How Black hair care grew Black power

This is Planet Money from NPR.

There's this woman on TikTok who is so incredibly compelling.

The next dress is from Zonda Rhodes, and I do have an iconic photo of my grandmother wearing

it, so let me show you.

Her name is Olivia Joan Colley, like so beautiful.

She's a young black photographer, and all of these posts Olivia Joan is trying on pieces

from a heap of incredibly fancy vintage clothing on a couch.

The beadwork is just impeccable.

It all belonged to her grandmother.

This dress weighs like 50 pounds.

It is very heavy.

There are shoes that cost more than some people's rent, and have never even been worn.

And then there are some very worn things.

This piece of my grandmother's favorite top, it even has like a bunch of stains on it from

when she's spilled.

And it still smells like her too, and she was my best friend, and so yeah, we're running

out of time.

Okay.

Bye.

The thing that's so striking about Olivia Joan's post is that these are co-tour dresses.

So her grandmother, a black woman, was wearing custom Chanel, Givenchy, Eve Saint Laurent.

This is for the wealthiest of the wealthy.

Some of the same designers who dressed Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy, and Princess Diana,

dressing this black woman from the south side of Chicago.

We called up Olivia Joan, and she told us, that is why she's been posting these outfits

of her grandmother's.

You really did not see black men and women able to even afford designer pieces, but to

see that my grandmother had such a deep, rooted archival collection as the reason why I really

think kept talking about it.

Olivia Joan says it even took her a long time to clock her grandparents' importance.

Like I remember my grandmother and I were watching the crown, and she was like, oh, I was

friends with a queen sister, and then I was just, I was just like, what, what did you

say?

Who was your grandmother?

Yeah, my grandmother is Joan Betty Henderson Johnson.

Joan Johnson, and her grandfather?

Who am I?

I'm Georgie Johnson.

That's all.

Um, that most certainly is not all.

George E. Johnson was Joan's husband, but he was also the maker of AfroShine, the most

iconic black hair product of the 20th century.

And don't forget AfroShine's conditioner and hairdress, the best for conditioning and

highlighting your hair.

And what do you want?

Nothing I can't get from AfroShine.

AfroShine's blowout kid and conditioner and hairdress, Johnson's AfroShine, the largest

selling products in a natural world.

It's hard to overstate.

How central AfroShine was the black culture and the rise of black business.

And in a way, the story of the Johnson's company is how they melded those two, because

while Olivia Joan posts her TikToks so people will understand wealthy black entrepreneurs

like her grandparents existed for the team here at Planet Money, how they made their

money, that's the story.

The Johnson's were among the most successful black entrepreneurs of their time, and they

did it by recognizing a key thing, that if you paid enough attention to what black Americans

needed, you could make money.

The Johnson saw black culture as black business.

The money they made helped fund the civil rights movement, paid for the legendary television

show, Soul Train, and for Joan's legendary shopping sprees.

And all that money came from black hair care products.

I still remember my grandparents coming over for dinner, and we would be watching

football while my mom's cooking, and I would have my hair down, and my grandfather would

come over and touch it and be like, Joan, we got to have a conversation.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Sonari Glatton.

Long time contributor, friend of the show, and America Baris, Joan and George Johnson's

intimate understanding of what black people wanted and needed for their hair and for their

lives helped grow the black middle class and black power.

And at the same time, they helped create what is today a multi-billion dollar industry.

Which, though they started it, they no longer owned.

Today on the show, the rise and fall of Johnson products, we're going to tell you this story

in three hairstyles, the conk, the afro, and the Jerry curl.

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OK, so we told you we're going to tell you this story in three hairstyles.

And before we get to our first, the conk, meaning, chemically straightened hair, we need

to paint you a picture of the times.

It's the early 1950s, World War II is just over.

And it's the second wave of the Great Migration.

And black workers are streaming into northern cities like Detroit and Chicago.

And at the time, the biggest music star is Nat King Cole.

Straighten up and fly right.

Nat King Cole is the absolute epitome of black style during this era.

His smooth voice, immaculate tailoring, and shiny, straight hair.

This was before George Johnson started his hair care company.

And well before Joan Johnson started rocking Chanel.

