Houston White's Dream for Camdentown

The Camdentown barber has a hand steady enough to reshape an entire neighborhood.

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It’s 9:30 a.m. on a Friday, and Houston White still isn’t used to the quiet. By this time on a Friday morning, the old-school barber chairs at Houston White Men’s Room—the coffee shop–meets–men’s boutique wrapped in a barbershop located on the corner of North Humboldt and 44th in the north Minneapolis neighborhood White has dubbed Camdentown—would be buzzing. Those chairs would be warmed by men discussing ideas big and small and everything in between—politics, fashion, business, sports, you name it—all while getting a cut or a shave. After being shuttered for months due to COVID-19, Houston White Men’s Room (HWMR) is open again, but it’s running at less than a third of capacity.

“The barbershop is our country club,” White says. He’s sipping on his own custom roast of Dogwood coffee (branded King Kunta, like the Kendrick Lamar song, an exclusive pour at HWMR). He gestures to the room, to the three carved-leather barber chairs, to pioneering graffiti artist Peyton Russell’s first gold leaf painting, to the Curtis custom batch coffee brewer, to his line of golf wear hanging on the opposite wall. It’s an invitation to imagine a fully operational HWMR: like the time White hosted a party for newly elected city council member Phillipe Cunningham, or when White threw his own Fashion Week runway show, or even White holding court with clippers on a normal Saturday afternoon. “Black men wield all the power in this space,” he says.

White is wearing a black polo of his own design, buttoned all the way up. His goatee is razor sharp. One of his trademark B.E. (stands for Black Excellence) dad hats sits atop his head. This plague has been a setback, but White has proven he can deal with adversity: He lost the love of his life, his wife, Donise, to stomach cancer two years ago. COVID has brought more loss to his community, but he’s been building himself back up since he was a little kid. White, 41, started cutting hair when he was 11 years old, back when he first experimented with his uncle’s manual trimming shears on his friends. “There were some kids coming home from church,” he says. “I told ’em, ‘Man, let me give you a trim—your hair is [messed] up anyway, so I couldn’t do much worse.’” He laughs at the memory, but the chuckle belies the modesty—he’s trusted in his own hands from the start. He says he went electric soon after that, in his aunt’s North Side house, demonstrating such an assured line and a mastery of fresh cuts that he was pulling in $950 a week by the time he was 16. Then he started trading his haircuts for access to Russell’s screenprinting machine.

“I was the very first student at Juxtaposition Arts,” he says as he recounts days spent at Russell’s original home studio in north Minneapolis. Russell turned him on to the Harlem Renaissance’s Ernest Crichlow, a huge influence on his style. Soon, he started selling his screenprinted shirts at North High School. “I’m a hustler, essentially,” he says, “with artistic gifts.”

White’s first love was the barber’s blades—he points out that barbering was one of the first pathways to entrepreneurship for Black people in America, and he’s proud to be a part of that legacy—but after a stint renting his own chair after high school, he started using his hands to sculpt larger, more lucrative masterpieces, building and remodeling residential real estate. White was born in Mississippi, and after his mother moved up to Minneapolis with him when he was a kid, he would return to Jackson in the summers to work with his dad and uncles, who were drywall contractors and mechanics. He had the skills to flip houses with his wife, Donise, who knew the finance world well as a banker, and together their contracting company began to fill a void in the Twin Cities housing market for affluent Black couples looking to make their dream home a reality. The two of them built and remodeled 30 houses together, growing their business to $14 million in sales by 2006. Two years later, the bottom of the housing market fell out.

“I was about to turn 30,” he says, “trying to figure out, ‘What now?’” He was used to winning—there was no precedent for his success, he says. But he found himself saddled with a 10,000-square-foot rebuild under water, with no prospects for new business, and he needed to reinvent himself on the fly. He says that experience gives him empathy for people caught in the same dynamic in the COVID era—doing everything right, crushing it, and then suddenly losing it all.

“A barbershop was always something I wanted to do again,” he says. “But if I couldn’t own the land, I wasn’t going to do it.” White and his wife were living in Golden Valley when he would drive by this coffee shop on 44th and Humboldt every day. He fell in love with the building, and he fell in love with the location, a green, park-centered neighborhood with one of the few full-service grocery stores on the North Side. White felt estranged from the north Minneapolis community he grew up in, and he wanted to buy back in. “I believe in the culture,” he says. “Who we were, who we are. And this place is special.” But people were struggling, and he knew he would have to build it back up—literally. “I mean, in 2008, when we bought this place—it was the Wild, Wild West.” There were drug houses on the block, shootings, and break-ins, and a lot of folks had moved to the suburbs. And the property itself, a down-on-its-luck coffee shop, needed a good paint job, air conditioning, and a whole lot more. But he knew how to restore the building. What he needed to learn was how to build a sustainable business, how to build a brand that he could grow.

“I learned a good deal about business development,” he says. “I learned about the personality of an enterprise—it’s the only way to build a system that isn’t dependent on people’s opinions.” And he resisted the gentrification model, “this notion of Black neighborhoods having to either suffer through blight or allow people to come in and tell them what should happen there.”

By 2012, the barbershop was thriving, his suits and accessories business was growing, and White had recaptured his place in the community, living with Donise in the apartment upstairs. But he kept thinking bigger. “Watch the Throne was kind of like the soundtrack of that year for me.” He fell in love with a song called “Murder to Excellence,” where Jay-Z raps, “Black excellence, opulence, decadence / tuxes next to the president, I’m present.” Around that time, a young MCAD student started working with him on branding, and White remembers hearing that track and saying, “Black excellence: We classy around here, we do it big.” This inspired his Black Excellence clothing brand, which he plans on eventually spinning off into three separate lines of clothing, all evocative of the Black experience: the New Classic, filled with dapper, prep school pieces; Victory, a line of regal sportswear inspired by the movie Coming to America; and Fresh, a celebration of streetwear.

He believes people are looking for something more than just another luxury brand. “Fashion and style is a totally irrational expenditure,” he says. “So if it’s not rooted in something that has meaning?” He scoffs. “I mean, I got a shirt already.” This summer, he released his first golf collection with an African designer from the Ivory Coast, Manou Effi. It sold out on his website within weeks. “This whole brand is about this authentic celebration of Black culture,” he says, “but it’s welcoming to everybody.”

In the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, White was forced to organize a crew to protect the shop he built, to protect his neighborhood from marauding outsiders. He said it was traumatizing, but it clarified his dream, which he believes is the only way to bring Minneapolis into the future: to make Camdentown a hub for fashion and culture. “I want it to reflect this moment in history where there is this awakening, but with social mobility for Black folks.” In order to get there, he says Black people need to acquire the capital that will allow them to manufacture in their own neighborhoods, like his. He has plans to build a Dogwood coffee roastery within a couple of years, and further down the line, he would love to build a shoe factory that could produce a Doc Martens–style boot. In his opinion, this is the only viable path to liberation. “Until you show up and you’ve got political clout, capital, and a vision, you can forget about it in this country.”

His guiding light is his wife, who never quite felt at home in their neighborhood. “Everything that I do is in honor of that woman,” he says. He’s driven to transform Camdentown into a place she would have loved, where young Black professionals with families don’t have to fight so hard for their own culture, don’t have to fight so hard to be themselves.

“Minneapolis can’t be a world-class city without a thriving Black middle-class neighborhood,” he says. After all, “The future of the world is Black and Brown.”

This article originally appeared in the October 2020 issue.