George E. Johnson, founder of Johnson Products and creator of Afro Sheen, dies at 99

By Megan Sayles
AFRO Staff Writer
msayles@afro.com

Visionary businessman and philanthropist George E. Johnson, who founded Johnson Products Co. (JPC), died peacefully at his Chicago home on July 6. He was 99. 

Johnson laid the foundation for a hair care empire when he founded JPC in 1954—creating some of the most prominent products in Black households, including Ultra Wave, Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen. The company became the first Black-owned business to go public on then-American Stock Exchange (AMEX) in 1969. 

Throughout his life, Johnson was steered by one central principle, the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have then do unto you. 

“When you adhere to the Golden Rule, you do things right. You help people. Then, when you help people, they help you,” said Johnson in an episode of the AFRO Chicken Boxx in 2025. “When people see how dedicated you are, they pay attention. That’s what worked for me.” 

Born to Priscilla Dean Johnson and Charles David Johnson on June 16, 1927, George E. Johnson was raised on a sharecropping plantation in Richton, Miss. When he was 2 years old, his mother left the Cotton State to escape racial violence and oppression in the Deep South, bringing Johnson and his brothers to Chicago. 

At 17, Johnson withdrew from high school and started working at Fuller Products, a Black-owned cosmetics and household goods company started by Samuel B. Fuller. Johnson looked to Fuller as a mentor and absorbed his philosophy of living by the Golden Rule. That philosophy would shape the opportunity that changed his life. 

While riding an elevator at Fuller Products, Johnson struck up a conversation with a barbershop owner who had been unable to meet with Fuller about improving a hair product. Johnson took the man’s business card and vowed to visit the shop himself.

Months later, Johnson kept that promise. He took the product back to the laboratory, spending nine months refining the formula before creating a version he believed could succeed in the marketplace. Convinced he had found the foundation for his own business, Johnson pieced together $500 in startup capital—borrowing $250 from a friend and securing another $250 bank loan after telling the loan officer he planned to use the money to take his wife on vacation.

The risk paid off. After founding JPC in 1954, Johnson transformed the business into one of the nation’s largest Black-owned enterprises. His first wife and high-school sweetheart, Joan Johnson, ran the business beside him, eventually leading the accounting department. The pair had four children together: Eric G. Johnson, John Johnson, George Johnson Jr. and Joan Marie Johnson. 

By the mid-1960s, Johnson’s success had attracted national attention. In 1966, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. toured JPC’s headquarters and remarked that it embodied the promise of Black Power. 

“When Dr. King visited us in 1966, Black Power was a phrase that described a new way of thinking about ourselves,” Johnson told AFRO writer Kevin McNeir in 2025. “But Dr. King used the phrase as a real compliment as he assessed our several floors that were jumping with acitivity—salesmen, chemists, secretaries—a mostly-Black group of employees who were finding their way into American’s middle class.” 

In 1971, he continued to expand JPC’s national reach by sponsoring the popular television program “Soul Train,” providing its initial financial backing to host and producer Don Cornelius. By 1975, JPC’s annual sales grew from $11.2 million to $37 million.

Even as the company expanded, Johnson said his greatest accomplishment wasn’t its financial success but the workplace culture he created. 

“My feeling was that my employees spent more of their waking hours with me in the company working, and it ought to be as comfortable for them or even more comfortable for them in their workplace than at home,” said Johnson on the AFRO Chicken Boxx. “I wanted them to feel like they were at home in my company.” 

That sentiment extended beyond words. Beginning in 1960, Johnson instituted a profit-sharing program that distributed 15 percent of the company’s pre-tax profits to employees. 

After decades of building JPC, Johnson’s later years were marked by both loss and an unexpected new chapter in his personal life. In 2019, his wife Joan Johnson died, sending him into a period of depression. Wanting to see him happy again, his granddaughters encouraged him to connect with art curator Madeline Murphy Rabb, the great-granddaughter of AFRO founder John H. Murphy and sister of civil rights attorney William “Billy” Murphy.

Johnson had known Rabb for more than 50 years and immediately asked his granddaughters to help him find her phone number. Eager to reconnect, he began searching for her contact information himself. After tracking down her number online, Johnson called Rabb and invited her to dinner in November 2021. 

The couple married on March 30, 2022, and Johnson became the stepfather of her two sons: Maurice Rabb and Christopher Rabb, who recently won a highly contested race to represent Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District. 

“My sweet George died this morning. Some of the happiest four years of our lives were spent with each other,” Rabb told AFRO publisher Frances Toni Draper. “He always said that we were divinely ordained to be together.” 

Rabb later helped Johnson chronicle his life and career in his memoir: “Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, from Soul Train to Wall Street,” which was published in 2025. 

Throughout his nearly century-long life, Johnson maintained that lasting success and fulfillment were rooted not in wealth, but in faith, character and the Golden Rule that guided him. 

“My best advice is get close to the Lord and stay as close as you can,” said Johnson on the AFRO Chicken Boxx. “He will take you places you never believed you could go.”e, Johnson maintained that lasting success and fulfillment were rooted not in wealth, but in faith, character and the Golden Rule that guided him. 

“My best advice is get close to the Lord and stay as close as you can,” said Johnson on the AFRO Chicken Boxx. “He will take you places you never believed you could go.”