Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...George E. Johnson Sr., the onetime chemist who built Chicago-based Johnson Products Co., the nation’s largest producer of cosmetics and hair products for African Americans, died on Monday at his Chicago home.
The death was confirmed in a statement by the Johnson family. Johnson had been a longtime resident of Water Tower Place in the Gold Coast, and he previously had lived in Glencoe.
For decades, Johnson was influential in the lives of post-World War II Black Americans, both through his company’s expansive product line, which included items such as Afro Sheen, Classy Curl, Gentle Treatment and Ultra Sheen, and through sponsorship of the TV dance program “Soul Train.” The success and market dominance of the company, which was founded in 1954 and sold to a white-run firm in 1993, was long seen as proof that Black business leaders could create their own business dynasties. Born George Ellis Johnson in Richton, Mississippi, in 1927 to Charles and Priscilla Johnson, Johnson moved with his family to Chicago when he was 2 years old. Industrious and entrepreneurial, Johnson, who grew up near Bronzeville, began working at age 6, collecting milk bottles. Later jobs included shining shoes, delivering newspapers, waiting tables and setting pins at a bowling alley.
“I worked my butt off and did things a young Black man didn’t do then,” Johnson told the Tribune in 2025. “I took my riding lessons in Washington Park. I went to the theater. I went to the opera. I dressed up for school every day. And I made money. I was never unemployed.”
Johnson left Wendell Phillips High School as a junior to join his brother as a door-to-door salesman for Black-owned Fuller Products, founded by Samuel B. Fuller. After a year of knocking on doors, Johnson joined Fuller’s laboratory staff, eventually becoming head production chemist — a role that taught him how to make everything from lipsticks and foundation to cologne.
“I spent 10 years with Fuller, and his philosophy was the ‘Golden Rule’ and I absorbed it,” Johnson told the Tribune last year. “The Golden Rule, in case you’ve forgotten, is quite old school: Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.”
After 10 years at Fuller, Johnson decided to strike off on his own, emboldened by a formula for hair straightening he developed in Fuller’s lab at the behest of Orville Nelson, a hair stylist for some stars, including Nat King Cole. Nelson tried out Johnson’s mix of lye and petroleum for his customers, and it was a success.
“One day, he said, ‘This is it. Don’t touch it,’” Johnson told the Tribune in 1993. “That day, I knew there was an opportunity to start a business.”
With that, Johnson Products was born. He started the business with a $250 loan. The straightener, known as Ultra Wave Hair Culture, was his first product and his first location was the back room of a friend’s store.
“That was where we got our start — 517 E. 63rd St.,” Johnson recalled to the Tribune in 1987. “I found someone who believed in me and someone who was willing to let me rent out that space. I paid $35 a month, worked a job during the day and went there every night to work.”
The business grew rapidly. By 1958, Johnson Products had begun selling products aimed not just at men but at women as well. That year, the company was large enough to occupy the entire second floor of a South Side warehouse, and two years later, it bought a three-story building. In 1964, the business began generating $1 million a year in revenue for the first time, and within the next several years, Johnson Products rolled out the Afro Sheen hair care line and the Ultra Sheen no-base creme relaxer.
Johnson steered his company through explosive growth, generating $12 million in sales in 1970 and $37 million in revenue by 1975. Johnson Products went public in 1971 on the American Stock Exchange — the first Black-owned company to do so.
In 1971, Johnson’s firm began sponsoring the syndicated TV show “Soul Train,” which relocated production from Los Angeles to Chicago as a result. His investment helped popularize the show further, while also offering Johnson Products greater exposure.
“The show did a great deal for us,” Johnson told the Tribune in 2012. “By around 1977, our sales had gone from $12 million (in 1971) to $40 million.”
The company’s success drew larger, deeper-pocketed competitors. It also found itself in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission, which in 1975 required the company to expand its warning label to five paragraphs to inform consumers that one of its hair-relaxer product’s ingredients was lye. While Johnson’s company already had warnings on its labels, it complied with the FTC, which assured Johnson Products that it would require hair-relaxer products made by white-owned businesses to do so as well.
However, that didn’t happen right away, Johnson told the Tribune in 1987, and the upshot was that it crimped Johnson Products’ sales and damaged the company’s consumer loyalty in the Black community.
“You couldn’t tell Black beauticians back then that our product was still good,” Johnson said. “They made the choice by looking at our package, with a five-paragraph warning, and looking at those that had none. I didn’t think we’d ever recover from it.”
Despite being beset by financial problems, Johnson Products remained a force well into the 1980s. In 1985, the company signed a multiyear endorsement deal with a young Chicago Bulls basketball player named Michael Jordan. Johnson Products also signed Jordan’s mother, Deloris, to an endorsement deal.
In 1988, Johnson’s wife, Joan, whom he had married in March 1950, filed for divorce. Johnson exited as Johnson Products’ chairman and CEO in 1989 and, as part of the divorce settlement, he turned over his controlling stock to Joan, who became the company’s boss and majority shareholder. In 1993, she oversaw Johnson Products’ sale to Miami-based pharmaceutical firm Ivax Corp.
“It’s like the worst nightmare I could have ever had,” Johnson told the Tribune in 1993. “Never in my wildest dreams when I was building this company did I believe it would wind up out of the Black community.”
Ivax sold Johnson Products in 2004 to Procter & Gamble, which then sold it to a consortium of Black-owned investors in 2009.
Johnson also served as chairman of the board of Independence Bank, which he helped found in 1964. He later was chair of the bank’s holding company, Indecorp, and he remained chairman until overseeing Indecorp’s sale to Chicago-based Shorebank in 1995.
Johnson also served on the U.S. Postal Service’s board of governors, beginning in 1971. In addition, he was the first Black member of the board of directors of Commonwealth Edison, and he also served on the boards of the Chicago Urban League, Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the Lyric Opera Chicago.
Johnson was later married to Renee Derem for a short time in the 1990s. In 1995, he remarried his first wife, who died in 2019. Johnson is survived by his third wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb; three sons, Eric, John and George Jr.; a daughter, Joan Marie; 10 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Services are pending.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.