Harlon Brooks Visitation, Obituary & Funeral , founder of Harlon’s BBQ in Houston

Harlon Brooks, who rose from humble beginnings as a self-described “chicken catcher” to create an empire of barbecue restaurants that spanned the nation, died Sunday at his Nacogdoches home.

He was 80.

Brooks was a pioneering Black entrepreneur who founded Harlon’s Bar-B-Que House in 1977 in a formerly abandoned gas station at Selinksy Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Houston’s South Park neighborhood.

Brooks and his wife, Alfreddie, owned more than two dozen Harlon’s locations at the peak of their business, which they both told The Daily Sentinel they learned through trial and error.

“We were barely making bills. We learned how to survive in tough times,” Brooks said in 1996 when he and his wife returned to Nacogdoches.

But a major break came when they were approached by then-state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, about opening a restaurant in what is now George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

“He came to my daddy in South Park in 1988 and asked him, ‘Do you want to be one of the first Black-owned companies to go into Houston International Airport?’” Brooks’ daughter, Candace, recalls. “My dad said, ‘I’ve got no money to do that. How am I going to do that?’”

Ellis made the deal work, and Harlon’s opened in the airport in the early 1990s.

“It was the first Black-owned barbecue business there ever. From there he opened 27 other restaurants,” she said. “It just went and went.”

During his first year in the restaurant business, Brooks grossed $380,000, according to the Houston Chronicle, and in 1999 revenues had increased to $13.7 million.

Brooks was excited to move back to his home town once business took off, his daughter said.

“He just loved where he was raised. He just loved this town,” she said.

In 2000, Brooks received the African-American Pinnacle Award from the Houston Chamber of Commerce for overcoming almost insurmountable odds to create a successful business.

“It really means a lot when people think that much of you,” he told The Daily Sentinel in October 2000.

Harlon Brooks was born Dec. 19, 1943, the son of Gaylon and Topsie Brooks. He was the only boy among the couple’s five children.

He grew up on Smith Street in South Nacogdoches, which was renamed for his father in 2013.

The hometown he loved wasn’t always so kind to him. As a child, Brooks was not allowed in the movie theater on Main Street in downtown Nacogdoches because of his race.

“So when he moved back home, one of the first accomplishments that he made was buying that theater,” said the Rev. James Ervin, Brooks’ longtime pastor at Iron Wheel Baptist Church.

Brooks carried on a hardworking tradition that had been handed down by their father, his sister, Ella Jean Whitaker, said.

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