Erika Barris

longtime contributor, friend of the show, and I'm Erika Barris.

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.

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

And before we get to our first, the conch, meaning chemically straightened hair, we need to paint you a picture of the times.

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

The more kink you conked out your hair, the whiter you looked, the more respectable, and the better your chances in the workforce.

Did you say six years old?

That was during the Great Depression.

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

They were extremely poor.

You were kind of like scrapping things.

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

So by the 1950s, when the conch, that straight and processed hair, was all the rage, George was moonlighting as a bathroom attendant and washing cars on 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.

Orville ran a well-known barbershop 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, this chemical product that turned curly, kinky, coily hair to straight permanently.

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 lye.

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