Category: Obituaries

George E. Johnson, a hair care magnate who rose from a sharecropper’s cabin to found, with his wife, Joan, what was said to be the first Black-owned company listed on a major American stock exchange, and who made a fortune on products like Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen, died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 99.

His death was confirmed by his second wife, Madeline Murphy Rabb, who said the cause was respiratory illness.

Long before sports figures, entertainers, and Fortune 500 executives commanded sky-high salaries, the Johnson Products Company, which sold Black hair products and cosmetics, made its founder, Mr. Johnson, one of the nation’s wealthiest African Americans.

He also helped found one of the first, and largest, Black-owned banks, the Independence Bank of Chicago, where he served as chairperson until it was sold in 1995. And for decades, Johnson Products indirectly influenced pop culture through its sponsorship of the nationally syndicated television dance show Soul Train.

Johnson Products originated in the laboratory of Samuel B. Fuller, a Black cosmetics entrepreneur, where Mr. Johnson worked after dropping out of high school. Up to that point, his experience — starting at the age of 9, when an aunt gave him a shoeshine box — had been menial jobs.

Mr. Johnson started at Fuller Products as a salesperson — “carrying the black bag,” as he put it — though he initially found it distressing to peddle pomade and face powder amid urban deprivation.

“I had a problem with it unless I really needed money,” he said in an interview for this obituary. “Then I would sell like hell.”

After requesting to work indoors, Mr. Johnson created his first product, a hair relaxer for men he called Ultra Wave. With Fuller’s blessing, Mr. Johnson teamed up with his wife and a barber to found Johnson Products in 1954.

After one branch of a finance company rejected his request for a business loan as a “ridiculous” idea, Mr. Johnson secured the $250 in seed money from another branch by saying he needed the funds to take Joan on a vacation to California. Those early financing troubles later inspired him to help start a bank.

He found himself on the road again to peddle his product when his partnership with the barber soured. From his station wagon, he sold Ultra Wave and other products to barbers from the Upper Midwest to New York City.

But he soon found that barbers were not loyal. “They couldn’t resist the next deal that came along, although it involved poor quality, cheaper stuff,” Mr. Johnson told the New York Times in 1976.

So he started eying beauty shops, where he observed women using hot combs and mineral oil to straighten hair, a smoky and unhealthful process. He modified Ultra Wave for the women’s market, creating Ultra Sheen, which he said reduced smoke by as much as 75% and could be used in the home.

Sales took off. In the 1960s, the company had an estimated 80% of the Black hair care market, and by 1970 it had annual sales of $12.6 million, or more than $100 million today. The company listed on the American Stock Exchange in January 1971.

Johnson Products spent heavily on advertising in its heyday — $5 million in 1975, or more than $31 million today — and was the first Black-controlled company to sponsor a national television program, Soul Train, which aired weekly for almost 35 years, until 2006.

(Johnson Products is not related to Johnson Publishing Company of Chicago, the former publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines. Nor is it related to Robert L. Johnson, a co-founder of Black Entertainment Television.)

Cultural and regulatory challenges — and even severe weather — exacted a toll on Johnson Products, which was struggling for survival by the late 1970s and posted its first loss in the mid-1980s.

The company, which relied on straighteners, was late to adapt to the growing popularity of Afro hairstyles in the 1960s. Near the end of that decade, its reformulation of Ultra Sheen as Afro Sheen resulted in a poor product for long, curly hair, Mr. Johnson acknowledged.

In the 1970s, a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the marketing of hair straighteners disrupted the industry, and in 1976 Johnson Products negotiated a consent order to add a warning that its products containing sodium hydroxide, or lye, and could cause scalp irritation and eye injury. This was over a year before Revlon, its far larger competitor, agreed to similar warning labels, a lag that may have given Revlon an edge with Black consumers.

While African Americans made up a small part of Revlon’s market, they represented almost all of Johnson Products’, and its share of the relaxer market skidded to 45% from 85% in two years.

