“Ice Cream! … It Must Be Sold.”

In the early 1890s, when Shelby was a small village of fewer than about 1,400 people, nearly half of them Black, a man known as “John the barber”—sometimes identified as John Turby Wilson, described as a tan Black man with large, bulging eyes—peddled ice cream through the dusty streets from a push cart. As he went, he shouted over and over: “Ice cream! Ice cream! Ice cream! It must be sold.”

Source: Mamie Jones.