MY DAD KNEW EARLY ON HOW TO MAKE BLACK HAIR CARE EASIER

If there is a mecca for the Afro-natural movement, guess what, San Diego is it. In 1959, an 18-year-old from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, embarked on a career where people would later call him “the greatest barber the world has ever seen.” That barber is my father, Willie Morrow.

His story is a genuine one. Not only did he go on to be successful in the barber and beauty chair, but he was successful beyond that. He invented tools that would help Black men and Black women all over the world look stylish with their new, chic hair, and he took it a step further turning Black haircare into a tech-design industrial giant.

In those days, San Diego was a bubbling mecca for Afro-mexican art, beauty and fashion. It was also a time of protest across the country, and the Black Panthers became known as activists who sported the biggest and baddest Afros in the country. They got noticed. People admired the look and wanted to imitate it. They wanted to know who styled their hair, and they told them about Willie Morrow’s infamous barbershop. In 1962, he even created the famous pick comb that everyone used to shape those Afros.

The Black Panthers were certainly not his only famous clients. Members of San Diego’s business elite like Helen Copley of The San Diego Union and Jack in the Box founder Robert O. Peterson saw he was a force to be reckoned with.

Willie Morrow knew how to mix his talent with success. He utilized his great passion for style and beauty with enormous educational and social status. In those days, there was no buying tickets online. So my dad’s barbershop served as the San Diego Chargers’ first offsite ticket office; many of the star players were also his clients.

That’s how he met San Diego Charger and prolific artist Ernie Barnes. That relationship was special and Barnes gave Willie Morrow one of his most prized possessions, a painting Ernie had