The Great Black Barbers — Masters of the Chair
The lineage piece: famous Black barbers, the best barbershop masters in our history, and the craft dynasties they built — the men who turned a chair, a razor and forty minutes of a powerful man’s unguarded conversation into banks, insurance companies and political power.
Every reader of this magazine knows the room. The bell over the door. The chairs in a row like a small parliament.
The master in the first chair, whose opinion on a haircut — and, quietly, on a marriage, a mortgage or a mayor — carries the weight of long experience. Our companion piece, The Chair, is about that institution as we live it today: the ritual, the standard, the sanctuary. This piece is its elder brother.
This is the history — the famous Black barbers and best barbershop masters whose names built the lineage, from the barbers who served presidents to the barber who trained, by his organisation’s account, most of the Black barbers in America.
Hold the central fact first, because the National Association of Barbers’ history of Black barbershops and the scholarship in our sources agree on it: for much of the 19th century, barbering was among the most prestigious occupations open to Black men in America.
The great downtown shops served the white elite — governors, senators, judges — because the craft was understood, by everyone, to be in Black hands. A master barber worked indoors, kept his own hours more than most men of his era could, handled cash daily, and heard everything.
What the best of them did with that position is the story of this article: they converted trust into capital, and capital into institutions.
Alonzo Herndon: From One Chair to Atlanta Life
Alonzo Franklin Herndon was born enslaved in Georgia in 1858, with, in the Georgia History account of his life, he had just a year of formal education, opened a barbershop in Jonesboro in 1878, and moved to Atlanta, where by the turn of the century he owned three barbershops serving Atlanta’s most elite white citizens.
One of them, the elegant Crystal Palace, operated — in the Georgia account’s telling — until 1972. Picture the room the name promises: marble, mirrors, hot towels, a standard of luxury that made the shop itself a piece of theatre, and Herndon its proprietor, investing the proceeds, steadily and unsentimentally, in Auburn Avenue real estate.
Then came the conversion that defines his place in this lineage. In 1905, the Georgia account records, Herndon paid $140 for a small burial association. That modest purchase became the Atlanta Life Insurance Company — and made him, in the same account’s words, Atlanta’s first Black millionaire.
The pattern matters more than the milestone. The barbershop taught him his market intimately: he knew what a dignified burial meant to the families in his chairs, what they could pay weekly, and why they would trust a policy sold by a man whose name was already a byword for keeping his word.
The chair was his market research, his distribution network and his character reference, all in one room. Atlanta Life endured for generations as one of the country’s leading Black financial institutions.
Herndon and his wife Adrienne — an Atlanta University professor — built a fifteen-room mansion that still stands, a house bought, in the most literal sense, one haircut at a time.
John Merrick: The Durham Builder
John Merrick’s road runs parallel, one state north, and ends in an even larger institution.
Born enslaved in North Carolina in 1859, Merrick learned bricklaying and barbering as a young man, moved to Durham in 1880, and — in the North Carolina History encyclopaedia’s entry on Merrick — bought into the shop where he worked, took it over fully when his partner left for Washington, and expanded into a small chain of barbershops serving Durham’s wealthy white men, Washington Duke among his customers, as the state’s historical marker account in our sources notes.
In 1898, Merrick and six fellow Black leaders of Durham founded the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association — North Carolina Mutual — to provide life insurance to Black families whom the established companies would not serve on fair terms.
The encyclopaedia account and the company’s histories in our sources describe the hard early years: losses, partners withdrawing, a reorganisation in 1900 with Merrick, Dr. Aaron Moore and C. C. Spaulding — the triumvirate, as Durham remembers them — holding the thing together. Merrick served as president from the founding until his death in 1919.
Under that leadership the company grew, in the NAIFA history in our sources, from a few hundred dollars of income in 1899 to more than $250,000 by 1910, and in time into the largest Black-owned business in the United States — the anchor of the Durham district the country learned to call Black Wall Street.
Two barbers, two cities, one discovery, made independently in Atlanta and Durham in the same generation: the trust a master barber banks every day is a form of capital, and insurance is where it compounds.
George A. Myers: The Barber Presidents Trusted
If Herndon and Merrick show the chair as capital, George A. Myers of Cleveland shows it as access — access of a kind no lobbyist could buy. Myers, born in Baltimore in 1859, arrived in Cleveland in 1879 and in 1888 opened the barbershop of the Hollenden Hotel, the city’s grand political hotel.
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, at Case Western Reserve University, gives the scale of the mature operation: by 1920, Myers’s shop employed 17 barbers, six manicurists, five porters, three ladies’ hairdressers, two cashiers and two podiatrists. It was less a shop than a small, gleaming department of state.
The men in his chairs ran the country, and the Cleveland teaching histories in our sources record that eight American presidents, from Hayes to Harding, took their turn in Myers’s chair, and that it became a mark of distinction for a regular to keep his own inscribed shaving mug in Myers’s rack.
His decisive relationship was with Marcus Hanna, the industrialist who managed William McKinley’s rise.
The encyclopaedia records that Myers became Hanna’s close ally, served as a delegate to the Republican national conventions of 1892, 1896 and 1900, and organised Black voters and delegates for the McKinley cause in Ohio and in the South — work the teaching histories describe as central to Hanna’s convention strategy.
Offered political appointments for himself, Myers declined them, the encyclopaedia notes, and instead secured appointments for four other Black men. Read that twice. The barber would not take the plum.
He spent his credit on his people. In his later years, the same record shows, he campaigned — successfully — for Cleveland newspapers to capitalise the word Negro and drop offensive terms.
