George E. Johnson, the Chicago entrepreneur who built a landmark company that reshaped Black hair care in America through brands like Afro Sheen, Ultra Wave, and Classy Curl, has died at the age of 99, according to news media reports.
Johnson passed away Monday at his downtown Chicago condominium from natural causes, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, citing his son, John Edward Johnson. The New York Times, citing his second wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, reported that he died of a respiratory illness.
Born in a sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi, Johnson moved to Chicago with his mother when he was just 2 years old. He would go on to establish one of the most influential Black-owned businesses in American history.
Johnson Products Company was established in 1954 at a time when mainstream U.S. companies largely ignored African American consumers. The business, which Johnson co-founded alongside his first wife, Joan Johnson — who passed away in 2019 — captured close to 80% of the Black hair care market by 1960. In 1971, the company became the first Black-owned firm to be listed on the American Stock Exchange, now called NYSE American.
Leveraging the energy of the Black Pride and Black Power movements in its marketing, the company became the sole sponsor of the television music program “Soul Train,” helping the Chicago-based weekly show expand from a local broadcast into a nationally syndicated phenomenon.
Johnson’s path to entrepreneurship was anything but easy. After dropping out of high school, he worked as a door-to-door cosmetics salesman before deciding to strike out on his own. His initial application for a business loan was turned down by the first bank he approached, according to the Chicago Sun-Times and BlackPast.org, an online encyclopedia focused on African American history.
Undeterred, Johnson secured a $250 loan from another bank by telling the loan officer the money was for a family vacation rather than a business venture. In his 2025 memoir, also titled “Afro Sheen,” Johnson reflected on his reasoning: “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.”
The company’s early flagship products, including Ultra Wave for men and Ultra Sheen for women, were hair-relaxing items designed for home use that helped consumers achieve the straight and wavy styles fashionable in the 1950s and early 1960s. As the Black Power movement grew and more African Americans embraced natural hair textures, Johnson Products adapted by introducing the Afro Sheen Blow Out kit in the late 1960s, according to BlackPast.org. The company’s Classy Curl product later helped popularize the “Jheri curl” perm style, originally developed by white hairdresser-chemist Jheri Redding.
Eventually, the company faced mounting pressure from major hair care and cosmetics corporations like Revlon, which moved aggressively into the African American market. After Johnson and his first wife divorced, the business changed ownership multiple times before a majority African American investment firm purchased it from Procter & Gamble in 2009.
