AFRO SHEEN

Nearing 100, Johnson looks back on a long life shaped early on by the entrepreneur S.B. Fuller, whom he met in 1944, and who preached a gospel that proclaimed, “God did not intend for you to be poor.” Johnson went to work for Fuller, convinced that, as Fuller said, “Anything a White man can do, so can you!” Johnson eventually developed his own product line that Fuller could have taken as competition but didn’t: A specialty good in a time when natural hair was out of favor, it straightened the hair of Black men without burning the scalp, as other products did. He entered a partnership that taught him a thing or two about vetting your associates. Upon dissolving it, Johnson steadily built an extensive line of grooming products, always remembering Fuller’s example: “The money I made in Chicago, I invested in Indianapolis. The money I made in Indianapolis, I invested in Cleveland. The money I made in Cleveland helped me open Detroit.” That line came to include more natural products that became iconic, such as the Afro Sheen of the title, for a time the engine driving an empire that allowed Johnson to underwrite another iconic expression of Black pride, the syndicated TV show Soul Train, which “conveyed contemporary Black youth hair, music, clothing, and culture…organically conveying positive messages.” The positive racial messages notwithstanding, Johnson found himself so successful that white businesses crowded into his market, so that, he writes, “according to some sources, by 1988, White manufacturers dominated more than half of the Black haircare market.” In this detailed, anecdotal memoir of business, Johnson notes this detail without rancor, closing with a shrug: “As much as it pained me to witness, that’s capitalism.”