George Ellis Johnson Sr. died on Sunday in Chicago at 99. [1] He had founded Johnson Products Company in 1954 with a $250 loan, built it into the first Black-owned business listed on the American Stock Exchange, and spent 70 years doing something that the American economy was not designed for: making Black people the intended customer rather than the afterthought.

The obituaries will lead with the milestones: the AMEX listing in 1971, the $31 million in annual sales by 1974, the products — Ultra Sheen, Afro Sheen, Ultra Wave, Classy Curl. [1] These are accurate and insufficient. The milestone that most precisely captures what Johnson built is smaller and more specific: in the early 1970s, Johnson Products became the first national sponsor of Soul Train. [2]

What that meant, in practice, was that a Black-owned cosmetics company was funding a Black-produced television program that reached a Black national audience. No white broadcast executives decided what went in the ad break. No mainstream advertiser had to be convinced that Black consumers constituted a viable market segment. Johnson's money reached Johnson's intended customers through a media channel that belonged to the same community it served. This was not a hair-care business decision. It was a demonstration that the architecture of Black commerce — from production to advertising to viewership to purchase — could be vertically integrated without the permission of the structures that had ignored that architecture for decades. [2]

The Afro Sheen product itself carried a message that the hair-care industry had declined to send. Straighteners had dominated Black hair care through the mid-20th century, in part because the beauty standards enforced by mainstream media left natural Black hair unmarketable. Afro Sheen was formulated for natural hair. Its advertising — in print and on Soul Train — placed natural Black hair in a commercial context that the broadcast television industry was not, in 1971, willing to place it in independently. Johnson paid for that context to exist. [3]

He grew up in Richton, Mississippi, and moved to Chicago's South Side as a teenager. He worked as a door-to-door salesman of beauty products before approaching Fuller Products Company as a chemist's assistant, where he learned the manufacturing side of the business. The $250 loan that capitalized Johnson Products Company in 1954 came from his employer at the time. [1] His wife Joan co-founded the company with him. She died in 1999.

In 1964, Johnson founded Independence Bank on the South Side, adding a financial services institution to the ecosystem of Black-owned enterprises he was building. [1] Muhammad Ali visited the South Side headquarters. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visited. The company had become by the late 1960s a physical address for Black Chicago's economic aspirations, and Johnson understood — in a way that many of his contemporaries in both business and civil rights did not — that those aspirations required a commercial expression to outlast individual leadership. [2]

Johnson Products was acquired by IVAX Corporation in 1993 and eventually by Wella in 2000. The Soul Train sponsorship that had made Afro Sheen famous predated the sale by two decades; the products and the brand name survived under different ownership. Johnson himself remained in Chicago, active into his 90s. In 2025, he and author Hilary Beard published his memoir, also titled Afro Sheen, through Little, Brown. [3]

He is survived by his second wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, four children, ten grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. [1] His death came of a respiratory illness.

The CROWN Act era — legislation in dozens of states prohibiting hair-texture discrimination in workplaces and schools — traces a direct line back to the cultural project Afro Sheen embodied in 1971: that natural Black hair belongs in commercial life, professional life, and public life on its own terms. Johnson did not lobby for that legislation. He built the commercial proof of concept that made the argument before the legislation existed. The billion-dollar Black beauty market that operates today has a financial address: a South Side Chicago storefront and a $250 loan.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York