Joe Louis Dudley, pioneering hair care entrepreneur, dies at the age of 86

Joe Louis Dudley, who grew a kitchen table business he started with his wife into one of the largest black-owned hair care companies in the Southeast and founded schools that trained tens of thousands of estheticians, died in February 2011, aged 8 at his home in Kernersville, NC, a suburb of Winston-Salem, he was 86.

The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, said his daughter Ursula Dudley Oglesby.

In the 1960s, Joe and Eunice Dudley were newly married and selling SB Fuller beauty products door to door in New York City. Mr. Fuller – no relation to the venerable door-to-door venture of Fuller Brush Company – was a Chicago-based black businessman who preached the gospel of progress through hard work and who made millions at a time when women liked to buy cosmetics in their homes .

The Dudleys absorbed his training and message and took their door-to-door Fuller business to North Carolina. And when the Fuller company ran into production problems, they started making their own products: scalp creams, oil shampoos and pomades that they mixed at home and poured into old mayonnaise jars.

Mr. Dudley stirred the formulas in steel vats with a spatula the size of a canoe paddle. Mrs. Dudley typed the labels, and their children screwed on the lids of the jars after the products had cooled and sat overnight.

The Dudley kitchen, Ms. Dudley said by phone, was not intended for preparing meals.

But they soon moved their activities out of the kitchen. And after a stint in Chicago, where the Dudleys took over the Fuller company, which was floundering, they returned to North Carolina and built their first factory in Greensboro, where they added Fuller products to their own line.

They then opened Dudley beauty schools North Carolina, Chicago And Washington, DC.

They also bought a radio station, a hotel and a travel agency and built an events center. Like his mentor, Mr. Fuller, Mr. Dudley was a sales evangelist and a man of staunch Christian faith. He recruited local students to work for him, as well as people who were down on their luck – those who were in prison or had problems with drugs.

Employees had to open savings accounts and sales meetings often started with a song. It was Mr. Dudley's habit to turn pop melodies into Dudley cheers, as he did with the Donna Summer disco. hit “Bad Girls”:

Now Dudley people know how to build

Know how to build

And they get it done through willpower

With willpower

We didn't come to Kernersville to sit down

To sit down

We have become the talk of the town

We are bad Dudley

Bad Dudley

We're a big, bad Dudley

Beep beep

Uh hum

toot Toot

Mr Dudley set himself the goal of becoming a millionaire by the age of 40, and he achieved that. For decades, the company's annual sales reached $40 million.

Comedian Chris Rock once made a pilgrimage to the Dudley Factory in Kernersville while making “Good Hair,” a 2009 documentary. He had begun exploring the mysteries and rituals of black hair care in the film — and the heavy standards of beauty and race – to answer one of his young daughter's questions: “Why don't I have good hair?”

The Dudley Company headquarters was a hub for Black beauty products, and Mr. Rock went there mainly to learn more about relaxer, the high-powered hair straightener. He was baffled by the economics: a 7,000-pound barrel of relaxer, he was told, was worth $18,000.

“If you make enough black women happy,” Mr. Rock declared in the film, as the camera panned to the Dudley mansion, “you can live like a king.”

Joe Louis Dudley, named for the boxing legend, was born on May 9, 1937 in coastal Aurora, NC, the fifth of eleven children. His parents, Clara (Yeates) and Gilmer Dudley, were farmers who grew tobacco and sweet potatoes. Their family of fourteen, including Joe's grandfather Ballam Dudley, who was born into slavery, lived together in a busy three-room farmhouse. Joe, who stuttered, was held back at school in first grade after his teachers labeled him, in the cruel jargon of the time, “mentally retarded.”

“Prove them wrong, Joe,” his mother encouraged him, as he often remembered. “Prove Them Wrong.”

He studied business at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (now North Carolina A&T State University), a historically black college. It took him six years to graduate because he also worked in a poultry factory for a while.

Later, while living with an aunt in Brooklyn, he one day saw a smart-looking young man selling beauty products nearby. Intrigued, he bought a $10 kit from the man's company, which turned out to be SB Fuller, and started selling himself.

It was a challenge at first because Mr. Dudley still stuttered. Sympathetic housewives taught him how to pronounce the product names, and he practiced in front of a mirror at night until he overcame his handicap. He met Eunice Mosley, a fellow salesman of Fuller's, and they married in 1961.

Lafayette Jones, chairman emeritus of the American Health and Beauty Aids Institute, an association of black manufacturers, said by phone that Mr. Dudley was “a leader among black hair care royalty.”

In addition to his daughter Mrs. Oglesby, Mr. Dudley is survived by a son, Joe Louis Dudley Jr.; another daughter, Genea Dudley Gidey; his siblings, Elsie Little and William, Cornelius, Mardecia, MacArthur and George Dudley; and three grandchildren. He and his wife divorced amicably in 2000 and remained business partners.

Mr. Dudley won the Horatio Alger Prize in 1995, an annual honor given in Washington to, as the organization notes, “leaders who have triumphed over adversity.” Quincy Jones, the music producer, and Don Shula, the longtime coach of the Miami Dolphins, also received the award that year.

In 2007, part of the Kernersville factory where the Dudley company manufactured 90 percent of its products was damaged by fire, and the recession hit. With the help of Mrs. Oglesby, a Harvard-educated lawyer, the Dudleys were restructured and downsized, and Mrs. Oglesby became president and chief executive of the newly formed organization. Dudley Beauty Corp.

At the time of his death, Mr. Dudley was still working. Mrs. Dudley has no plans to retire.