George wasn't straightening his hair like Nat King Cole.

That wasn't his world.

But he saw it was what a lot of black folks really wanted.

As black people were moving into the middle class, there was intense pressure to assimilate.

The more kinky you contact your hair, the wider you looked, the more respectable.

And the better your chances in the workforce.

Not only did they straighten it, but they finger-waved it.

So they would have waves in their hair.

They were going crazy for this.

And this was when George Johnson was coming of age, though he'd actually been hustling

for years already.

I started working when I was like six years old.

Did you say six years old?

Six years old, yeah.

That was during the Great Depression.

George, his brothers, and his mom had moved to Chicago from Mississippi.

They were extremely poor.

So Joan and I started going up and down the back stairs of the building we lived in.

And going in the garbage cans and picking up the milk bottles, the paper, the rags.

You were like kind of like scrapping things.

For every pound of paper, we got a, I think, a penny.

The only thing that got us some real money was when we took the tin foil that was in

the wrappers of the cigarette packages.

It took a long time, but when we got to say a pound of that tin foil, we get some real

money from the junk man for that.

George worked all kinds of jobs, shining shoes, delivering newspapers.

And while he was poor, he was lucky enough to land at this legendary Chicago high school.

It's called Wendell Phillips.

That King Cole went there, Sam Cook, Mary T. Washington.

She was the first black woman CPA.

And that high school was where George would meet his future wife, Joan.

Joan graduated.

George didn't finish because he needed money.

So by the 1950s, when the conk that straightened processed hair was all the rage, George was

moonlighting as a bathroom attendant and washing cars in the weekends.

And his main job was in a black owned company that made cosmetics, where he eventually worked

his way up to mixing chemicals in a lab.

How do you get a chemistry background after two years of high school?

I took two years of chemistry in high school.

That was enough.

No, no, no.

George learned on the job.

And then one day, after he'd become essentially operations manager, he was riding the elevator

at work and he met a barber, Orville Nelson.

Orville ran a, well, no barber shop on the south side of Chicago.

And he was trying to get the company George worked for to partner with him.

See this guy, Orville, had created his own hair straightener.

His chemical product that turned curly, kinky, coily hair to straight permanently.

Orville was Nat King Cole's barber, a pretty big deal.

George says Orville would fly to California just to do Nat's hair.

But when George met Orville, he had this look about him.

When I looked at his face, he looked so dejected that I just popped out of my mouth.

What the hell is wrong with you?

What was wrong with him was that the straightening mixture he'd come up with was not working

the way he wanted it to.

Orville was a barber, not a chemist, but he'd come up with a concoction based on old recipes

that included mixing egg, potato, and sodium hydroxide, or what we call lie.

And these were powerful chemicals.

Leave them in just long enough and you had swinging hair.

Believe these products in the hair too long and it might burn longer than that.

You might not have any hair left.

So in that elevator, Orville is benting about his frustrations.

And George, thinking about the chemistry of it all, is so intrigued that he asks Orville

to come watch his barber's inaction.

I went over to a shop and walked in and shocked when I saw what was going on inside.

This wasn't your picture postcard barber shop where everyone's sitting around and talking

about sports and politics.

This was pandemonium.

The barbers would run to a vat of the concoction where they'd mix it up, then pour it into

a small jar, then race back to their clients and apply it to their heads.

He had four chairs.

They were always full.

And these guys were working like crazy to get this product in and out of the head on

the people they were working on.

The men were squirming in their chairs waiting for it to work.

Then just before it burned them too badly, the barbers would turn the chair around and

lower their heads into the shampoo bowl.

And George saw what the problem was.

They needed something, some ingredient to keep it stable.

It was obvious to me when I saw the product, the way it was separated, it told me that it

needed to be emulsified.

So I thought it would be very easy, because I knew it was not, took nine months.

George used his boss's chemistry lab to start experimenting.

And after night, he tried vat after vat of chemicals in different combinations.

And then he'd give them the Orville who tried them out in his barbershop.

Finally, George found something he thought was going to work.

He describes it as being thicker than mayonnaise.

He took the formula to Orville who tried it on some clients.

