Sonari Glinton

Gotta love those names.

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...

What kind of reputation did she get after that?

You're going to pay this lady.

Joan and George were selling Ultrawave to barbershops all over Chicago.

And then they started expanding.

I grew up as a kid driving past that Johnson Products factory on the Dan Ryan Big Expressway in Chicago.

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

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 we named it Independence 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 in 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.

And right around the time Afrosheen hit shelves, something happened that shows just how central this company had become.

It was 1966, and King wanted to come tour Georgia's research facility.