Nelson Evans stepped into The Hair Affair barbershop on Chicago's South Side, past the sign on the mirrored wall that reads "Have you loved your black man today?" But before Evans settled into the padded swivel chair for his monthly trim, barber Eddie Davis stopped him: "When's the last time you had your prostate checked?"

Evans, a prostate cancer survivor, didn't mind the personal question. He's been having his curls clipped at the shop for decades. Davis is "more than a barber. He's my friend," Evans said over the drone of electric clippers.

For many African-American men, the barbershop is more than just a place for a haircut. It is a social hub, a place to--metaphorically--let down your hair. For generations, it has been a place to exchange stories, gossip and a little good advice.

Now in a first-of-its-kind national campaign set to launch in March, health educators want to take advantage of that barbershop banter to target African-Americans with information about prostate cancer, a disease that kills black men at rates higher than any other racial or ethnic group.

The New Jersey-based non-profit Prostate Net has recruited more than 800 barbershops across the country, including The Hair Affair and nearly two dozen others in the Chicago area, to disseminate health information, exploiting the traditional role of barbers in the African-American community as information brokers and influential counselors. The barbers will hand out brochures, show videos and direct patrons to free prostate screenings at local hospitals.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, University of Chicago political scientist and author of "Barbershops, Bibles and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought," described the outreach as a "brilliant strategy," given the historic function of the black barbershop as a community center.

The barbershop connection

During the Great Migration that began during World War I, as Southern blacks trekked to Northern cities, illiterate sharecroppers often stopped in barbershops to hear about jobs, the cities they were bound for and the towns they left behind. Sometimes they would ask other patrons to relay news from the latest edition of the Chicago Defender and other publications.

"For more than 100 years, black barbershops have operated in this way," Harris-Lacewell said.

There are, of course, other traditional gathering places for African-Americans, most notably churches. And similar health campaigns in recent years have solicited black churches to act as messengers.

Way to reach all sections

But public health experts say barbershops and salons reach a broader cross-section of African-Americans, especially those who are younger, don't attend church or are transient.

For barbers, whose predecessors in centuries gone by often doubled as surgeons, the focus on public health is something of a return to ancient roots.

From Los Angeles and New York to Cleveland and Atlanta, hair cutters have taken part in programs such as the American Heart Association's Barbershop Blood Pressure Screenings, or the National Cancer Institute's "Stay Beautiful, Stay Alive" project, which enlists beauty salons in the fight against breast and cervical cancer.

"It only makes sense," said Joseph M. Harrington, project director in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Rush University Medical Center, who is awaiting a state grant to train barbers as health educators.

"Men go to barbershops and they go regularly. If you make the information available there, it's more likely they'll get it than if you tried to set up a program and bring them into it."

Prostate Net officials expect to spend more than $5 million on their campaign, which debuted last year with support from Abbott Laboratories, Black Entertainment Television and Metro-Goldwyn Mayer Inc.--producers of the "Barbershop" movies starring rapper Ice Cube as a shop owner on Chicago's South Side.

During its three-month pilot last year, Prostate Net worked with 21 medical centers across the country to recruit and train more than 200 barbers. Nearly 10,000 men who had never been in the health-care system were screened. Eighty-four percent of them were ages 40 to 69, according to Prostate Net.

In March, as part of a six-month "Wired Barbershop Initiative," the Prostate Net will expand on the outreach by installing educational kiosks in a select number of shops. The kiosks will feature seating, a literature rack and a touch-screen computer linked to a Web portal with access to cancer information and health videos.

Postgraduate public health and medical students from the American Medical Association Minority Affairs Consortium will also volunteer to conduct information sessions in the shops and assist computer users. Prostate Net founder Virgil H. Simons said part of the mission is fighting the lingering mistrust many African-Americans have of public health programs, a result of incidents such as the Tuskegee Experiment, in which the U.S. government left poor blacks untreated for syphilis in Alabama in order to watch the effects.

Closing health gap

That mistrust makes it difficult to close a persistent health gap in the U.S., in which African-Americans have a 25 percent higher death rate from cancer, twice the death rate from diabetes and more than twice the infant mortality rate of whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Until we find a way to generate trust, to create dialogue, we're going to have a lot of the same numbers and be unable to have blacks effectively represented in drug development," said Simons, 58, himself a prostate cancer survivor. "We're talking about prostate cancer today, but we're really talking about people taking responsibility for their own health."

The idea of creating a nationwide network of barbershops to fight prostate cancer came to Simons in 2002 as he sat watching the first "Barbershop" movie.

The majority of the film is spent eavesdropping on playful barbershop banter, a real-life phenomenon he thought could be harnessed for culturally specific disease education.

"Everything I had learned in life, I learned in a barbershop," said Simons, fondly recalling Red's Barbershop on the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up. "So why not use barbershops as a way to get this across?"

With $100,000 of his own money, the former Sears marketing executive launched the campaign last February to coincide with National Cancer Prevention Month and the MGM release of the sequel to "Barbershop."

Mistrust of doctors

"It makes a difference because I've heard people say that they don't trust their doctor," said Hair Affair stylist Diara Brooks, who handed out hundreds of brochures to the shop's mix of old and young clientele. "A lot of men aren't clear on what prostate cancer is or they're scared to go to the doctor."

Brooks, one of two women who work at the shop, has observed that men just don't talk openly about their bodies the way women do. She credits barber Eddie Davis with making clients comfortable enough to talk about pretty much anything.

"It's mandatory that we talk about subjects like this openly," said Davis, 59, the gold hoop in his left ear giving him a Samuel L. Jackson-like coolness.

As he cut the hair of Evans, the prostate cancer survivor, a female martial-arts movie blared from a small TV atop the corner vending machine. Ceiling fans twirled overhead. Copies of the Chicago Defender filled the waiting area. Talk turned to cars, women and life.

Evans, 67, explained that thanks to early detection by doctors, he was cured with radiation, rather than surgery.

"One of the things my doctor told me was, "Nelson, don't keep this a secret. Let your friends know,'" he said.

With his hair freshly cut, Evans headed for the door, turning to ask Davis, "When's the last time you bought a car?"

"Man, I'm going to keep my car until I get old," Davis replied.

"Well, it's time to trade it," Evans quipped. The men shared a hearty laugh, before Evans walked out the door.