In 1954, George E. Johnson borrowed $250 to buy a hot comb and a mixing kettle and set up a hair care business in the back of a South Side Chicago shop. Johnson, who turned that loan into Johnson Products Company, maker of Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen and the first Black owned business listed on the American Stock Exchange, died on July 6, 2026, at his home in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood. He was 99.

He was born June 16, 1927, in Richton, Mississippi, and moved to Chicago with his mother, Priscilla, at age two. He grew up in Bronzeville on the South Side, where he shined shoes, delivered newspapers, waited tables and collected milk bottles for spare change, and he left high school in the eleventh grade. As a teenager he went to work for Fuller Products Company, the Black owned cosmetics firm run by Samuel B. Fuller, where he spent roughly a decade mixing and selling hair products and absorbed the Golden Rule philosophy he credited for much of his later success. "It's a foundation that was established in him as a child by his mother, that he established in all of us," his son Eric George Johnson said after his father's death, describing the values Johnson passed down.

Johnson used that experience, and the $250 loan, to found Johnson Products Company in 1954 with his wife, Joan, and a barber who later left the venture. Its first product, Ultra Wave, was a home hair relaxer marketed to men. Johnson extended the line into Ultra Sheen, a home hair straightener for women that offered an alternative to hours spent in a salon chair, and by the 1960s Johnson Products commanded as much as 80 percent of the Black hair care market, with additional lines including Afro Sheen, Classy Curl and Black Tie cologne.

In 1964, Johnson founded Independence Bank of Chicago and served as its chairman until the bank was sold in 1995. It grew into one of the largest Black owned banks in the country. "That was just so impressive to me that he would start the largest Black bank in the country," John W. Rogers Jr., founder and co-CEO of Ariel Investments, told The Associated Press after Johnson's death.

Two years later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. toured Johnson's manufacturing plant during a Chicago organizing trip. Johnson recalled King looking over the factory floor and declaring, "Now this is Black power!", an encounter he returned to decades later while writing his memoir, as he recounted to the Chicago Sun-Times.

In 1971, Johnson Products became the first Black owned company listed on the American Stock Exchange, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Around the same period, the company became one of the first national sponsors of "Soul Train," the Chicago born music and dance show. "Without George Johnson and Johnson Products there would not have been a Soul Train or a Soul Train Music Awards," Chicago media entrepreneur Don Jackson said after Johnson's death, according to CBS News Chicago. Johnson also became the first Black member of Commonwealth Edison's board of directors.

Johnson's business success translated into wider recognition and philanthropy. Ebony magazine gave him its American Black Achievement Award in 1978, and the Harvard Club of Chicago gave him its Public Service Award in 1979. Through the George E. Johnson Educational Fund, he and Joan funded more than 1,000 college scholarships.

The business changed hands more than once during Johnson's lifetime. A divorce in 1989 cost him majority ownership of the company he had founded, and in 1993 it was sold to the Miami based Ivax Corporation. Johnson and Joan remarried in 1995 and stayed married until her death in 2019. The Johnson Products brand later passed to Procter & Gamble in 2004, before a group of African American investors bought it back in 2009, returning it to Black ownership.

Johnson married Madeline Murphy Rabb on March 30, 2022. By then he kept homes in the Chicago suburb of Glencoe, in Paris and in Jamaica, and owned cattle ranches back in Mississippi, the state he had left as a toddler. In February 2025, at 97, he published a memoir, "Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, from Soul Train to Wall Street," cowritten with Hilary Beard. "He did the things that he did during an era when many people did not believe Black people were human," Beard said after Johnson's death. "He accomplished the things he did during an era when Black people, especially Black women, couldn't access the mainstream workplace," she told Block Club Chicago.

On November 4, 2025, Harvard University's Hutchins Center awarded Johnson its W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, the university's highest honor in African and African American studies. The following June, the Obama Foundation announced that a program room at its newly opened Obama Presidential Center in Chicago would carry the names of Joan and George Johnson, honoring the couple who had, in the foundation's words, "reshaped Black identity and entrepreneurship in America." His son Eric George Johnson later told The Associated Press that less than two weeks before his father's death, "he was standing with Barack Obama in the presidential library, dedicating a room for he and my mother. It's a wonderful life to celebrate."

Johnson died on the morning of July 6, 2026, at his Gold Coast home. "My sweet George died this morning," his wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, said afterward. He is survived by Rabb; his children, John Edward Johnson, Eric George Johnson, George "Petey" Ellis Johnson Jr. and Joan Marie Johnson; 10 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Illinois state Rep. Sonya Harper, who represents part of Chicago's South Side, said Johnson's influence reached well beyond hair care products. "George Johnson showed us that beauty is more than appearance," she said. "It is identity. It is culture. It is an economic power." Valerie Jarrett, chief executive of the Obama Foundation, described him as "a kind and decent, gentle man who, no matter how busy or important he became, always had time for quiet words of encouragement to those of us who looked up to him."

What Johnson leaves in Chicago is tangible. Johnson Products, under Black ownership again since 2009, still sells Afro Sheen and Ultra Sheen. Independence Bank helped open Chicago banking to a generation of Black entrepreneurs he mentored. The George E. Johnson Educational Fund keeps sending students to college on scholarships he and Joan started. And on Stony Island Avenue, a program room bearing both their names now hosts the kind of community classes and gatherings Johnson spent his life underwriting, not far from the South Side blocks where he once shined shoes for spare change.