George E. Johnson, Sr., the entrepreneur whose namesake haircare company, Johnson Products Company (JPC), reshaped the beauty industry for Black consumers and broke barriers on Wall Street, has died. As confirmed by his son John Edward Johnson, he died from natural causes at his home in downtown Chicago. He was 99.
Johnson’s story began far from the boardroom. He was born in 1927 in Richton, Mississippi, and later moved to Chicago as a child, where he worked from a young age shining shoes and bussing tables to help support his family. Those formative years, according to his family, instilled the values that would define his career and guide his life: humility, determination, personal responsibility, and treating everyone with dignity and respect.
Before finding success on his own, Johnson worked as a production chemist for S.B. Fuller’s cosmetics firm in 1944, an apprenticeship in the industry he would later come to dominate. The origin of his own company has become part of business lore: When Fuller Products passed on a pitch idea from a Chicago barber seeking a gentler hair straightener, Johnson took it on, seeing it as an opportunity and working with a chemist colleague, Herbert Martini, to develop a formula that wouldn’t burn scalps as it worked. Securing the capital to launch it required some ingenuity of its own. After a bank rejected his loan request, Johnson went to a different branch of the same bank. He told the loan officer he needed the money to take his wife on vacation, correctly betting that this framing wouldn’t trigger the officer’s prejudices.
In 1954, with that loan in hand and his wife Joan’s encouragement, Johnson founded Johnson Products Company on Chicago’s South Side. The company launched with, in the family’s words, “an unshakable belief that opportunity should exist for everyone.” The brand’s breakthrough products, Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen, became household names, salon staples, and “a source of pride throughout Black America,” according to the Johnson family in a statement.
Ultra Sheen, a home-use hair straightener introduced in the late 1950s, drove much of the company’s early growth, with Afro Sheen arriving later to serve an entirely different cultural moment. Afro Sheen captured the “Black is Beautiful” movement as the Afro became a prominent symbol of identity and pride in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, the business was thriving. Annual sales topped $31 million by 1974, fueled in part by advertising campaigns from Black-owned agencies that portrayed Black people in loving family moments and professional careers, a striking departure from the era’s typical advertising.
Johnson Products’ most historic milestone came in 1971, when it became the first Black-owned company to trade on the American Stock Exchange. The company’s cultural footprint extended into entertainment, too, as the longtime sponsor of Soul Train, the dance and music show that became a cultural institution. Longtime friend and business associate Don Jackson underpinned just how pivotal that backing was. “Without George Johnson and Johnson Products, there would not have been a Soul Train or a Soul Train Music Awards,” he said, calling Johnson “a great businessman who loved his community.”
Johnson’s ambitions reached beyond beauty products. He founded Independence Bank in 1964 to expand access to capital in underserved communities and became the first African American to sit on the board of Commonwealth Edison. Reflecting on his path from poverty to prominence, Johnson told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1979: “Anyone given the same opportunities can get ahead. You just need the same mental attitude and motivation.”
His family’s public statement, released following his passing, captured the scope of what he built: “George was a visionary business leader who built a haircare empire, broke barriers on Wall Street, and helped fuel the fight for civil rights.” His son added simply, “I think his legacy as a businessman and philanthropist speaks for itself.’ Johnson is survived by his second wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, as well as his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Funeral arrangements have not yet been announced.