Parrish Street, and the Man Who Cut Washington Duke's Hair

John Merrick was born enslaved in Clinton, North Carolina, in eighteen fifty-nine. By the time he was twelve, he was working in a brickyard in Chapel Hill. By his early twenties, he was in Durham, running a barbershop. By eighteen ninety-two, he owned five of them.

Three of those shops served white customers. Among his regulars was Washington Duke, the patriarch of the tobacco dynasty that would put Durham on the map. Merrick cut the man's hair, listened, and watched how capital moved.

In eighteen ninety-eight, Merrick co-founded the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association with Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore, the first Black physician in Durham, and several other local businessmen. Charles Clinton Spaulding joined soon after as general manager and became a principal when the company reorganized in nineteen hundred. The company began writing life insurance policies on April first, eighteen ninety-nine, because white-owned insurance companies either refused Black policyholders outright or charged them discriminatory rates. Merrick had watched the white economy closely enough to know exactly what he was building and exactly why.

The company relocated to Parrish Street and became the anchor of what Booker T. Washington, visiting in nineteen ten, called a model for Black enterprise in America. W.E.B. Du Bois came the following year and said the same thing. The block around Parrish Street and the Hayti neighborhood to the south held more than two hundred Black-owned businesses at its peak. A Black bank. A Black hospital. A Black newspaper. A Black law firm. A Black drug company. They called it the Wall Street of Black America.

John Merrick died on August sixth, nineteen nineteen, the wealthiest Black man in the South. Charles Clinton Spaulding ran NC Mutual until his death in nineteen fifty-two. The building still stands on Parrish Street. The company, now the oldest Black-owned life insurance company in the United States, still operates.