George E. Johnson Sr.

Orville Nelson stepped onto an elevator at Fuller Products Company looking beaten, and George E. Johnson, on his way down to a second job, stopped to ask what was wrong. Nelson was a South Side barber, and the relaxer he used to straighten his customers' hair carried so much lye that his shop had to rush each man to the shampoo bowl before it scorched his scalp. Johnson spent his days in Fuller's lab learning to emulsify other men's formulas, and he thought he could solve the barber's problem. He and a Fuller chemist, Herbert Martini, worked out a milder cream, and that cream became the company Johnson would run for the rest of his working life. Johnson died of natural causes at his home in downtown Chicago on July 6, 2026, at the age of 99, his son John Edward Johnson said.

He launched the product, Ultra Wave Hair Culture, on $500, half of it a bank loan and the other half put up by Nelson, and by his own account had a dollar left when it reached the barbershops. Johnson Products Company, founded in 1954 with Nelson, who soon left the business, grew out of that dollar into a manufacturer that in 1971 became the first Black-owned company to trade on the American Stock Exchange. A man who had collected milk bottles for the junkman at the age of six now ran a company whose shares traded on Wall Street.

He was born on June 16, 1927, in Richton, Mississippi, and came north to Chicago's Bronzeville in the summer of 1929, sharing a rooming-house room with his mother and two siblings. As a boy he ran a paper route and bussed heavy trays at a downtown nightclub, adding his wages to his mother's. He left Wendell Phillips High School in his junior year when his older brother brought him into Fuller Products, the cosmetics firm run by S.B. Fuller, then one of the wealthiest Black businessmen in the country. It was in Fuller's lab that Johnson learned his chemistry, and from Fuller that he took the Golden Rule he named as his method for the rest of his life.

What set his company apart was as much how he sold as what he made. Ultra Wave led to Ultra Sheen and then Afro Sheen, and Johnson hired the Black adman Vincent T. Cullers to advertise them with images of Black customers as physicians, artists, and world figures, in place of the caricatures most national advertising still used. Cullers built a campaign around the Swahili phrase "watu wazuri," beautiful people. Johnson's money also pushed "Soul Train," Don Cornelius's Chicago dance program, into national syndication in 1971, the first Black show to make that move, and Afro Sheen commercials ran between sets by Marvin Gaye and the Jackson 5.

Success also brought a fight he did not pick. In 1975 the Federal Trade Commission required Johnson to label his Ultra Sheen relaxer as containing lye, and he signed a consent order agreeing to do it. He contended that white-owned competitors like Revlon, which sold copies of his straighteners, were not made to carry the same warning, and that the gap handed them a marketing edge. When the Seventh Circuit took up the case, it found the order later entered against Revlon was indeed less restrictive than his and sent the dispute back to the commission, without deciding whether the difference was unfair.

He did not hold on to the company. In their 1989 divorce he transferred Johnson Products to his wife, Joan, and she sold it to the Ivax Corporation in 1993, ending nearly four decades of his ownership; it later passed out of Black hands and was bought back by a group of investors in 2009. Johnson had built a second base by then, having helped start Chicago's Independence Bank in 1964 and gone on to chair its holding company, Indecorp, one of the larger Black-owned banking operations in the country.

He is survived by his wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, and four children. In 2025 he told the whole of it in a memoir, Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, from "Soul Train" to Wall Street. The approach in its pages was the one he had brought onto that elevator at Fuller: find what is hurting people, and build the thing that stops it.