The chair had given him the ear of the powerful for forty years; he used it, at the end, on the question of how his people would be named in print.
Henry Miller Morgan: The Man Who Schooled the Trade
Every lineage needs its teacher, and this one’s is Henry Miller Morgan of Tyler, Texas. The problem he solved was structural: by the 1920s, states required barbers to be licensed, and the education licensing required was, in practice, closed to Black students.
The Texas Historical Commission’s marker text for Morgan records his answer: he opened a barber college in Tyler in 1933 — beginning, in the marker’s account, with five chairs — with dormitories for his students, and then branches: Houston in 1937, Jackson, Mississippi, in 1945, Little Rock in 1946, Manhattan in 1948, Dallas in 1949.
The curriculum, the marker notes, ranged well beyond cutting — scalp and skin diseases, electricity, chemistry, anatomy. This was a professional school, built to a professional standard, by a man the Tyler directory had listed simply as a barber in 1918.
The scale of what Morgan built is stated, with appropriate caution, in both the marker text and the Association’s history: at its height, the Tyler Barber College chain was training a majority of the nation’s Black barbers — the Association’s figure, printed here as theirs, is nearly 80 percent.
Whether the true figure is that or somewhat less, the consequence is the same, and it is staggering to contemplate: for a generation, if you sat in a Black barbershop almost anywhere in America, the odds were strong that the hands holding the clippers had been trained, directly or through an affiliated school, by Henry Miller Morgan’s organisation.
He did not only master the chair. He standardised mastery itself, and gave thousands of men a licensed, portable, respectable trade at the height of Jim Crow. A Texas historical marker stands in Tyler today to say so.
“Simply put, the opportunity for Black men running Black barbershops shifted to the chance for prosperity — and prosper Black barbershops did.”— National Association of Barbers, “The History of Black Barbershops”
Willie Lee Morrow: The Inventor in the Chair
Our final master brings the lineage into the modern era, and changes its instrument from the razor to the laboratory.
Willie Lee Morrow was born in Alabama in 1939, the son of sharecroppers, taught himself barbering as a boy — the obituary accounts in our sources describe his start as a “stump barber,” with a tree stump for a chair — and settled in San Diego, where he opened his first salon in 1959, the year of his graduation from barber college.
His Market Street headquarters became, in the obituary coverage, a small empire under one roof: barbershop and salon, his California Curl company, a radio station and the San Diego Monitor newspaper.
Morrow’s genius was to see that the master barber’s knowledge — what Black hair actually does, and what it needs — was intellectual property.
He wrote the manual: The Principles of Cutting and Styling Negro Hair, and the United States Department of Defense, in the account carried in his biographical entries, contracted him to teach Black hair-cutting technique to military barbers, work that took him to bases and combat zones.
He commercialised the Afro pick — the wide-toothed comb, in his company’s naming the Afro Tease or “Eze Teze,” that made the era’s defining style possible — and his California Curl treatment is described in the obituaries as the precursor to the Jheri curl that followed it across the 1980s.
His book 400 Years Without a Comb treated the history itself as part of the craft.
Morrow died in San Diego in 2022, aged 82, a publisher, broadcaster and manufacturer whose fortune began exactly where Herndon’s and Merrick’s had: in a chair, listening carefully to what the people in it needed, and then building the thing they needed at industrial scale.
What the Masters Hand Down
Stand back from the five lives and the lineage resolves into a small number of durable lessons, which is why this magazine keeps returning to the barbershop as serious history — the same inheritance line that runs from Mansa Musa through Greenwood to the present series.
First: craft at the highest standard is never merely craft; in a master’s hands it becomes trust, and trust is the raw material of every institution in this article. Second: the great barbers owned — their shops, their buildings, their schools, their product lines. The chair was a livelihood; ownership made it a legacy.
Third: each of them served a need the established market refused to serve, and served it better than the refusers could have.
And fourth — the lesson the room itself teaches every Saturday morning — a barbershop run to the old standard is a civic institution disguised as a grooming business: newsroom, debating society, hiring hall and confessional, with a haircut attached.
The masters are gone; the standard is not. It lives wherever a barber still sweeps his own floor, still knows his regulars’ children by name, still treats the first chair as an office of trust.
Honour the lineage the practical way: choose your chair carefully, pay the master what mastery is worth, and take a boy with you when you go. Somebody in that room is watching how it is done, the way a boy in Alabama once started, with a stump for a chair. The line continues through whoever is paying attention.
The Chair — Barbers, Salons, and the Ritual Today
Mansa Musa and the Empire of Gold
The Kingdoms of Gold — Zimbabwe, Benin, Ashanti
The Fortune Builders — Lewis, Johnson, and Gaston
National Association of Barbers — “The History of Black Barbershops”
Collectors Weekly — “Straight Razors and Social Justice: The Empowering Evolution of Black Barbershops”
Today in Georgia History — “Alonzo Herndon”
North Carolina History — “John Merrick (1859–1919)”
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Case Western Reserve) — “Myers, George A.”
Texas Historical Commission — Henry Miller Morgan marker (Atlas No. 5423013089)
Wikipedia — “Willie Morrow” (biographical entry and obituary sources)
Illinois Public Media — “The Legacy of the Black Barbershop”
North Carolina DNCR — “John Merrick 1859–1919” highway marker
NAIFA — “John Merrick and Alonzo Herndon Were Life Insurance Industry Pioneers”
Teaching Cleveland — “Black Political Power in Ohio Pre World War 2” (George A. Myers)
EURweb — “Dr. Willie Morrow: Creator of the ‘Afro-Pick,’ ‘California Curl’ & Black Media Pioneer”
Questions & Answers
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