He’s worked on Biloxi Main Street 63 years. Here’s how the city is honoring him
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- Biloxi renamed part of Main Street as Tyrone Burton Way to honor local barber.
- Burton operated his barbershop in the same area for over 63 years since 1962.
- City granted landmark status to shop that survived Hurricane Katrina flooding.
More than 63 years after he arrived in Biloxi to cut hair and raise a family, the city will salute Tyrone Burton on Memorial Day with a portion of Main Street named in his honor.
The public ceremony is at 9 a.m. Monday at Tyrone’s Barber and Beauty Salon at 281 Main St. It’s where his barber pole still spins and along the same stretch of Main Street where he’s worked all 63 years, “moving on up,” he jokes, like the Jeffersons on television, to a more spacious shop each time.
Also during the ceremony, the city will grant a landmark status to the combined barbershop and beauty shop he built in 1988 after working at three other shops.
Main Street from Division Street to Esther’s Boulevard near the railroad tracks will become “Tyrone Burton Way,” said Councilman Felix Gines, who will preside over the ceremony.
Burton has worked in Biloxi since Jan. 2, 1962 and his is one of or perhaps the longest running business by the same owner in the entire city, Gines said.
“I guess you could say I have stood the test of time,” Burton said, as he stands in his barbershop amid walls covered in memories. There’s a photo of Burton cutting Oprah Winfrey father’s hair, and he also gave haircuts to BB King and Sinbad, among other celebrities. In a drawer he still keeps his first, hand-operated clippers.
He’s 84 and still works part time, with no plans to retire, he said.
Time capsule
The shop is a time capsule of his dream and the evolution of Main Street Biloxi, from the early 1960s, when it was one of the busiest business areas of the city to now, when the barber shop is one of just two businesses still operating in that area.
Burton’s story is about a kid who knew from an early age what he wanted to do with his life. He followed that dream from his family farm in Franklinton, Louisiana as one of 11 kids in the family. He was able to take his own four kids onto the Biloxi beaches after the Civil Rights wade-ins and on vacations across the country, funded by so many haircuts over so many years.
As he recalls, a haircut cost $1.50 when he arrived in Biloxi, where he was the youngest of the four or five barbers working along Main Street. Now he’s the only one and an adult cut is $25.
He knew by age 14 he wanted to be a barber and right after graduation from a segregated high school, he attended Katy’s Barber College in New Orleans in 1960–61, working as an elevator operator by day and going to school at night.
He and his wife, Vera, married 63 years ago, right out of barber school. They’ve lived 63 years in Biloxi, where they had four children the first five years, and attended Main Street Baptist Church all those years.
“It’s been a good life. It’s what I asked for, and I got it,” he said.
Thriving Main Street
Along with the other memorabilia on the barbershop walls is a framed copy of a Sun Herald article from 1994 that recalls how Main Street, from Division Street to the railroad tracks, once “teemed with night spots, eating stops, barber shops, beauty parlors, grocery and drug stores and more.”
After barber school, Burton was advised to work in Biloxi, near Keesler Air Force Base. The barbers on the base weren’t very good, Burton recalls, and when the airmen got paid around the first and 15th of the month, they headed to his shop, where he worked to 11 p.m. or beyond.
“I cut until they quit coming,” he said.
‘I knew when this happened that this was going to be the place for me and my family. This going to be my home. And from there, from that day, it went nowhere but up,” Burton said in an oral history in 1999.
Their search for a good haircut drew the airmen from the base in a cab shared by six or eight of them into the community to spend their money and keep the clubs and other businesses prosperous.
Loyalty and trust
The Gines family had the same makeup as Burton’s growing up — five girls and six boys that always needed haircuts. Coming from a family of that size, his parents weren’t always able to send the boys for haircuts, Gines said. Burton let them get their haircuts on credit.
“He made it affordable for families like us,” Gines said.
Many women and girls also get their hair done at Tyrone’s, where Burton’s daughter Roshena Shinholster styles hair in the salon that’s part of her father’s barber shop. “We’ve been together forever,” she said, even longer than Shon Johnson who’s been styling hair there almost 30 years.
Burton’s compassion made for a loyal following among his customers and he gets choked up when he recalls how a man who had his first haircut at Tyrone’s drove his young son from Houston to get his first haircut there.
Over the years Burton acted as advisor and counselor. He had people tell him, “Tyrone I never told anybody but you this,” as they shared their secret. That’s trust you build over the years, he said.
The shop survived 15 feet of water during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the building had to be gutted and rebuilt and is still there after so many other businesses deserted Main Street.
If you go:
What: Dedication of portion of Main Street in Tyrone Burton’s honor. Refreshments to follow.
When: 9 a.m. on Memorial Day (Monday, May 26)
Where: 281 Main St., Biloxi
This story was originally published May 23, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
