Willie Lee Morrow, the son of Alabama’s share cropper, who built a business empire around hair care products for African-American consumers, designed to work in a natural style that exploded in popularity in the 1960s. Includes a comb. A tool he called Afroties. , But it became known as Aphropic — died on June 22nd at his home in San Diego. He was 82 years old.
His daughter, Cheryl Morrow, said the cause was pneumonia.
Morrow was already a successful barber on the eastern side of San Diego when his family friend Robert Bell set foot in his shop in 1962. Mr. Bell has just returned from studying in Nigeria and brought a gift to Mr. Morrow. Traditional wooden combs, with long, hard tines far enough apart, are intended to make fun of curly hair.
Mr Morrow had never seen anything like that, but he couldn’t get it into his hands at a better time. For generations, many blacks blame their naturally twisted hair and trim it near the scalp or straighten it, often using painful corrosive chemicals. I did that.
But the civil rights movement has spawned a generation of young blacks who aspire to claim freedom from oppressive aesthetics. Natural hair was becoming as political a statement as the choice of style, the physical expression of the new black power spirit.
The blowout, later known as Afro, became the dominant style. But that has brought new challenges to barbers like Mr. Morrow.
“Afro was surprised by everyone,” he told Evony in 1970.
Morrow, an avid innovator, spent years designing picks. At first, I made a wooden pick in the back of the store before landing on the mass-produced plastic version. Eventually he got seven models, one of which was a dryer attachment, selling about 12,000 picks a week.
Based on his growing reputation, the Pentagon signed a contract with him in 1969, training thousands of barbers and hairdressers to treat black hair.
“Until very recently, blacks were self-conscious about their curly, twisted hair,” he told the New York Times in 1971. It made it easy for the military. They simply stuck the Clippers over Negro’s head. No problem at all. “
Over the next few years, Morrow has traveled to bases around Asia, Europe and the United States, providing workshops to military and local civilian barbers, recording tens of thousands of miles. He claimed to be the youngest person in history to record a million miles on Delta.
Of course, not everyone wanted Afro, even at the height of the Black Power era. That’s why he developed dozens of other hair care products. Many of them are milder orthodontic and softening treatments than the traditional chemicals used at the time. ..
By the mid-1970s, he had a product called Tomorrow Curl. It began to appear in 1977 when the name was changed to California Curl. It gave his customer’s hair a soft and shiny look, and like a pick, it was easy to use.
Again, his timing was perfect. Afro’s popularity has diminished, and young people are looking for new styles. But when Morrow decided to sell his product only to hair care professionals, another company moved. Another California hairdresser, Jheri Redding, remade the white hair product he already had on the market and sold it directly to black consumers.
By the 1980s, the hottest hairstyle among young African Americans was Jheri Curl, named after a popular person, if not the inventor.
Willie Lee Morerow was born on October 9, 1939 in Eutaw, Alabama, an agricultural town southwest of Birmingham. His parents Holly and Olean (Jordan) Morrow were peasants, and his father sold pirated whiskey to the side.
Along with his daughter Cheryl, he is surviving by his wife, Gloria (Lacy) Morrow, and another daughter, Angela Morrow. His son Todd died in front of him.
Willy, one of eight children, started working from an early age. He later said that after noticing that only the best students in school were shot in college, he decided to find another way out of poverty and immediately landed in a barber shop. He started cutting his hair at the age of thirteen.
He moved to San Diego in 1959. This was part of a wave of black Southerners drawn to Southern California’s warm climate and abundant work promises.
He went to a barber school, attended a salon, and bought him for $ 5,000 when the owner decided to retire. Soon it became the basis of black life in San Diego, and Morrow became the barber of choice for professional athletes, California politicians, musicians, and movie stars.
“When I first cut my hair, I went to the barber shop and realized that it was a whole culture where people laughed, talked about politics, talked about social issues, talked about life,” he said. A study at Starla Lewis San Diego Mesa College, Professor Emeritus of Black, said in a telephone interview. “It has been a community for decades.”
Morrow wrote more than a dozen books, most of which are manuals such as “The Principles of Black Hair Cutting and Styling” (1966) and the story-telling history “400 Years Without Combs” (1973). ..Black hair care from Africa from slavery to the present
Morrow later entered the media. He launched San Diego’s first black-centric radio station in 1979, and the newspaper San Diego Monitor in 1986. He manufactured most of the products next to the salon and expanded to take over almost the entire block. 200 people. A 10-foot afropic stood out in front.
He eventually handed over most of his business to his daughter Cheryl, but he came to work almost every day — unless he had to cut his hair, he puttered in his lab and always had another. I was looking for a new idea.