He said, this is it.

Don't touch it.

Don't move.

We got it.

And it just popped out of my mouth when he said that I said, we order.

We ought to market this.

George recognized in this improved black hair care product a massive economic opportunity.

We can make a product that would do this for everybody.

In 1954, Orville and George went into business together.

The product was ultra wave hair culture.

Got to love those names.

Yeah.

Now, this wasn't the first hair straightener.

But what was new was this product was shelf stable and reliable.

So George started selling ultra wave to barbershops around Chicago and building trust with

those barbers by teaching them how to use the product.

And almost instantly, it was a hit.

So much so that he asked his wife, Joan, to quit her good paying government job to help

him handle the books and the product, capping and labeling jars, loading trucks.

Eventually when George and Orville's business relationships soured, Orville left, and George

and Joan took over, it was Johnson products company.

And George says, Joan turned out to be a fearless business woman.

Like one time, this barber owed the money.

And she went out to collect the day that she went.

He was just going to blow her off and tell her, you know, I don't have the money.

I can't pay the bill right now.

So she said, okay, then I'm going to serve him till you do.

Remember, this is the 50s when a woman was not welcome at a barbershop.

And they tried to run her out of that with some nasty language.

But she just said them reading the magazine until the guy finally decided he had to pay

her.

And he did.

We're kind of reputation that she got after that.

Oh, she was tough.

She had a tough reputation.

You're going to pay this lady.

Joan and George were selling ultra-wave the barbershops all over Chicago.

And then they started expanding.

The property came out of Chicago and able me to open up in Annapolis.

And then the money out in Annapolis helped me open up Cleveland.

And then I could go to Detroit and then to Memphis, the St. Louis, you know, just market

by market.

They eventually moved beyond just barbershops and get their products on two store shelves.

And they start making products for women.

They want to grow more.

So they build a real headquarters in their neighborhood on the south side of Chicago,

a laboratory and factory that becomes like a monument to black culture.

I grew up as a kid driving past that Johnson products factory on the Dan Ryan big express

way in Chicago.

And it was such a symbol of black entrepreneurship and black business.

Yeah.

And George hired majority black people and he paid them well in every division.

Everyone from the janitors to the executives.

In those days, if you were black and successful like the Johnson's where you didn't just grow

your own business, your responsibility was to grow your community.

So George, along with a group of mostly black businessmen, took over a failed neighborhood

bank so that other black entrepreneurs and families could get loans and renamed it

in the parents bank by 1965.

George Johnson was one of the most successful black businessmen of all time.

And a big part of his success was that from the start, he saw black people as customers

and gave them what they needed, whether it was hair straightener or a loan from the bank.

But now their customers were changing.

By the mid 1960s, young people were losing interest in straightening their hair.

The civil rights movement was an absolute full swing and hair straightening didn't align

with the message of the movement.

civil rights leaders were demanding human rights and also rejecting white beauty standards

and that meant embracing natural hair.

Black is beautiful and what God gave you is good enough.

We got on it right away and we came up with a great product called AfroShine.

AfroShine.

The company's new product was a hair moisturizer for Afros.

So in our story, as told through three hairstyles, here is the second one, the Afro, a dramatic

new look for the era of civil rights and black power.

And right around the time AfroShine hit shelves, something happened that shows just how central

this company had become.

I got a call from Dr. King in October as in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Asking me for an appointment in November.

It was 1966 and King wanted to come toward George's research facility.

Now this was a low moment in the civil rights movement for King and his organization.

When Dr. King came to visit me that day, let me know they couldn't make payroll.

And as King walked around Johnson products headquarters, he saw black faces everywhere.

People in lab coats, in suits and ties, the whole staff came out to see him.

We had just put up a 30,000 square foot new hedge quarters.

He looked up at the building, and he said, this is black power.

Part of the reason for King's visit was fundraising.

His organization needed a loan.

And it depends on the bank loan them over $100,000.

What was his response?

Oh, he cried.

He cried when we gave him the check.

The Johnson's were underwriting the civil rights movement.

And now, with their new headquarters and new product in place, they wanted to reach

a new audience, specifically young black consumers.

And that's when they took their marketing to a whole new level.

