B. Boyd’s Beauty Parlor
Known Name(s)
B. Boyd’s Beauty Parlor
Address
43 Camp St. Providence, RI
Establishment Type(s)
Beauty Parlor
Physical Status
Demolished
Detailed History
B. Boyd’s Beauty Parlor reflects the strength and tenacity of African-American women during the pre-Civil Rights era. B. Boyd was Beulah Boyd Jackson, who owned the house at 43 Camp St.—her name appears on the 1937 Hopkins Atlas map, and not that of her husband, Raymond Jackson. The Jacksons were part of the Great Migration; Raymond had been born in Maryland in 1902 and Beulah in Virginia in 1896.
Beulah and Raymond were 44 and 38 respectively when they listed Beulah’s business in The Green Book in 1940. That year, they lived with their six-year-old son, Raymond, Jr., and a one month old daughter, Addie May. They also shared their house with Raymond’s widowed aunt, Jennie Walters, Lewis and Eleanor Jackson, and Josephine Edmonds, a widow, and her twelve-year-old son, Stanley. The entire group was likely an extended family.
Beulah’s beauty parlor business was in operation as early as 1935. Raymond worked alternately as a machinist and a hairdresser, possibly moving back and forth between the two jobs as was most lucrative. Lewis was a chauffeur in 1940 and by 1950 had found work as a guard at the Rhode Island Hospital. Eleanor may have started working in the salon but by the 1950s, she worked as a senior clerk at the RI Department of Administration’s Division of Personnel. By 1947, Mrs. Margaret B. Mayo had moved into the residence and worked in the salon, possibly to replace Eleanor. While Raymond, Jr., was listed later in the directories as a student, there is no record of what happened to Addie May. Raymond, Sr., died in 1952.
B. Boyd’s Beauty Parlor was in operation until 1960, when the area was redeveloped for, among other things, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Elementary School.
