Philly Cuts owner Darryl Thomas (center) and his employees and supporters in front of his barbershop at 44th and Chestnut (Darryl Thomas Facebook photo)

The barbershop on 44th and Chestnut Streets in West Philadelphia seems to have only two floors: the ground floor for men’s haircuts, and the second floor for women’s haircuts. But there’s also third floor, a room plastered with maps and signs, with people taking calls and typing messages: A campaign office.

Philly Cuts has been in operation for 18 years, and this year its 43-year-old owner Darryl Thomas is running for political office for the first time. Thomas, a Democrat, is running for State Representative of the 190th District in the primary election on Tuesday, April 26th. This legislative district includes Belmont, Carroll Park, Cathedral Park, Mill Creek, Haddington, East Parkside,West Powelton, Strawberry Mansion, Allegheny West and Lehigh West. This is the district that Thomas grew up in and left for college—but eventually came back to.

Thomas said the barbershop is like a “watering hole”— a natural place for the community to come together, and a good place to reach them. Over the years, that barbershop has morphed into a community crossroads, a place where people can come for one service — a haircut — and find information and access to other services, like healthcare, education, and job opportunities. 

Thomas said he didn’t start out thinking he was going to be a barber. He grew up in the Mill Creek section of West Philadelphia, on 46th and Fairmount, and in high school rode the bus all the way to Lamberton High School, which was on 75th and Woodbine Ave. He said his parents felt Lamberton was the best choice to prepare him for college. His late father was a truck driver and his mother is a retired traffic court employee. He credits both of them for instilling in him a value for education and hard work.

In high school, Thomas thought he might one day become a veterinarian. He worked as an assistant to a veterinarian at age 14, and that was where he started his interest in cutting hair, which he pursued by working at a local barbershop throughout high school. He would go on to attend Howard University in 1990 for college, where he studied communications and worked at the Department of Justice for the Director of Personnel.

Thomas said he left school after his junior year, going through a difficult time, and got a job working for a show on ABC called Visions. He also earned money cutting hair at Like That Barbershop in Washington, DC. But in 1997, he moved back to Philadelphia.

“I don’t like talking about this too much,” Thomas said, “But there was an incident that happened in 1995, December 1st , when one of my good friends was killed. And it happened on 40th and Girard. And that’s when I decided, I have to get back home, I have to do something.”

When Thomas moved back, he decided to try opening a barbershop, inspired by his success working at the one in DC. “My father was a little frustrated,” Thomas said. “He said, ‘What’re you doing? I sent you out there to be a lawyer, or a doctor.’”

In trying to promote change in West Philadelphia, Thomas’s campaign platform is focusing on improving public education, improvement in quality and access for senior services, and building business partnerships to increase skilled trade apprenticeships and job opportunities (including incentives for hiring non-violent offenders). According to the 2010 census, over 75 percent of West Philadelphians are African-American and Thomas is focused on promoting equal opportunity for these residents who face persistent socioeconomic disparities.

When he talks about inequity, Thomas uses a specific analogy of a cage to describe the situation many West Philadelphians find themselves in. “It’s 62,000 people living in a cage. Bread is being rationed to them in the form of jobs, access to healthcare, and access to education. Poverty depicts and predicts their behavior. So then all of a sudden, you get robberies. It’s not because the individual is genetically predisposed to be a robber or a thief. It’s primarily because of the conditions.”

How do you control the conditions of a society? Thomas has focused on the power of experiences. He has organized trips outside of the city for children who have never had the experience of interacting with horses. They’ve gone deep sea fishing. He’s taken them to Eagles training camp at Lehigh University. The shop has held lessons to teach how to tie a tie. And when someone comes out of prison and can’t get a job, that person might be able to get a temporary job with Philly Cuts as the search continues.

What often ends up happening, Thomas said, is that places of employment will ignore the applications of ex-convicts, and so the temporary job at Philly Cuts will turn into a permanent one. This is what happened to James Brown, a barber who grew up in the 190th district and who has been working at Philly Cuts since 1998.

“Darryl gave me an opportunity to work at his barbershop, at his establishment, and the opportunity that he gave me helped me provide for my family, send my kids to college, and take care of myself as well as my family, without getting in any trouble or being the victim of the streets,” said Brown. “For him to take that gamble with me, when I got no responses back from my job applications in the rest of the city, it opened a door for me.”

Thomas is concerned about the current state of re-employment and re-entry into society for non-violent ex-offenders. He has also had the personal family experience of having an uncle and an aunt incarcerated as he grew up, and visiting them in two different prisons on weekends. To a young Thomas, this was a powerful reminder of the importance of making the most of opportunity. “My uncle would always tell me, don’t ever come in here. If I want to see a bird, he’s got to choose to fly over that wall.”

People around Thomas say his desire to run for political office is a new one.

“A barbershop is full of opinions, everybody has one, and everybody doesn’t have a problem expressing that in the confines of the barbershop,” said Philly Cuts client David Dix. “But I never would have thought Darryl a politician or potential elected official. He was always very much an entrepreneur, very much community minded, and I think at the time, particularly early on, he just didn’t think that was an effective route to get things done.”

Thomas himself said, “I’m not a politician, even though I’m running for office. I’m a social activist.”

He is running against five other Democratic candidates, including incumbent Vanessa Lowery Brown, who has held the office since 2009. Brown was charged last year with taking $4,000 from an undercover informant during a government corruption investigation that caught the transactions on videotape, and the scandal led three other state representatives to resign. She has denied the charges, saying she was the victim of racial targeting by investigators.

According to Dix, this represented a significant breach of trust in the West Philadelphia community, and it was what inspired a disappointed Thomas to consider running for office.

“I don’t think he would have ever run for office had the incumbent not violated the public trust in such a real way, and had it not really been counter to the core of his integrity,” said Dix. “He just couldn’t really fathom that somebody would do that.” Dix said that in the current political climate, he thinks the community will elect someone who is “professionally pedigreed,” young enough to serve for decades, and not currently elected.

According to Thomas, out of the 62,000 residents of West Philadelphia, only about half are registered to vote, and of those only about 6,000 end up voting on elections. But all the Philly Cuts employees are registered to vote, according to barber James Brown, and many clients have been newly registered.

Regardless of the result on Tuesday, Thomas said that he would continue to be a community advocate. And, at the very least, maybe the campaign is benefiting business at the barbershop.

Thomas joked: “Since this campaign, we’ve been getting a lot of new people coming through the door. We should have run this campaign years ago.”

– Vidya Viswanathan