George found the perfect fiat club.

So trained, these television shows showcasing all of the best black musicians and dancing

young people with big, bouncy afros having the time of their lives.

Sonarri and I made a whole episode about it.

Go check it out.

You know, George first saw Soul Train live in a studio.

I saw it, and I liked it.

But it was only airing in black and white on local television in Chicago.

It lost everything that I saw when I saw it in person.

George thought the show should be in color.

So I had a 30 minute color pilot made.

And eventually, George, right to check for it to become a national program.

And part of the deal is that ads for afrosheen and ultra-sheen are gonna be on every show.

So Johnson products became Soul Train's sponsor.

Kids loved it.

One guy at the end of one end of the hall, which say, one, two, one, Zuri, and the guy

at the other end of the hall was that, use afrosheen.

And that's the natural truth.

Use afrosheen by Remarkin' it.

Yeah.

They had an undeniable hit.

We started on TV in October of 71, and that year sales ended at, I believe, 11.2 million

in 75.39 million.

You attribute that to Soul Train?

Oh, absolutely.

Throughout its growth, the company's success also attracted attention from people outside

the black community.

And I started getting visits from representatives of stock brokers.

And one company started talking to me about taking me public.

In 1971, Johnson products company made its debut as the first black-owned company listed

on the American stock exchange.

Did that feel like a big deal?

It was a great deal.

It was a great deal.

We went to New York, and of course they just, you know, they put the red carpet out

and it was really an extraordinary time.

Did it feel like that was the moment you had made it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I knew I had made it then.

People were just buttering us up all over the place.

It wasn't just the buttering.

The stock was doing really well.

George had never paid himself an actual salary before going public.

And now, for the first time, he had real money in his pocket.

He bought a boat, purchased property, a nice house with a pool.

He took up tennis and skiing.

Joan was not doing the books anymore.

She was flying the Paris to shop, and she became a staple at all the top designer shops

in Chicago.

We went on a vacation to New York City, and we passed by Rose Norse dealer, and she looked

in and saw white, convertible Rose Norse with red interior, and said, I'd like to have

that car.

And I bought it for her.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, things were good.

That kid who had sold balls of aluminum and the alley for pennies was big time.

His black customers had never identified more with his products, and his company was on

Wall Street.

What that meant was way more money, but way less control.

Can you ever start regretting it?

Right away.

That's after the break.

Up until going public, George and Joan Johnson had built their company by giving their customers

what they wanted.

Straight hair and afros, a bank that would give them loans, backing for the civil rights

movement, and a banging TV show.

But after going public, the Johnson's had to answer to a board.

George was thinking about the black consumer, and the board, George says they were thinking

about the shareholder.

George was asked to hire a quote, real marketing director instead of his brother and himself,

and George told us under the new marketing director, a white guy, the company sales went

flat for the first time.

But George also ran into another big problem.

Now that they were public, everything about the company was public.

And George says because he knew there was increased scrutiny on them as the only black

owned company on the stock exchange, he felt extra pressure to get everything absolutely

right.

So in all of their official paperwork, the Johnson's broke down exactly how much they were making

on each of their products, like where they were getting the best profits.

We wanted to be out front and give a good honest report, and we overdid that, and that

was not smart.

Why was it not smart?

Because the white companies didn't know what we were doing until we issued that report.

And when people who hadn't been paying attention to black Americans as a profitable market saw

that?

They woke up.

Yeah, they woke up.

I think they woke up when they saw that first annual report.

So you wrote a blueprint for them?

That's right.

Then they got interested.

Other bigger companies realized how much money they'd been leaving on the table.

Like Revlon, the cosmetics giants, now they created their own hair straightener.

And they were an established international company.

Even though George now had Rolls-Royce money, he did not have Revlon money.

Their product was a good product.

It was the one that they didn't wipe us out.

No, the Revlon relaxer did not wipe out Johnson products.

What really did wipe Johnson products out though, aside from a few sort of typical business

missteps, was the final hairstyle of our episode, The Jerry Curl.

The Jerry Curl exploded when Michael Jackson of Mummy Maid Thriller.

I'm very familiar with it.

