This story of a barber & his neighborhood will break your heart, but will give you hope

Sept. 25, 2010

Turning around male mind-sets is KC barbershop's mission
By BILL REITER, The Kansas City Star

As he drives toward his shop, Joey Thomas thinks. About how many haircuts it takes to pay the bills. About how many haircuts it takes to turn around a neighborhood.

Early on this Saturday morning, before Indiana Avenue stirs to life, half a dozen customers are waiting for JoeyCuts to open.

“Good morning,” Joey says, slipping quickly behind his chair, glancing at the mirror.

Looking back is a long-dreadlocked man whose skill with a razor and clippers is matched only by his ability to remain unbroken, despite what the inner city can throw at a person in 27 years.

Also caught in that moment’s reflection: a young man struggling with the mission of this place.

JoeyCuts Salon is a barbershop recently named America’s best by the Hoodie Awards, a prestigious honor sponsored by comedian Steve Harvey that recognizes the very best and brightest in the African-American community.

Thomas traveled to Las Vegas last month for the ceremony, where he rubbed elbows at the Mandalay Bay with celebrities and other winners.

Across Kansas City, his shop is best recognized for its free, annual, back-to-school haircuts for boys. Not as well known is his Know Joey? Foundation that works on the inside of those young heads.

“The problem with our community is young black males,” explains Rodney Knott, a community leader who gets his hair cut at the shop. “Now what do you do about it? Unfortunately, in our community the definition of manhood is perverted. Joey is a very important example of what that definition of manhood should be.”

So for some, the shop represents the nexus of a neighborhood’s dreams, a spot that serves as a counterweight to the fear just outside the door, and a reminder to young black men that living in Kansas City’s most dangerous ZIP code need not condemn you to an early death, life behind bars or the crushing pessimism that a Great Recession hoists on such places.

“Before integration, all black folks lived in the same place,” Knott says. “What that allowed was young black men to see that black men can be successful.

“I grew up with lawyers, three football players, doctors in my neighborhood,” he says. “They were good role models. When they were able to move — and that was a good thing — it left a vacuum. And Joey is filling that.”

Joey blinks, comes back to himself, and turns from the mirror to his customers. Waiting, seated on shiny metal chairs, are the faces of a boy and several men in their 20s and 30s.

The very people Joey hopes to reach with his shop and foundation. So they don’t end up like another face in the room — Bo’s.

Joey looks at his customers.

“OK,” he says quietly. “Who’s up?”

The journey started in the hazy light of a July morning in 1985, when the sounds could have been fireworks but were instead gunfire.

A supermarket heist had gone bad. A police officer lay wounded, shot twice. Milton Thomas, 30, one of the robbers, took a fatal bullet in the chest.

“I don’t remember a touch, a laugh, a smell,” Joey says of his father. “Growing up I realized there was an anger growing inside me. Even people talking to me about him, about knowing him, made me angry, because everyone got to know him but me. That anger played a big part of my life.

“Spiritually and personally, I was trying to understand why life was unfair, why I didn’t know my father.”

His mother worked two or three jobs. He ran with the wrong kids, got kicked out of schools, pulled down a 0.8 grade-point average as a high school freshman.

He spent a few nights in jail, but he wasn’t a gang member or a drug dealer or criminal, people say, just someone flirting at the edges of trouble.

Milton Thomas Jr., now his younger brother’s biggest fan, says flatly: “Joey was a bad kid. Angry, always had to be his way.

“I fell into some of those traps. When you grow up on 42nd and Bellefontaine in the late 1980s and 1990s, all you knew was drugs and gangs.”

William Thomas, another brother, agreed: “It was Crips and Bloods, and you’re walking through both on the way to the school where a shotgun would be put in your face, and you’re taking off your coat and shoes and handing them over.”

So 11 years ago in a hospital room, when Milton Jr.’s eyes fluttered, opened, focused, his first words in weeks were: “Who shot me?”

Milton was the closest thing Joey had to a father — made him dinner, tried to steer him from some of his own mistakes. He had a family, was working hard, went home one night with a headache and fell asleep.

He wouldn’t wake up again for a month. A blood vessel had burst in his brain.

Milton says he died three times in the hospital. Doctors were sure he wouldn’t wake again.

So their mother, LaDonna Adams, and the family’s pastor walked into his hospital room, laid hands on him and prayed.

Joey reconnected. He went back to school regularly, and every night arrived at the hospital, sure his presence and love could penetrate Milton’s coma.

“That’s where Joey learned to pray,” says Adams. “He’d sit at his brother’s bedside, talk to him, read Scripture to him. It was a very young man taking that all on. Joey willed him to live.”

So if Milton’s awakening could be called a miracle, it possibly was just the second in that room.

Joey was a different person.

“Someone had to be the rock,” Joey says of his brother’s trials. “I took that on. I had this sense that it was God’s message to him to slow down and enjoy life.”

