George E. Johnson, the pioneering Chicago entrepreneur whose eponymous company transformed Black hair care in the United States with brands including Afro Sheen, Ultra Wave and Classy Curl, died on Monday at age 99, according to a family statement.
The family said Johnson “passed away peacefully at home at the age of 99, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy of entrepreneurship, faith, perseverance, philanthropy, and family.”
The New York Times, citing his second wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, reported that Johnson died of a respiratory illness.
Johnson Products Co. 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.
“He truly believed business could be a force for good, creating opportunity, strengthening communities, opening doors for others, and demonstrating that success carries with it a responsibility to serve,” the family statement said.
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 was born in a sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi in 1927, moved to Chicago with his mother at age 2. He later worked as a door-to-door cosmetics salesman after dropping out of high school and 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.
“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.”
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 hairstyles 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.
