George E. Johnson Sr., who turned a $250 loan into one of the largest Black-owned businesses in America and, in 1971, into the first Black-owned company traded on the American Stock Exchange, died Monday morning, July 6, at his home in downtown Chicago. He was 99. His son John Edward Johnson confirmed the death; The New York Times, citing Johnson's wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, reported the cause as a respiratory illness [1][2].

The mainstream account leads, understandably, with the jars: Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen, the products that sat on bathroom shelves across Black America and were advertised, week after week, on "Soul Train," the television show Johnson Products sponsored nationally through the 1970s [2][3]. That is a real inheritance, and X has spent the week trading it — the shelf, the commercials, the show. But the nostalgia buries the harder and more instructive story, which is the balance sheet.

Johnson was born in 1927 in Richton, Mississippi, and carried to Chicago's South Side as a child in the Great Migration. In 1954, with his first wife, Joan, and $250 in borrowed money, he founded Johnson Products Company to serve a Black hair-care market the mainstream cosmetics industry had simply declined to see [1][2]. He did not just enter that market. He built it, and then took most of it: by 1960 the company commanded close to 80 percent of the Black hair-care business [3]. The 1971 listing on the American Stock Exchange was not a vanity milestone. It was a capital event — a Black-owned manufacturer meeting Wall Street on Wall Street's terms and being priced there.

What Johnson did with the proceeds is the part the paper wants on the record. He recycled the fortune into the community that produced it. He founded Independence Bank, a Black-owned bank on the South Side. He became the first Black board member of Commonwealth Edison, the Illinois utility [1]. And he established the George E. Johnson Educational Fund, which awarded more than 1,000 college scholarships [1]. A self-made market became a bank, a board seat, and a thousand tuition checks.

Joan Johnson, his co-founder and first wife, died in 2019 [2]. His 2024 memoir carried a title that read the whole arc in one line — "Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, from Soul Train to Wall Street" [1]. Soul Train was the culture. Wall Street was the capital. Johnson is one of the few American builders who insisted on both and let neither stand in for the other.

He is survived by Rabb and by children from his marriage to Joan. The obituaries will run the Afro Sheen jar, and they should. But the man was an entrepreneur first, and the truest monument is the one he compounded: a market he invented, a listing no Black founder had reached before him, and a fortune he refused to keep to himself.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York