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 done just for him called “Willie’s Barbershop.” He cherishes that painting today.
It was in that barbershop/workshop on Market Street in Southeast San Diego, where he began to design and manufacture many Black beauty firsts such as the blow attachment he invented and used on a young Black girl who later became a movie star, Whoopi Goldberg. She was brought to him by another notable San Diegan, Makeda Cheatom, who would become executive director and founder of the WorldBeat Cultural Center in Balboa Park.
Even outside of San Diego dad was known all over the world. He contracted with the Defense Department visiting military bases all over the world, teaching other Blacks how to do Black hair. He created media and educational literature and manuals for U.S. military branches and their families. His books and manuals could be found in commissaries on just about every continent in the world.
My dad knew early on what could make Black haircare easier and what would keep people stylish.
With his keen sense of business and creativity, he came up with a fancy hairdo that everyone wanted, and he created the tools to help them make it. From the Afro hairstyle, to the Afro-pic comb, to the cold wave curl that inspired the famous Jheri curl from the 1980s, to the first utility patented hair comb called the “Eze-Teze comb,” and the first Afro comb blow dryer attachment, he didn’t stop.
As if he wasn’t busy enough, one of my dad’s proudest achievements was his media ownership. In the 1980s, he leased and operated XHRM radio (the first Black radio station in San Diego) and created the San Diego Monitor newspaper in 1986, which turned out to be one of the largest employers of African Americans in San Diego in the history of African American business.
To this day, my dad, Willie Morrow, believes a community must create an economy where African Americans can work and live in the same ZIP code and be successful and proud of their accomplishments.
Morrow is CEO of California Curl Beauty and editor of San Diego Monitor News. She lives in Encanto.
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