Submitted By: THANDISIZWE MGUDLWA
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, August 16, 2022/ —
From poverty to glory is perhaps how the story of Samuel Fuller could
be best described.
But it was not an easy journey by far.
In fact, it was a long hard road for S.B. Fuller before he could even
begin to assemble the wildly successful business that would become
Fuller Products Company.
The son of Louisiana sharecroppers, his family was so poor that he was
forced to drop out of school in the sixth grade to help on the farm.
When he was only seventeen years old, in 1922, Fuller’s mother passed
away, and he was called into action to use his budding talent as an
entrepreneur to support his other six siblings.
As a young man, he was able to make the leap and move to Chicago,
Illinois in 1928, only a year before the Great Depression hit.
If Fuller was going to make a business success of himself, he would
have to do so through the poverty and calamity of the Depression.
But make a success he did. As Fuller founded his own company, Fuller
Products, in 1929, and stuck through it while simultaneously working
another job as an insurance rep.
In 1939, after ten years of toil, he was able to build Fuller Products
its own factory. And by the 1950s, Fuller was bringing in over $10
million in sales each year.
He was founder and president of the Fuller Products Company, publisher
of the New York Age and Pittsburgh Courier, head of the South Side
Chicago NAACP, president of the National Negro Business League, and a
prominent Black Republican.
S. B. Fuller’s life was an illustration of business success and self-help.
His company gave inspiration and training to countless aspiring
entrepreneurs and future leaders, including John H. Johnson of Johnson
Publishing, George Ellis Johnson founder of Johnson Products, and Dr.
T. R. M. Howard.
Joe L. Dudley Senior of Greensboro, North Carolina had a similar
business, the Dudley Products Company, which was a major distributor
of Fuller products and also offered products of its own and kept the
Fuller Products name alive after the end of S. B. Fuller’s career.
George Johnson, later a business mogul in his own right as founder of
Johnson Products Company spent ten years of his early career learning
under the mentorship of Samuel Fuller.
He recalled, “What Mr. Fuller was doing in 1944 was taking people off
of welfare and making them independent.
People were leaving welfare, in a short time, buying homes or getting
into better apartments, buying cars.
It was amazing what Mr. Fuller was doing with people, people who
were just not going anywhere.
He gave them a focus. He inspired them, and he told them where to look
to find the inspiration.”
Fuller (no relation to Alfred C. Fuller, founder of the Fuller Brush
Company) was born into rural poverty to a sharecropper family in
Monroe, Ouachita Parish, Louisiana in 1905.
The family’s poverty was such that he had to drop out of school in
sixth grade. At nine he was selling products door-to-door and gaining
experience as an entrepreneur.
At fifteen his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. Sadly, two years
later his mother would pass away leaving seven children to fend for
themselves.
In an interview (U.S. News World Report – August 19, 1963 ) he spoke
of this time ” …the Relief people came and offered us some relief,
but we did not accept it because it was a shame in those days for
people to receive relief. We did not want our neighbors to think we
couldn’t make for ourselves. So we youngsters made it for ourselves. “
After going to Chicago in 1928, Fuller worked in a wide range of
menial jobs, eventually rising to become manager of a coal yard.
Subsequent to his employment in the coal yard, he gained employment as
an insurance representative for Commonwealth Burial Association, an
African-American firm. Although he had a secure job during the
Depression, he nevertheless struck out on his own preferring “freedom”
to “security.”
Fuller’s career as an entrepreneur started after he borrowed
twenty-five dollars using his car as collateral. Along with his friend
Lestine Thornton (who later became his wife), he invested in a load of
soap from Boyer International Laboratories, manufacturer of Jean Nadal
Cosmetics and HA Hair Arranger. His success selling soap door-to-door
inspired him to invest another $1000. He incorporated Fuller Products
in 1929. In four years he would be promoted to manager at
Commonwealth while continuing to grow his own company to a line of 30
products and hiring additional door-to-door salespeople.
