BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Corporate boycotts are back; history shows they work
Forty years ago Black-businesses banded together to fight for a fair market
It must have taken 97-year old George E. Johnson by no surprise when he read about the recent decision taken by major stores, like Target, to end their programs to support Black-owned businesses. Johnson, who founded the iconic Johnson Products Company in the 1950s, has seen this all before.
Despite his company being traded on the New York Stock Exchange and manufacturing wildly successful products like Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen, when he introduced Black Tie cologne in the 1970s, major department stores refused to stock it. The product ultimately was a failure because it couldn’t get on the shelves.
We learn this, and much more, in Johnson’s new memoir (with Hilary Beard), Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule.
Nearly a 100 years old now, Johnson’s path is as remarkable as any other of the better-known twentieth century CEOs: from chemist for S. E. Fuller to business owner to backer of Soul Train. When he applied for a $250 business loan, the banker turned him away, explaining that Johnson would never repay the loan. Undeterred, Johnson returned to a different branch of the bank several days later and secured a $250 family vacation loan instead.
The book is a must read!
Johnson’s feel-good story might appear trapped in the past. That’s until you read the headlines in the New York Times and see his struggle remains. There’s nothing dated about the discrimination George E. Johnson faced, nor is in the organized reaction to that treatment.
The recent calls to boycott Target products is reminiscent of a similar boycott of the Revlon corporation 40 years ago. Then, it was George E. Johnson and his associates at other Black-owned beauty companies, like Soft Sheen, M & M Products, and Luster Products, that coordinated with Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH. Today, it’s Black Lives Matter Minnesota, the Racial Justice Network and the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, according to the New York Times.
In 1986, the boycott happened in response to an executive at Revlon, Irving Bottner, claiming in Newsweek magazine that Black-owned beauty companies produced inferior products and that they’d all be gone within a few years. His slur was obvious and ugly.
A national boycott happened next, notable for the elaborate mock funerals held in major cities to attract attention to Revlon’s aim to take over the Black beauty industry. The media showed up, especially magazines like Jet and Ebony, and the boycott worked. Revlon apologized and divested from apartheid South Africa, one of the demands made by organizers.
Several decades later, despite that victory, the threat to Black-owned businesses has only grown. Access to shoppers remains the difference between success and failure for small businesses, and this access remains tightly, and often unfairly, controlled.
As the New York Times notes, novel opportunities to overcome historic prejudices have worked, especially for Black-owned companies that market highly competitive products. Ending them now risks a return to the business environment George E. Johnson faced in the 1970s and 1980s. If there ever way, this is a possibility worthy of a boycott.
