Chapter 1: What is the significance of Afro Sheen in Black culture?
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 Ghaly. 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 used to be my grandmother's favorite top. It even has like a bunch of stains on it from when she spilled. And it still smells like her too. And she was my best friend. And so, yeah, I'm running out of time. Okay, bye.
The thing that's so striking about Olivia Jones' posts is that these are couture dresses. So her grandmother, a Black woman, was wearing custom Chanel, Givenchy, Yves 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.
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Chapter 2: How did George and Joan Johnson start their hair care business?
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Sonari Glenton.
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.
Which, though they started it, they no longer own. Today on the show, the rise and fall of Johnson products. We're going to tell you this story in three hairstyles. the conch, the afro, and the jerry curl.
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.
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. 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 kink you conked out your hair, the whiter 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.
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Chapter 3: What role did the conk hairstyle play in the Black community?
After two years of high school?
I took two years of chemistry in high school.
That was enough. But 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-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.
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 it 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 lye.
And these were powerful chemicals. Leave them in just long enough and you had swinging hair. But leave 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 venting about his frustrations. And George, thinking about the chemistry of it all, is so intrigued that he asks Orville to come watch his barbers in action.
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Chapter 4: How did the afro symbolize the civil rights movement?
In 1954, Orville and George went into business together. The product was Ultra Wave Hair Culture. Gotta 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 relationship soured, Orville left and George and Joan took over. It was Johnson Products Company. And George says Joan turned out to be a fearless businesswoman. Like one time, this barber owed them 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, OK, then I'm going to sit over here until you do.
Remember, this is the 50s, when a woman was not welcome in a barbershop.
And, you know, and they tried to run her out of there with some, you know, nasty language. But she just sat there reading Ebony magazine until the guy finally decided he had to pay her, and he did.
What kind of reputation did she get after that?
Oh, she was tough. She had a tough reputation.
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Chapter 5: What impact did Soul Train have on Johnson Products Company?
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.
Black is beautiful, and what God gave you is good enough. We got on it right away, and we came out with a great product called Afrosheen.
Afrosheen, 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 Afrosheen 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 tour Georgia'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, he let me know they couldn't make payroll.
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Chapter 6: How did the introduction of the jheri curl affect the market?
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.
I started getting visits from representatives of stockbrokers. 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.
Ooh, fancy.
Yeah, it was really an extraordinary time.
Did it feel like that was the moment you had made it?
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Chapter 7: What challenges did Johnson Products face as a publicly traded company?
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.
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.
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Chapter 8: How did the legacy of the Johnsons influence today's Black entrepreneurs?
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 is always great for me. Yeah. Okay. I love show and tell.
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