Mr. Johnson also said he faced racial discrimination, contending that distributors “don’t seem to want Black products to be exposed to all Americans.”

In early 1979, a heavy snowstorm in Chicago brought the company to a near standstill for more than a month, blocking truckers from transporting supplies or shipments and damaging its plant.

George Ellis Johnson was born June 16, 1927, in a sharecropper’s shack in Richton, Miss., and moved to Chicago with his mother, Priscilla, when he was 2. Although his education ended in 11th grade, he was awarded nine honorary doctorates over his lifetime.

Last year, Mr. Johnson published Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, From ‘Soul Train’ to Wall Street, a memoir, written with Hilary Beard.

Joan Johnson wound up with control of the company when the couple divorced in 1989. After some disruptions, including the departure of her son Eric as president and CEO, she sold Johnson Products to the Ivax Corporation in 1993, netting about $32 million, or about $75 million today.

The Johnsons remarried in 1995. She died in 2019.

In addition to Rabb, whom he married in 2022, Mr. Johnson is survived by his sons, Eric, John, and George Jr.; his daughter, Joan; 10 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Ivax sold the company to Procter & Gamble in 2004 before it was bought by a consortium of African American investment firms in 2009.

“When I think about pioneers, the real pioneers are the people who are able to make a path where none exists,” Eric Johnson told CNN after his mother died in 2019. “Johnson Products in many ways was that company. She and my father had no provided path. They created a path where there was none.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Victoria Cruz, a matriarchal figure in the New York transgender community who was at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when a police raid set in motion the gay liberation movement, and who later worked as an advocate for survivors of antitrans violence, died on June 25 in New York City. She was 79.

Her partner, Charles Wright, confirmed the death, in a hospital, and said the cause was liver cancer.

Ms. Cruz spent 17 years working for the New York City Anti-Violence Project, which provides counseling and other services for LGTBQ+ and HIV-affected survivors of violence. There, she focused on domestic abuse, but her role in the organization — and in the community — extended far beyond her official duties.

She understood the intersectional threats that trans people faced in areas like housing discrimination and workplace harassment — expertise that made her a unique resource to thousands of trans New Yorkers.

“People would come into the office and just ask for Miss Vicky,” Catherine Shugrue-Dos Santos, a former deputy executive director at the organization, said in an interview. “They wouldn’t give their names; they wouldn’t talk to anybody else. She really had the trust of the community.”

She was especially effective because she came to the group as a survivor herself: In 1996, while working at a nursing home in Brooklyn, she was repeatedly harassed and assaulted by four co-workers.

“I was very angry. Very angry,” she told Vanity Fair in 2017. “The worst part of it is that I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me.”

One day she brought a knife to work, intent on fighting back, but then thought better of it. A friend suggested she contact the Anti-Violence Project, which at the time was run by Christine Quinn, who later became the first female and first openly gay speaker of the New York City Council.

The group helped her file police reports and led protests outside the nursing home. Eventually, two of the four co-workers were convicted of harassment — one of the first times that someone was held legally accountable for antitrans violence in New York State.

Quinn brought Ms. Cruz on as a volunteer, then hired her to manage the front desk. The job also had her answering the organization’s hotline, a task that connected Cruz with countless at-risk New Yorkers.

“She was perhaps the strongest person I have ever met,” Quinn said in an interview. “She was part of the birth of the modern LGBT rights movement in New York, and therefore across the country. She was someone who had survived a terrible sexual assault and transformed that horrible moment into beaconlike strength that you felt whenever you were around her.”

Ms. Cruz was a central figure in David France’s 2017 documentary, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, about the 1992 death of a trans activist that police ruled a suicide, but many, including Ms. Cruz, suspected was murder.

The documentary tracks her search for answers and ends with her conclusion that Johnson was murdered by the mafia.

Ms. Cruz did not know Johnson, but their lives overlapped. Both were at the Stonewall Inn on the night of June 28, 1969, when police conducted one of their routine raids at the bar. This time, though, the largely transgender clientele inside fought back, and a riot ensued.

