George E. Johnson, at 97, is a rich man. He’s been a rich man since the 1960s. He’s owned yachts, cattle ranches and a home in France. Years ago, he took a French lover; they divorced after a short marriage. He lived in Glencoe much of his life. He had a tennis court and swimming pool, and when his first wife came home from Neiman Marcus carrying thousands of dollars’ worth of designer clothes, he blinked and showed concern, but Joan, his wife, said they had money, what was the worry? Johnson was a rich man.
His mother nicknamed him “The Rich Man” before he actually was a rich man. He acted like one. His mother left Mississippi at 18 and arrived in Chicago as part of the Great Migration. He grew up near Bronzeville and took small jobs as early as age 6. He waited tables, washed cars, swept floors, shined shoes. After he made a little cash, he took horseback riding lessons around Hyde Park. He bought wide-legged jodhpurs and liked to walk around wearing them. He would also carry a riding crop, just because.
“I worked my butt off and did things a young Black man didn’t do then,” he said recently. “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.”
The other morning he looked out across Chicago, from his apartment on the 64th floor of Water Tower Place. It wraps around a corner of the skyscraper. From here you can see the West Side; turn and watch steam curling out of rooftops along Michigan Avenue. Jeanne Gang’s long, skeletal St. Regis stands tall in one window, though it’s actually a mile way.
Behind him was one of the Picassos he owns.
Beside him was a grand piano topped with a white bust, Schroeder-like. Around him were sculptures and vases and elegant cream-colored furniture he’s been collecting for decades, mingled with the paintings brought in by his third wife, renowned art consultant Madeline Murphy Rabb. They were married three years ago, when Johnson was 94.
It’s been a life.
And yet Johnson, as he insists in his new memoir, “Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, from ‘Soul Train’ to Wall Street,” never thought of himself as a capitalist. Being a capitalist meant greed, an accumulation of wealth, and Johnson accumulated plenty, but he lived by a question you don’t hear often in 2025:
How much money does one man need?
He decided recently that his story, and the lessons of his career, might be useful now.
Johnson made his money selling hair care products designed for Black communities. Afro Sheen, Ultra Sheen, Classy Curl, Gentle Treatment, along with Black Tie cologne. He made those. He created Johnson Products Co., which had a warehouse beside the Dan Ryan for decades. (Today, it’s home to Perspectives Leadership Academy, at Lafayette Avenue and 85th Street.) In the 1970s, Johnson Products became the first Black-owned business traded on Wall Street. Johnson used the money from that success to bankroll a Chicago TV show with national aspirations, “Soul Train.”
Throughout his four-decade long control of Johnson Products, he had a profit-sharing policy with employees. He had hundreds of employees and provided full health care, an on-site nurse, six sick days annually, four-day (paid) weekends every holiday, family leave, college tuition reimbursement (a decade before it was common) and a subsidized employee cafeteria.
He is proof a company can trickle down profits, when the will is there.
“I had spent the money that I made early on educating (barbers and hair stylists) how to use my project and it worked out well,” he said. “But listen, when the stockbrokers told me I had to discontinue profit sharing, saying investors would not stand for giving away 25 percent of profits, before taxes, to employees, I said: ‘Well, that’s a deal breaker.’ They thought I was crazy. I was not crazy. I was determined to keep profit sharing. My company started in ’54. By 1960, I was profit sharing. My feeling was, look, these people helped make my money, why not share it?”
I’m going to pause a moment to peek outside and see if the universe imploded.
Nope, looks good.
On the wall of his office are photos you might expect someone with this kind of success. Johnson with Barack Obama. Johnson with the Clintons. Johnson with Jesse Jackson (a close friend). Johnson with Muhammad Ali. Johnson with Oprah Winfrey. Beneath those, a note from Martin Luther King Jr., who toured the Johnson factory and proclaimed: “Now this is Black power!” About 90% of the staff were Black. King announced the creation of Operation Breadbasket in the cafeteria. Within seven years of business, the company was pulling in $7 million (adjusted for 2025 dollars) and hosting hairdresser dinners. In 1961, Louis Armstrong was the entertainment.
All of which emerged from Johnson’s signature hair straightener for men, Ultra Wave, then his Ultra Sheen relaxer for women, which reduced the heat and grease needed for straightening. The products themselves, said Hilary Beard, who helped Johnson write his memoir, contributed in its own way to the growth of a Black middle class in America.
“His relaxer meant your hair would be permanently straight, or straighter,” she said, “and that meant Black people could access work — so they could be seen as human. It’s hard for people to understand that now, but George was practicing and helping diversity and inclusion before the rest of mainstream Chicago businesses even considered it.
“I grew up in a world George created.”
Johnson looks tired, and happy. He has a wide, ingratiating smile. He remembers exactly why he decided to write a memoir at 97: “It was Nov. 21, 2021. A Sunday morning. I was sitting in the family room in my chair and all of a sudden the room got bright and I heard five words: ‘YOU MUST TELL YOUR STORY.’ I never intended to do a book. When I retired people asked, but I had no intention. My grandkids asked how I started the company, I’d think about the lessons the Lord bestowed and start to cry. I didn’t like talking about myself. I could never get through a story.
“I also considered that the way I met Orville Nelson was God’s plan.”
Nelson was a hotshot Chicago barber to Black celebrities, and Nat King Cole’s personal barber. Johnson and Nelson met at Fuller Products Co., a Black-owned cosmetics business, where Johnson was the head production chemist. Nelson wanted Fuller to make a better straightener. When Fuller passed on the idea, Johnson started working on solutions. He partnered for a time with Nelson.
But soon Johnson learned that Nelson was selling his own variation on their straightener, using some of Johnson’s work, but without Johnson’s knowledge. Their partnership dissolved soon after, and Johnson remained an acolyte of his former boss, S.B. Fuller, who was one of the richest Black men in America in the mid-1950s. Like Fuller, he saw his new company not as a way to get rich but to create generational wealth on the South Side.
Johnson’s memoir, then, plays like an alternate history, as seen through hair. As Black Power grows popular in the 1960s and people begin wearing their hair more natural, Johnson pivots to Afro Sheen. As Jheri curls take off and curly perms show few signs of being a fad, Johnson feels squeezed by competition, including Revlon.
By the end of the 1980s, he resigns from the company and as part of a divorce settlement, he turns over a controlling stake to his first wife, Joan, who eventually sells to the Ivax pharmaceutical corporation, which is swallowed by L’Oreal, which divests itself of several Johnson brands, and Johnson Products Co. eventually peters out around 2009.
Back at his apartment, Rabb comes into the room.
“You said you were never afraid of failure,” she tells her husband.
Johnson nods.
“I wasn’t,” he said. “No, I wasn’t. I really wasn’t. I spent 10 years with Fuller, and his philosophy was the Golden Rule, and I absorbed it.” The Golden Rule, in case you’ve forgotten, is quite old school: Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com