Willie Lee Morrow, a son of Alabama sharecroppers who constructed a enterprise empire round hair care merchandise aimed at African American shoppers, amongst them a comb designed to work with the pure types that exploded in recognition in the Nineteen Sixties — a instrument he known as the Afro Tease, however which got here to be often known as the Afro choose — died on June 22 at his residence in San Diego. He was 82.
His daughter Cheryl Morrow stated the trigger was pneumonia.
Mr. Morrow was already a profitable barber on the east aspect of San Diego when a household good friend, Robert Bell, walked into his store in 1962. Mr. Bell had simply returned from learning in Nigeria, and he introduced Mr. Morrow a present: a standard wood comb, with lengthy, stiff tines spaced effectively aside, meant to tease out curly hair.
Mr. Morrow had by no means seen something prefer it, however it couldn’t have landed in his palms at a greater time. For generations, many Black individuals had seen their naturally kinky hair as a legal responsibility, and both trimmed it near the scalp or straightened it, typically utilizing painfully caustic chemical compounds to take action.
But the civil rights motion produced a era of younger Black individuals keen to say their freedom from oppressive aesthetics. Natural hair was turning into as a lot a political assertion as a method alternative, a bodily expression of the rising Black Power ethos.
The blowout, later often known as the Afro, grew to become the dominant fashion. But it introduced a brand new problem to barbers like Mr. Morrow.
“The Afro caught everybody off guard,” he advised Ebony journal in 1970. “Even Black barbers and beauticians in America were caught lacking the knowledge as well as the desire to style a decent Afro.”
An inveterate innovator, Mr. Morrow spent years engaged on his choose design, at first making wood picks in the again of his store earlier than he landed on a plastic model that could possibly be mass produced. Eventually he had seven fashions, considered one of them a blow-dryer attachment, and he was promoting about 12,000 picks per week.
Based on his rising popularity, the Department of Defense contracted with him in 1969 to coach its 1000’s of barbers and beauticians to work with Black hair.
“Until fairly recently, the Black person was self-conscious about his curly, kinky hair,” he advised The New York Times in 1971. “He or she would spend a fortune trying to take the curl out. That made it easy for the military. They would simply run the clippers closely over a Negro’s head — no problem at all.”
Over the subsequent few years, Mr. Morrow logged tens of 1000’s of miles visiting bases round Asia, Europe and the United States, giving workshops to navy and native civilian barbers. He claimed he was the youngest individual ever to log 1,000,000 miles on Delta Air Lines.
Of course, not everybody needed an Afro, even at the top of the Black Power period, and so alongside the choose he developed dozens of different hair care merchandise, a lot of them straightening and softening remedies that had been gentler than the standard chemical compounds then in use.
By the mid-Nineteen Seventies he had a product known as Tomorrow Curl, which started to take off in 1977 when he modified the identify to California Curl. It gave his prospects’ hair a tender and glossy look, and like the choose, it was simple to make use of.
Again, his timing was excellent. The Afro was waning in recognition, and younger individuals had been searching for a brand new fashion. But when Mr. Morrow determined to market his product solely to hair care professionals, different firms moved in. Jheri Redding, one other California hairdresser, reformulated a product he already had on the marketplace for white hair and offered it on to Black shoppers.
By the Nineteen Eighties, the hottest hair fashion amongst younger African Americans was the Jheri curl, named for its popularizer if not its inventor.
Willie Lee Morrow was born on Oct. 9, 1939, in Eutaw, Ala., a farming city southwest of Birmingham. His dad and mom, Hollie and Olean (Jordan) Morrow, had been sharecroppers, and his father offered bootleg whiskey on the aspect.
Along together with his daughter Cheryl, he’s survived by his spouse, Gloria (Lacy) Morrow, and one other daughter, Angela Morrow. A son, Todd, died earlier than him.
One of eight kids, Willie began work at an early age. He later stated that when he realized that solely the highest college students in class had a shot at school, he determined to seek out one other manner out of poverty and shortly landed on barbering. He began reducing hair when he was 13.
He moved to San Diego in 1959, a part of a wave of Black Southerners drawn to Southern California’s heat local weather and promise of plentiful jobs.
He attended barber college, joined a salon and, when its proprietor determined to retire, purchased him out for $5,000. (*82*) it was a cornerstone of Black life in San Diego, and Mr. Morrow was the barber of alternative for professional athletes, California politicians, musicians and film stars.
“The first time I cut my hair I went to that barbershop and discovered that it was a whole culture, where people would laugh talk, talk about politics, talk about social issues, talk about life,” Starla Lewis, a professor emerita of Black research at San Diego Mesa College, stated in a cellphone interview. “It was a community for many, many decades.”
Mr. Morrow wrote greater than a dozen books, most of them manuals like “The Principles of Cutting and Styling Negro Hair” (1966), in addition to a historical past, “400 Years Without a Comb” (1973), which traced the story of Black hair care from Africa by means of slavery to the current.
Mr. Morrow later branched out into media. He began San Diego’s first Black-centered radio station in 1979 and a newspaper, The San Diego Monitor, in 1986. He made most of his merchandise subsequent door to his salon, having expanded to take over nearly the whole block, and he employed some 200 individuals. A ten-foot Afro choose stood out entrance.
He finally handed over most of his enterprise to his daughter Cheryl, although he continued to come back to work nearly day-after-day — if to not reduce hair, then to putter in his laboratory, at all times searching for one other new concept.
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