We can thank the Afro Sheen founder for ‘The Sound of Philadelphia’

Like many Black children growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Mount Airy author Hilary Beard had fond memories of Afros and Soul Train dancers.

“I was a little Black girl with braids who sat between my mother’s knees every day as she combed my hair and oiled my scalp with Ultra Sheen,” Beard recalled in a recent video chat. “When I was in the seventh grade and cut my hair into an Afro, I used Afro Sheen. I grew up watching Soul Train. I lived in a world created by this man.”

It wasn’t until 40 years later that she realized these hallmarks of Black culture had a common author, George E. Johnson, the father of modern Black hair care.

Three years ago, Beard teamed up with a then 94-year-old Johnson to cowrite his memoir. She combined her warm memories of plaits, kinky blowouts, Black power picks, and the Soul Train Line with more than 2,000 pages of interviews to write Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, from Soul Train to Wall Street, a 320-page story of entrepreneurship, civil rights, and Black culture, spanning nearly a century.

“Mr. Johnson’s story sweeps through the Cotton South, the Great Migration, the Jim Crow North, the Jim Crow South, World War II, and the civil rights of the 1950s and 1960s,” Beard said. “And it’s told through the perspective of an African American man. We know many of these stories have not been told, they have also been actively suppressed.”

Johnson’s story begins in 1927 Richton, Miss., on a small sharecropping farm. His mother, Priscilla, left his father in 1929, and moved Johnson and his two brothers to Chicago’s South Side. In his early 20s, he worked as a production chemist at the Black-owned cosmetics company Fuller Products, owned by S.B. Fuller, the richest Black man in America at the time.

In the early to mid-20th century, many Black people’s grooming habits included straightening their hair to assimilate, often affording them better jobs in mainstream America. The hair straightening concoctions — a mix of potatoes, lye, and eggs — separated, were messy to apply, and burned.

While working at Fuller Products, Johnson developed Ultra Wave Hair Culture, a creamy emulsified product barbers applied to clients’ hair, giving them the slicked back look popularized in the 1940s by Little Richard, Nat King Cole, and Sammy Davis Jr.

Ultra Wave Hair Culture marked Johnson Products Co.’s debut. In the next decade, JPC introduced Ultra Sheen Cream Satin Press, which hairdressers applied to Black women’s hair before pressing it straight with a hot comb; and Ultra Sheen Relaxer, a lye-based hair straightener for Black women. The “Black is Beautiful” movement birthed Afro Sheen, a spray that left Afros voluminous and glossy.

“The thing that moved my products forward was innovation,” said Johnson, who, at 97, still sounds like a salesman talking to potential customers. “We created something like a new mousetrap, it had never been done before.”

In 1971 — with sales of $12.1 million, or $94 million in today’s dollars — JPC became the first Black-owned company to be publicly traded on the American Stock Exchange, now known as the New York Stock Exchange. Although at the time it was a major achievement, Johnson said that with hindsight, he realized it was a big misstep as he was forced to answer to a board that didn’t understand the Black community.

Johnson — not to be confused with John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines — built his empire when banks did not loan money to Black startups, and groceries and drugstores did not stock Black hair care products, let alone place them on endcaps. Johnson remembers struggling to build his business when there were no federal laws to protect him from discrimination. He built his own manufacturing facility and created networks to distribute and advertise his products, and was among the first to sell Black hair care products in mainstream retail outlets.

To see companies like Target and Walmart — which up until recently had a stellar reputation of stocking Black hair care by Black-owned companies — cower under the Trump administration and roll back DEI initiatives is not only disheartening, but it also signals going back to a time when disenfranchisement of minority- and women-owned businesses was standard operating procedure. This reality, Beard says, makes Johnson’s story particularly timely, serving as a road map with young entrepreneurs of color.

“There is a widespread movement to make programs, books, and context that remind us of the bigotry in our nation’s history illegal,” Beard said. “Mr. Johnson is a witness to the overt racism many Americans would like to sweep under the rug. The irony is the very history they don’t want us to know is the reality they are attempting to create.”

JPC was among the first companies to advertise products to Black consumers using images of Black professionals — like doctors, lawyers, and teachers — instead of subservient characters like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.

Johnson created Soul Train with Don Cornelius in 1971 so his advertising dollars could reach Black consumers directly. Soul Train — the hippest trip in America — was modeled after Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, and featured R&B acts, creating the community that bought Afro and Ultra Sheen products. In 1974, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff wrote Soul Train’s iconic theme song, “T.S.O.P. — The Sound of Philadelphia,” performed by Philadelphia International Records’ The Three Degrees. Soul Train laid the cultural groundwork for MTV and Black Entertainment Television, and “T.S.O.P.” was the first TV theme song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. JPC’s profits nearly tripled to $37 million a year by 1975.

“That was tremendous growth,” Johnson said. “And in 1980, I gave Don my share with the stipulation he keep one minute of advertising time a show to JPC.”

Johnson never planned to write a book.

“I certainly wouldn’t have waited until I was 94 to do this,” he said. “But I had an epiphany, a real experience and I clearly heard five words, ‘You must tell your story.‘”

Johnson is married to Madeline Murphy Rabb, the mother of Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb, a friend of Beard’s. Chris Rabb reached out to Beard, the author of 19 books including memoirs she cowrote with actors and husband-wife team Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance, as well as Philadelphia high school baseball phenomenon Mo’ne Davis, in 2021.

Beard read 16 books about Black hair care culture and Chicago history. The two-year-long writing process became emotional, especially when Johnson recalled his infidelity and losing his first manufacturing facility to fire.

“When Mr. Johnson contacted me, I thought of the African proverb: when an elder dies, a library burns down,” Beard said. “So, I dropped everything to capture this piece of living history on the page.”