George E. Johnson, founder of pioneering Black hair products company, dead at 99

By Steve Gorman

July 6 (Reuters) – George E. Johnson, the pioneering Chicago entrepreneur whose eponymous company transformed Black hair care in the U.S. with brands including Afro Sheen, Ultra Wave and Classy Curl, died on Monday at age 99, according to news media reports.

Johnson, who was born in a sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi and moved to Chicago with his mother at age 2, died at his downtown Chicago condo of natural causes, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, citing his son, John Edward Johnson.

The New York Times, citing his second wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, reported that Johnson died of a respiratory illness.

The Johnson Products Company was founded in 1954, catering to African Americans’ evolving tastes in hairstyles, fashion and cosmetics in an era when U.S. companies and advertisers paid little attention to Black consumers.

The business, which Johnson co-founded with his first wife, Joan Johnson, who died in 2019, grew to command nearly 80% of the Black hair care market by 1960, and in 1971 became the first Black-owned company listed on the American Stock Exchange, now known as NYSE American. 

With a marketing campaign echoing slogans and imagery of the era’s Black Pride and Black Power movements, the company became the exclusive sponsor of the television music show “Soul Train,” helping the Chicago-based weekly program grow from a local broadcast into a nationally syndicated hit.

The company’s own business roots illustrated the difficulties minority entrepreneurs faced at the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Johnson, who started as a door-to-door cosmetics salesman after dropping out of high school, launched his own venture with a bank loan of just $250 he secured by telling a white loan officer he wanted to borrow the money for a family vacation.

The first bank he approached had rejected his application for a business loan, according to the Chicago Sun-Times and BlackPast.org, an online encyclopedia devoted to African American history.

“I knew this request (for a vacation loan) wouldn’t rattle [the loan officer’s] belief that he was superior to me. Nor would it challenge his stereotypes of Black men as subservient or unintelligent,” Johnson recounted in his 2025 memoir, “Afro Sheen.”

FROM HAIR STRAIGHTENER TO THE AFRO

Some of the company’s first major brands, including Ultra Wave for men and Ultra Sheen for women, were introduced as hair-relaxing products designed for home use, to achieve straight and wavy hair styles popular in the 1950s and early 1960s.

As Black Power consciousness gave rise to an increasing preference among Black people for a more natural hair texture and look that did not seek to mimic the styles worn by whites, Johnson’s company adapted with the advent of its Afro Sheen Blow Out kit in the late 1960s, according to BlackPast.org.

The company’s Classy Curl helped consumers achieve the “Jheri curl” perm first popularized by white hairdresser-chemist Jheri Redding.

Johnson’s venture began to struggle as it faced competition from large hair care and cosmetics companies such as Revlon that sought to grab market share in the increasingly lucrative African American hairstyling business.

After the Johnsons divorced, ownership of their business changed hands a number of times before a majority African American investment firm acquired the business in 2009 from Procter & Gamble.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; editing by Donna Bryson and Michael Perry)