Joey moved Milton’s 4-year-old son into Joey’s mother’s home to help raise him. It was supposed to be temporary, but one day the family asked Milton’s son whether he wanted to stay with his uncle, and he did.

“I had someone to take care of, who was my responsibility,” Joey says.

A few years later he did the same with a niece whose mother died in a car wreck. He is still raising them both.

“Being (a father figure) was a huge part of it,” Joey says of his later decisions.

This all became a message to save others. Some might have become a pastor, some a social worker. But Joey could cut hair.

His mother was a stylist, so a salon was not new to him, nor was taking clippers in hand to turn another man’s hair into his private work of art.

By age 12, Joey had a customer base, was charging $5 to $7. First it was kids from the streets, then grown men, whom he sat in his home’s dim bathroom.

“They sat on the toilet stool, and I’d cut half of their hair, and then we’d take a break,” he says. “I’d have to walk out to the light to get a better look. Then I’d do the other half.”

Joey thought earlier that he’d move on to something else. But Milton’s brush with death, his brother William believes, made Joey “realize that, ‘Man, life isn’t something you can play with.’ ”

So Joey worked at Walmart, at UPS, cutting hair on the side, saving his money, doing right by the family. He went to barber school and worked at a shop on Prospect and 75th Street.

He wanted his own place, of course.

In his mid-20s, Joey opened the doors on Indiana Avenue in July 2008.

Noteworthy, but nothing particularly unusual, except … how many young barbers start a foundation for charitable works at the same time they’re deciding how many chairs to install?

He wanted the shop to be more than just a business to support himself and his family. He wanted it to be an example of what was possible in a blighted neighborhood, as well as a funding arm for his foundation.

The foundation has hosted youth summits, funded scholarships for homeless kids, put on events like “Groom for Success,” a five-day camp for young men aimed at teaching them about finance, dress and more.

The nonprofit agency is recorded with the Missouri secretary of state but is still waiting on the Internal Revenue Service to grant it 501(c)(3) status. Without it, it’s harder to raise funds for projects.

“So the money we get is mostly out of our pockets,” says Ronica Smith, the vice president of the board. “A lot of it’s from Joey, from the barbershop.”

Barbershops have long been social hubs. The cutters at Joey’s operate on the belief that every customer is a person for whom a few friendly words and a group of good people can make a difference.

“I wanted to make change, for the visitors and the staff inside the shop and myself,” Joey said. “To each of us, it allows us to learn, to work for the community, to be in the middle of it.”

The business plan wasn’t designed to make him rich, just to fund the five barber chairs, four of which he’d rent out to other barbers. There’s a stylist in back, too.

Like the old days, JoeyCuts is that place in the neighborhood where black men who had achieved the American Dream and those who hadn’t can sit side by side.

Alvin Brooks, president of Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, applauded Thomas’ efforts.

“This whole issue of African-American males is so grave, it’s a crisis state, and whatever anyone can do to reach out to one or go beyond that is great. The thing that troubles me is, there are not enough young brothers like Joey who are doing something.”

The first barber Joey hired was a kindhearted acquaintance named Derrick Patterson, who worked the chair in the middle of the room.

Patterson is not at the chair anymore, but his presence is still felt. His face looks out from a flier tacked on the shop’s back wall.

WHO TOOK ME AWAY FROM MY FAMILY!?

It’s a plea from a dead man, next to two other fliers just like it, written in first person as if Patterson staring out on the shop really could demand your help in finding his killer. He was 30 when he died.

Everyone called him Bo. He hadn’t come into work one day in January when a relative came into the shop and screamed that he was dead. They’d found him shot in the back of a car. Eight months later, the case is unsolved.

“It really messed me up,” Joey says. “After that, one of the things I made an agreement with myself about was, ‘I will not go back into the darkness.’ ”

Telling the story, Joey shakes his head and looks down. Friends call him an “old soul,” carrying so much weight, they say. Trying to run a business, to make a change. Living with the fact that his shop can only do so much.

“That’s what’s so important about Joey,” says Knott, the community leader who works with absentee fathers in the area. “He’s a reminder of exactly why not to quit.”

Some nights, such as Thursday, he does not quit until nearly 11 p.m. — a long time on his feet. Thomas sits in the back in the styling chair and lets out a deep sigh.

“I just need to enjoy this moment, to think,” he says.

His nephew and niece call to see whether they can go out for snacks. There are enough in the fridge, he tells them. His mom calls next. He smiles and hands over the phone.

“That’s his fate, what he’s doing, his destiny,” she says. “It’s the seed God planted, to be there and help people. God’s plan for Joey was to use that barbershop.”

By now the store is empty. His friend’s face still looks back at him, next to words that say: “Enough Black lives lost, tears shed and children discouraged. Enough gunfire, people scared and murderers who walked!”

“I’m trying to do my best,” Joey said. “I think it’s working, but it’s a never-ending duty, and I can’t do it on my own.”

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/09/25/2250467/turning-around-male-mind-sets.html#ixzz10eTS27Mq