George E. Johnson, a hair care magnate whose rise from a Mississippi sharecropper’s cabin to the helm of a groundbreaking Black owned company reshaped an entire industry, died Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 99.
His death was confirmed by his second wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, who said the cause was respiratory illness.
“Johnson Products became a fixture in homes and salons around the world and a source of pride throughout Black America,” his family said in a statement.
Johnson Products — the company behind Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen — also made its founder one of the nation’s wealthiest African Americans. The company became the first Black owned business listed on a major American stock exchange.
Johnson also helped found one of the first and largest Black owned banks, the Independence Bank of Chicago, where he served as chairman until it was sold in 1995. And for decades, Johnson Products shaped pop culture through its sponsorship of the nationally syndicated dance show “Soul Train” – and became the first Black controlled company to sponsor a national television program.
George Ellis Johnson was born June 16, 1927, in a sharecropper’s shack in Richton, Mississippi. When he was two years old, he came to Chicago with his mother, Priscilla Dean Johnson. She was just 18 when she left her husband and took her three small children to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. By the time Johnson was nine, he was contributing to the household as a shoeshine boy.
Johnson Products began in the laboratory of Samuel B. Fuller, a Black cosmetics entrepreneur, where Johnson worked after leaving high school to help provide for his family.
He joined Fuller Products as a salesman, but he entered product development when he invented a men’s hair relaxer called Ultra Wave. With Fuller’s blessing, he teamed up with his wife, Joan Johnson, to found Johnson Products in 1954.
According to The New York Times, when one finance company rejected his request for a business loan as “ridiculous,” Johnson secured $250 in seed money from another branch by saying he needed the funds to take Joan Johnson on vacation. Those early financing barriers later inspired him to help start a bank.
He sold Ultra Wave and other products from the trunk of his station wagon and traveled from Chicago to Harlem and back.
He eventually shifted his focus to beauty shops. He modified Ultra Wave for women, creating Ultra Sheen.
By the 1960s, Johnson Products held an estimated 80 percent of the Black hair care market. By 1970, annual sales reached $12.6 million — more than $100 million today. The company made history for a Black owned business when it was listed on the American Stock Exchange in January 1971.
Joan Johnson gained control of the company when the couple divorced in 1989. After several disruptions — including the departure of her son Eric as president and chief executive — she sold Johnson Products to the Ivax Corporation in 1993, netting about $32 million, or roughly $75 million in today’s dollars.
The Johnsons remarried in 1995. They remained married until her death in 2019.
Although he left school in the 11th grade, he received nine honorary doctorates over his lifetime. In 2024 Johnson published Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, From ‘Soul Train’ to Wall Street, a memoir written with Hilary Beard.
“I had an epiphany,” Johnson said in a statement released by the book’s publisher, Little, Brown and Company. “In that experience, I clearly heard five words: ‘You must tell your story.’ I believed it was the voice of the Lord. I made an 180-degree turn and immediately sought a writer.”
In addition to his second wife, whom he married in 2022, Johnson is survived by his sons Eric, John and George Jr.; his daughter, Joan; 10 grandchildren; and seven great grandchildren.
Information from the New York Times and PBS.org contributed to this report.