Okay.

And he's on the cover of that album with Jerry Curl.

So everybody was like, I need a Jerry Curl.

I need a Jerry Curl.

And you didn't have a Jerry Curl.

Yeah, I didn't have it.

Then we still work on it.

Johnson products rushed theirs to the market, but they were far too behind.

And by the way, Jerry Redding, the inventor of the Jerry Curl, was white.

So another black owned company was the one to bring it to the masses.

And their tagline was a black manufacturer that understands the hair care needs of black

customers.

So they came to eat George Johnson's lunch.

Now he had a big publicly traded company and he seemed out of touch.

Did it feel like you guys weren't on like at the cutting edge?

We weren't.

We didn't match the leading Jerry Curl projects that were out there.

So that's, you know, atmosphere.

We lost a lot of our customers.

And that's when we had our first losses.

There are lots of different things you can blame for the demise of the Johnson products

company.

The company was starting to feel dated and was losing money.

Also, regulators started requiring relaxer companies to add warning labels because of

the potential health risks and these days are actually lots of lawsuits about this.

Back then, George and Joan also had marriage troubles.

They got divorced, eventually remarried, but Joan ended up in charge of the company.

So it became Joan's job to rescue what remained.

And she did turn things around.

And then in 1993, she made national news by selling Johnson products to a white owned

pharmaceutical company for $70 million.

The sale of the lucrative beauty products business announced yesterday represents a milestone

in an African American success story.

It's also a recognition that Johnson's customers are part of an increasingly attractive

market for mainstream investors.

This important black owned business was now not.

It got a lot of press coverage, including this one magazine cover it feels like everyone

has seen.

It's Joan and her daughter.

They were on the cover of the magazine Black Enterprise in November of 1993 with this headline.

Should we sell our firms to whites?

Joan made $32 million in the sale of the company.

Today, the global black hair care market is worth something like $4 billion.

And George told us he feels proud that he helped open the door for black entrepreneurs

that came after him.

I'm so happy to see all these companies, all these new people out there in the business.

And especially by the fact that most of them are women that are running these companies.

So George feels good about that.

But for his granddaughter, Olivia Joan, with all those boxes of her grandmother's clothing,

it's a bit more complicated.

I think business-wise, they paved the way for black hair care to this day.

To this day, Olivia Joan still uses the products her family created more than six decades

ago.

The famous blue grease, I think, is probably one of their most well-known products.

I have some if you want me to show you.

Show and tell us that was great for me.

Yeah.

I love show and tell.

Yeah, yeah.

It's in my bathroom.

I got you.

I'm holding this little plastic tub, half full of blue goo, ultrashine, original formula,

conditioner and hair dress.

You're holding up the hair product that lived in my bathroom growing up.

So I know this bottle.

It's just perfect for braids.

I like to moisturize my scalp, especially in the winter time.

This is my saving graze.

But when Olivia Joan goes to the store and looks down that hair care aisle or multiple

aisles, she says she doesn't feel the same pride.

Oh, I think I think I look at those products and it really just breaks my heart.

Didn't see how many are actually founded or ran by white people, even though their products

are directed for the black community, compared to how many black founders or owners have

products on the shelves.

And so I think to me, it's like, shouldn't there be more growing up.

I do remember my sister braiding my hair, God, I wish I still have some and the smell

of the Johnson's products.

But much more than that, I remember the building where these products were made.

My mom went to church across the expressway from Johnson products.

To me, that mid-century masterpiece, which was at the heart of this important black middle

class community, it symbolized blackness, prosperity, and black power.

But more importantly, it represented this sort of optimism about the future that is

special and unique to that time.

And meanwhile, today, most black haircare companies have white owners.

This episode of Planned of Money was produced by James Sede.

It was edited by Marion McCune and fact check by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Jimmy

Keely.

Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Sonari has a book coming out.

It's called Black Anomics.

It's about the way race explains the economy and why it matters.

And if you want to hear more about George Johnson's life, check out his book.

It's called AfroShin.

We had production help from C-Zero Cyrus, thanks to Ayanna Contreras.

America Bears?

I'm Sonari Glenton.

This is NPR.

Thanks for listening.