One way is by giving everyone the right amount of personal attention, Harris says. Everyone has an opinion, and they’re all working eight hours a day not making money. “We have 34 students right now–white, Black, from overseas, women. That, combined with all the students, makes for an extended family of sorts, complete with all the potential for conflict. Today Harris’s whole family works for the Academy-his wife, three sons, mother, brother, sister-in-law, and nephew. Eventually he expanded to the second floor of the building, helping with that renovation as well.

Tio himself helped rehabilitate part of the building and in 2007 he opened the Academy and started teaching with eight students. The late Cressworth Lander, then president of the Dunbar Coalition, a group working to rehabilitate the Dunbar School into a cultural center, came to him and asked him to start a barber academy in the old school.Īt the time, the building was “naked,” Tio says. Ten years ago, Harris was running two barber shops in Tucson-Tio’s and Kingdom Cuts-and was also a pastor in a church.

Tio Harris of The Dunbar Barber Academy An Academy Opens “It’s the oldest profession in the world,” Harris says. Now he runs the Dunbar Barber Academy at the Dunbar Pavilion in Tucson, training an average of 40 students a year to become barbers. Harris officially became a barber at age 21. One day at school, Harris was asked to take his hat off and was so embarrassed about his hair that he came home and said to his father, “You’re never cutting it again.”īy age 10, he says, “I was cutting every head in the neighborhood.”

“But he always left blotches and bald spots,” Harris says. Before that, his father was the household haircutter. Tio Harris has been cutting hair-including his own-since he was seven years old.

Deeper than hair