Willie Lee Morrow, a son of Alabama sharecroppers who crafted a business empire close to hair care products and solutions aimed at African American consumers, amid them a comb built to work with the purely natural variations that exploded in attractiveness in the 1960s — a resource he identified as the Afro Tease, but which came to be regarded as the Afro decide — died on June 22 at his residence in San Diego. He was 82.
His daughter Cheryl Morrow said the trigger was pneumonia.
Mr. Morrow was presently a prosperous barber on the east side of San Diego when a family members mate, Robert Bell, walked into his store in 1962. Mr. Bell had just returned from learning in Nigeria, and he brought Mr. Morrow a present: a conventional wood comb, with lengthy, rigid tines spaced perfectly aside, meant to tease out curly hair.
Mr. Morrow experienced under no circumstances noticed everything like it, but it could not have landed in his arms at a improved time. For generations, quite a few Black people experienced considered their obviously kinky hair as a legal responsibility, and possibly trimmed it shut to the scalp or straightened it, typically utilizing painfully caustic chemicals to do so.
But the civil rights motion manufactured a era of younger Black persons keen to assert their flexibility from oppressive aesthetics. Pure hair was turning into as much a political statement as a model selection, a bodily expression of the emerging Black Electrical power ethos.
The blowout, later acknowledged as the Afro, became the dominant fashion. But it presented a new problem to barbers like Mr. Morrow.
“The Afro caught every person off guard,” he instructed Ebony journal in 1970. “Even Black barbers and beauticians in America ended up caught lacking the know-how as perfectly as the need to style a decent Afro.”
An inveterate innovator, Mr. Morrow used years doing the job on his choose layout, at initially earning wooden picks in the back again of his shop right before he landed on a plastic edition that could be mass developed. Ultimately he had seven types, one particular of them a blow-dryer attachment, and he was selling about 12,000 picks a 7 days.
Based mostly on his rising track record, the Office of Defense contracted with him in 1969 to train its thousands of barbers and beauticians to get the job done with Black hair.
“Until reasonably not too long ago, the Black particular person was self-mindful about his curly, kinky hair,” he informed The New York Situations in 1971. “He or she would invest a fortune seeking to get the curl out. That manufactured it uncomplicated for the armed service. They would simply operate the clippers intently in excess of a Negro’s head — no trouble at all.”
Around the next couple years, Mr. Morrow logged tens of countless numbers of miles visiting bases all over Asia, Europe and the United States, providing workshops to navy and local civilian barbers. He claimed he was the youngest human being at any time to log a million miles on Delta Air Strains.
Of program, not anyone needed an Afro, even at the peak of the Black Power era, and so alongside the select he produced dozens of other hair care merchandise, numerous of them straightening and softening solutions that have been gentler than the common chemical substances then in use.
By the mid-1970s he experienced a product identified as Tomorrow Curl, which commenced to just take off in 1977 when he changed the name to California Curl. It gave his customers’ hair a delicate and shiny seem, and like the choose, it was straightforward to use.
Once more, his timing was ideal. The Afro was waning in popularity, and young persons had been on the lookout for a new type. But when Mr. Morrow decided to market place his solution completely to hair care industry experts, other corporations moved in. Jheri Redding, an additional California hairdresser, reformulated a products he currently had on the current market for white hair and sold it immediately to Black customers.
By the 1980s, the best hair design among the youthful African People in america 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, ended up sharecroppers, and his father sold bootleg whiskey on the aspect.
Along with his daughter Cheryl, he is survived by his wife, Gloria (Lacy) Morrow, and one more daughter, Angela Morrow. A son, Todd, died just before him.
A person of 8 young children, Willie started work at an early age. He later on claimed that as soon as he realized that only the very greatest students in school experienced a shot at college or university, he made the decision to come across a different way out of poverty and before long landed on barbering. He commenced reducing hair when he was 13.
He moved to San Diego in 1959, component of a wave of Black Southerners drawn to Southern California’s warm local climate and assure of plentiful work.
He attended barber college, joined a salon and, when its owner made a decision to retire, bought him out for $5,000. Before long it was a cornerstone of Black lifetime in San Diego, and Mr. Morrow was the barber of choice for pro athletes, California politicians, musicians and motion picture stars.
“The first time I minimize my hair I went to that barbershop and uncovered that it was a total lifestyle, where by individuals would chortle talk, chat about politics, chat about social troubles, talk about lifetime,” Starla Lewis, a professor emerita of Black reports at San Diego Mesa College or university, claimed in a cellular phone job interview. “It was a group for many, several many years.”
Mr. Morrow wrote much more than a dozen guides, most of them manuals like “The Principles of Chopping and Styling Negro Hair” (1966), as effectively as a background, “400 Years Without having a Comb” (1973), which traced the story of Black hair care from Africa as a result of slavery to the present.
Mr. Morrow afterwards branched out into media. He began San Diego’s to start with Black-centered radio station in 1979 and a newspaper, The San Diego Check, in 1986. He designed most of his merchandise future door to his salon, possessing expanded to take over virtually the overall block, and he employed some 200 folks. A 10-foot Afro pick stood out entrance.
He at some point handed about most of his business to his daughter Cheryl, while he ongoing to appear to get the job done practically every single working day — if not to reduce hair, then to putter in his laboratory, usually on the lookout for yet another new strategy.
