Click image for larger view

Borner's eponymous barber college is, first and foremost, a training facility for aspiring clipper masters. But the three-story building, whose modest exterior belies the school's majestic confines, is also an eloquent rejoinder to the economic disenfranchisement of the inner city.

Walk in the door, and the grimness of urban decay gives way to a sparkling vision of entrepreneurial inspiration. The expansive main room has a colonial feel, with 25-foot ceilings, columns in the center, and a balcony in one corner. Old-fashioned barber chairs in varying hues ring two sides of the room, and hanging from the back wall is a large neon sign with the words "Borner's Barber College" lit up in red, white and blue. The place is almost dauntingly immaculate.

"You're not going to find any school like this in California," says the impeccably groomed Borner, surveying his labor of love. "Why did I do it? 'Cause I want the finest."

Getting the finest in South-Central, however, proved quite a challenge. Borner still simmers over his inability to obtain a loan when he decided to move his school from Lynwood to the current location.

"Why can't I have a place as nice in the ghetto as in Beverly Hills?" he says. "Am I any less a person because I live in South Central?"

Undeterred, Borner and his wife Velma poured their life savings into their new enterprise. She held on to her job as a CT scan operator, while he often slept at the college after exhausting days of refurbishing the building (formerly a nightclub) from the ground up.

Lest any of his students take the school for granted, Borner has adorned the walls with an often harrowing pictorial history of the African-American experience. The chronological display ends with the framed barbering certificates of his staff and a glowing portrait of him and his wife.

Originally from Bogalusa, Louisiana, Borner spent ten years in the military before settling in for a 23-year stint with TRW. When a young woman whom the Borners were putting through barber college asked them to buy the school in 1990, they did. Borner took extension classes at UCLA, earned his license, and has never looked back.

"After I got involved, I realized this is something I could do to help a lot of people--this would be my niche."

Borner isn't making any money from the school, but he doesn't seem to mind. For him, the college is as much a social reclamation project as a business.

"It's very difficult for a black person to get started at anything. The system beats them down. That's why they sell drugs. It's hard to do what's right. But it can be done. How do I know? Because I've done it."