and free in antebellum America.