Ms. Cruz had been outside with her boyfriend, one of the bar’s bouncers. As the violence escalated, he told her to go home. When she returned in the morning, she found the bar in ruins. She grabbed a beer sign and other memorabilia, and also took home the bar’s dog, Rusty.

The Stonewall riot sparked the beginning of the gay liberation movement, which had a strong trans presence. Johnson and another well-known community figure, Sylvia Rivera — a friend of Ms. Cruz’s — became particularly active, ensuring that trans people had a place within the movement.

Ms. Cruz played a quieter role, but over time she became a central figure as well — and a recognizable one, with her homemade outfits topped with a headband adorned with feathers and cowrie shells, in honor of her heritage as a descendant of the Taíno people of Puerto Rico.

“She was an elder in that community,” France said in an interview. “She was a transgender woman of color who had lived into old age, which is so rare.”

Victoria Cruz was born on Sept. 19, 1946, in Guánica, on Puerto Rico’s southwestern coast. When she was 4, her family moved to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, where her father worked as a longshoreman; her mother was a seamstress.

She identified as female from an early age, and her family was strongly supportive. Her mother made her dresses, and her father, who affectionately called her “El Negro,” on account of her dark skin, switched to using the word’s feminine form, “La Negra.”

She studied cosmetology in high school and worked as a model, but soon found both routes closed to her because she was trans.

After high school, she found a doctor in Coney Island who provided her with the medical treatment to help her transition.

Through the 1970s she was a sex worker and a dancer in West Village clubs. She also developed an addiction to crack cocaine, though she eventually became sober.

She enrolled at Brooklyn College in 1978 and graduated four years later with a degree in theater.

But she continued to struggle financially, and ended up on public assistance. The program required her to work, which is how she ended up on the staff at the Brooklyn nursing home.

Her survivors include Wright and her sister Hedye Cruz. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

In 2012, Ms. Cruz received the National Crime Victims’ Service Award from the U.S. Department of Justice.

In an interview for the Anti-Violence Project in 2022, Ms. Cruz explained why she committed her life to counseling.

“If you have been in that situation — everybody’s situation is different but similar,” she said. “If you have the empathy to help out people, that’s half the ordeal. Just having the empathy and letting them know that you’re there to help them, not to judge them.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

In the late 1970s, comic artist Art Spiegelman and his wife, the editor Françoise Mouly, began dreaming up a new magazine, one they hoped would elevate cartooning into the realm of high art.

A colleague suggested that they talk to Jerry Moriarty, a painter who lived in Manhattan, a little uptown from their SoHo loft.

Arriving at Mr. Moriarty’s studio, Spiegelman was stunned by what he encountered: comics that were painted.

“It was totally mind-blowing,” Spiegelman, whose graphic memoir Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, said in an interview. “It was exactly what we were groping for, which was a place that wasn’t underground comics anymore, nor was it art underground.”

Raw, their magazine, debuted in 1980 with Jack Survives, the first in a series of painted comics by Mr. Moriarty about a stoic Everyman who muddles through the indignities of life in a hat and tie, refusing to capitulate.

“It’s as if Edward Hopper had taken up songwriting,” comic artist Chris Ware wrote in the Believer magazine in 2009. “For lack of a better word, it’s poetry — I believe the first that comics has ever seen — and poetry as fresh and affecting now as when first drawn.”

Mr. Moriarty died on March 25 at his home in Binghamton, N.Y., where his nephew Kevin Moriarty had been caring for him in his final years. He was 88. His death, which was not widely reported, was confirmed by his brother Fred Moriarty, who survives him.

A self-described loner, Mr. Moriarty refused to sell his paintings, and supported himself by teaching at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In many ways, he had the sort of average life embodied by his Everyman character, Jack, who resembled Mr. Moriarty’s father in appearance (and only in appearance).

“Jack is an average man wanting to be average,” he wrote in The Complete Jack Survives, a 2009 collection of his Jack comics. “I am an average man who doesn’t want to be average, and art allows me to express that frustration.”