The substantial number of African American families who moved to the
The south side of Chicago during the Great Migration became the customer
base from which Fuller Products would see tremendous expansion. The
additional growth was sufficient for the company to open its own
factory in 1939. In 1947, Fuller purchased Boyer to prevent its
bankruptcy, keeping his ownership a secret. The company began to
manufacture and sell a diverse line of commodities from deodorant and
hair care to hosiery and men’s suits.
Fuller also purchased several newspapers including the New York Age
and the Pittsburgh Courier. Additionally, he owned the South Center
Department Store and the Regal Theater in Chicago.
Fuller was a leading black Republican although he always had an
independent streak. He promoted civil rights and briefly headed the
Chicago South Side NAACP. Along with Birmingham businessman, A. G.
Gaston, he tried to organize a cooperative effort to purchase the
segregated bus company during the Montgomery bus boycott. He told
Martin Luther King Jr., “The bus company is losing money and willing
to sell. We should buy it.” King was skeptical of the idea, and not
enough African American people came forward to raise the money.
And sespite his belief in civil rights, Fuller’s emphasis was always
on the need for African American people to go into business.
In 1958, he blasted the federal government for undermining free
enterprise and fostering socialism.
He feared that it was “doing the same thing today as was done in the
days of Caesar—destroying incentive and initiative.”
He argued that wherever “there is capitalism there is freedom.”
Fuller was a good friend and associate of Dr. T. R. M. Howard, of
Mound Bayou, Mississippi and later Chicago.
Howard was a wealthy black entrepreneur and a prominent civil rights
leader and mentor to Medgar Evers.
Fuller and Howard had probably met because of their mutual involvement
in the National Negro Business League. Fuller was president of the
organization for several terms in the 1940s and 1950s. He hired Howard
to be medical director of Fuller Products and supported his Republican
campaign for Congress in 1958.
And during the 1950s, Fuller was probably the richest African American
man in the United States. His cosmetics company had $18 million in
sales and a sales force of five thousand (one-third of them white). It
gave training to many future entrepreneurs and other leaders. “It
doesn’t make any difference,” he declared, “about the color of an
individual’s skin. No one cares whether a cow is black, red, yellow,
or brown. They want to know how much milk it can produce.”
Despite his opinion, the White Citizens Councils organized a boycott
of Fuller’s Nadal products line during the 1950s, when they learned an
African American owned the company. This would be the beginning of a
turn of fortune for Fuller’s business interests that would affect his
activities throughout the 1960s.
In 1963 Fuller was the first African American inducted into the
National Association of Manufacturers. During his acceptance speech he
stated that “a lack of understanding of the capitalist system and not
racial barriers was keeping blacks from making progress.” In an
interview that same year with U.S. News & World Report he said,
“Negroes are not discriminated against because of the color of their
skin. They are discriminated against because they have not anything to
offer that people want to buy.” Afterwards his company suffered severe
setbacks as many of his comments were reported out of context. Major
national black leaders reacted angrily and called for a boycott of
Fuller Products.
In 1968, Fuller sold unregistered promissory notes in interstate
commerce for which he was charged with violating the Federal
Securities Act. After pleading guilty, being placed on five years’
probation, and ordered to repay creditors $1.6 million, Fuller
Products entered bankruptcy in 1971. Although the company reorganized,
and reported profits of $300,000 in 1972, and the cosmetics portion of
the old company was rebuilt, it never returned to the firm’s previous
levels of size or profitability.
And in 1976, Fuller, as a result of health problems, asked his top
distributor, Joe Louis Dudley, Sr., to move to Chicago and become
President of the Fuller Products Company. Dudley ran both Fuller
Products Company and Dudley Products Company from 1976 until 1984. In
1984, Fuller Products Company was purchased by Dudley.
Fuller is the father-in-law of neurologist and Canadian football
hall-of-famer Tom Casey.
Fuller was 83 years of age when he died at St. Francis Hospital in
Blue Island, Illinois from kidney failure.
Long may his legacy live.
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