Book Review: Afro Sheen Is A Blueprint For Black Economic Power

Forbes

16-05-2025

By Sonari Glinton | Forbes Contributor
If you care about Black entrepreneurship, business history, or the roots of modern branding, Afro Sheen by George E. Johnson is here for you. This memoir tells the real story behind Johnson Products, the first Black-owned company on the American Stock Exchange. Johnson straightened Black hair with Ultra Sheen and celebrated it with Afro Sheen. He helped fund Soul Train and kept the civil rights movement afloat. Johnson not only ran one of the most important Black companies, but he also built a model for Black power on his terms. If only modern Black moguls followed his template.
Even if you've never heard of George Johnson, you've seen his work. It was on the shelves, on your TV, in the music, in the mirror.
Johnson didn't have a college degree or institutional investors. He did have hustle galore, chemistry skills, and vision. Johnson started working at age 6, getting blood out of the overalls of a stockyard working neighbor. He dropped out of Chicago's legendary Wendell Phillips High School after two years. Wendell Phillips produced Nat King Cole, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sam Cooke.
After getting denied a $250 loan for a business, he lied to a loan officer about needing vacation money and walked out with a check. He started his business in a makeshift lab and built it into a $39 million company by the mid-1970s. That's over $ 215 million today.
But Johnson wasn't simply hustling to feed his family; part of his mission was to serve the community. And throughout the book, you can read about his commitment to and his involvement in the community. Probably as consequential as his company (especially to denizens of the South Side of Chicago) was his co-founding of Independence Bank. Johnson Products offered maternity leave, profit-sharing, and health insurance. This was at a time when most companies, Black or white, didn't.
Johnson's career is instructive for entrepreneurs, as Jason Wingard wrote in this publication. The entrepreneur Johnson gives credit for his career to another Chicago business great, S.B. Fuller.
Fuller (who mentored George Johnson and publishing giant John Johnson) was a former sharecropper who became a multimillionaire selling soap door to door. Fuller taught him that capitalism, when used right, could lead Black folks to liberation. Johnson took the lesson and built something even bigger. He used his company cafeteria as a launchpad for Jesse Jackson's Operation Breadbasket.
That story is wild. Jackson was broke and still in the seminary. Johnson pulled together a group of Black businessmen to cover his rent and back a push to get Black-owned products on grocery shelves. When Dr. King needed payroll covered, Johnson wrote the check. Upon receiving the loan, King wept.
The book also lays out just how much the mainstream beauty industry ignored Black folks. White-owned companies didn't market Black consumers, and Black folks didn't trust the few hair care products made by white companies. This was a time when Black men straightened their hair to pass. Black women spent real money and time (!) in salons. Often, barbers and stylists acted as amateur chemists, mixing batches of their own products. Johnson saw the opportunity. Probably most consequentially were his efforts to reach Black heads and pocketbooks. He knew TV ads weren't aimed at Black audiences. So he didn't just buy airtime, he produced a TV show and then gave Don Cornelius the money to start Soul Train.
I dug into this story for Planet Money in 'Soul Train and the Business of Black Joy'. George Johnson and Don Cornelius weren't just selling music or beauty products. They were building a distribution network for Black culture and monetizing it.
'We started on TV in October of '71. That year, sales were $11.2 million. By 1975, $39 million… Absolutely because of Soul Train.'
One of Johnson's closest collaborators was Tom Burrell, the ad legend who said, 'Black people are not dark-skinned white people.' Johnson didn't need to be told that. He was producing commercials featuring Afros, dark skin, and joy, decades before that was mainstream.
Reading Afro Sheen, I kept thinking about how much of George Johnson's influence we just absorbed without naming it. Afro Sheen was in every Black household I knew. But nobody talked about the fact that the man behind it was funding civil rights, building banks, and cutting checks to Dr. King. Soul Train wasn't just a vibe—it was a business move that helped anchor Black Hollywood.
'We had just put up a 30,000 square foot new headquarters… he looked up at the building... and he said... 'This is Black Power.''
Johnson built a modernist headquarters in Chicago's Chatham neighborhood, right along the Dan Ryan. The plaza had sculptures, brick pyramids, clean lines, and big signage. It was a message to the city of Chicago, on its way to work.
When Dr. King toured the building in 1966, he looked around and said, 'This is Black Power.' And he was right.
If Afro Sheen were fiction, it would sound too perfect. But it's real. And Johnson gives us the receipts. This book belongs on the shelf next to Shoe Dog, Built to Last, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, because it's all three at once.
I interviewed Mr. Johnson for an upcoming Planet Money episode. You'll be able to hear his voice in that story soon. You can also watch a clip of our conversation now on my Substack, Vanilla is Black. This isn't nostalgia. It's a blueprint. And right now, when Black businesses are still undercapitalized and cultural landmarks keep disappearing, this story matters more than ever.
We'd be fools not to study it.
Enjoyed this piece? I break these stories down weekly on my Substack, Vanilla is Black.