Jack’s spare dialogue — often spoken aloud to himself — reminded Mr. Moriarty’s admirers of Samuel Beckett’s minimalist, existentialist plays.

In another panel, Jack is in his office. He opens his lunch and discovers that his wife has packed him a cat-shaped cookie.

“I can’t eat a cat cookie,” he says out loud, seemingly to nobody, before taking a bite. “You have to start with the head or it looks at you to the end.”

To describe his craft, Mr. Moriarty created a portmanteau: paintoonist, a fusion of painter and cartoonist. The word hasn’t yet appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it certainly defined him.

“There’s a kind of stillness in his work,” Hillary Chute, a professor at Northeastern University and a scholar of graphic narratives, said in an interview. “So you enter it as a story, and it has psychological depth, but also the kinds of composition that you would see in paintings.”

Jerome Brien Moriarty was born on Jan. 15, 1938, in Binghamton, the third of four children. His father, John Moriarty, was an expert in Morse code who telegraphed play-by-play accounts of sporting events for the Associated Press. His mother, Esther (Turner) Moriarty, sold magazine subscriptions and worked as a sales clerk at a department store.

Growing up, Jerry loved cowboy movies and radio shows. He also read and collected comics.

“At age 8, I crossed the ‘fantasy barrier’ and became an ‘art kid’ because I could copy Superman or Bugs Bunny better than my classmates,” he wrote in the catalog for “Uninked: Paintings, Sculpture and Graphic Works by Five Cartoonists,” a 2007 exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum.

His father bought him a drafting table and encouraged him to pursue a career in art, setting up a studio in the cellar.

“It was dank, low and funky, but I loved the cellar because no one came down there unless they had to,” Mr. Moriarty said in the Believer. “Sometimes my dad came down after supper and watched me paint, still in his shirt and tie from work.”

After graduating from high school, he moved to Brooklyn to study at the Pratt Institute, earning a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1960.

He remained in New York City, working as a freelance illustrator and contributing drawings to Esquire, GQ, Seventeen, the New Yorker, and pinup magazines. In 1963, he began teaching at the School of Visual Arts, painting in his studio at night.

Jack came along in the late 1970s after a student gave Moriarty a copy of the war comic Frontline Combat, which he had read as a teenager.

“I took it home and I fell on the floor,” he said in a 2009 interview with the Daily Cross Hatch, an online comics journal. “Not only was it better than I remembered, it was inspiring. I thought, ‘How many other things since that period have I not seen?’ So I started going to comic cons, and that’s where the collector in me started to awaken.”

To Moriarty, Jack wasn’t just a character on canvas; he was a way to reconnect with his father, who had died when he was 14.

“Jack Survives is a whimsical, one-sided conversation with my father where I am 99% of it,” he told the Believer. “Dad is in Jack as a quiet presence who survives Jack’s frustrations far better than I do.”

Mr. Moriarty moved on from Jack in the late 1980s and continued to paint, though in an entirely new way — in panel form, much like a comic book artist. In one painting, Moriarty peers down from the ceiling at his father, who is reading the newspaper. In another, he is an old man painting in his cellar.

“There was no conscious attempt to be poetic or subtle,” he said. “I am not a fan of bigness or theatricality. I prefer string quartets to symphonies, jazz trios to big bands.”

He also savored solitude.

“Loner and loneliness are not the same,” he said. “Everybody has been lonely, but not everybody is a loner. Jack is alone, but he is not a loner. I am a loner, and I fully understand why that makes me strange to society. I am not lonely. Being alone is total freedom for me.”

He usually started painting after midnight, finished by 3 a.m., ate dinner, watched movies, went to bed at 7 a.m., woke up at 2 p.m., had breakfast and watched Jeopardy! He had no use for the hoity-toity art world.

“It was about as pure an experience of being an artist as I’ve ever witnessed,” Spiegelman said. “It was, in some ways, without ambition and without a thought about posterity.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.