DR. JOE L. DUDLEY. SR. HEAD
OF DUDLEY PRODUCTS,
DIES AT AGE 86
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
“I am, I can and I will!”
And with those words, humanitarian Joe Louis Dudley Sr. built a successful hair care products business empire that has thrived for over 50 years. He once said that his strong belief in Jesus Christ saw him through many challenges.
On Thursday, Feb. 8th, Joe L. Dudley, age 86, died peacefully at his home in Kernersville, leaving behind a wife and three adult children who are living out his legacy of excellence and achievement, and a company that is known around the world for its resilience and top place in the annals of Black business history.
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of our hero, Dr. Joe L. Dudley, Sr.,” the family said in a statement. “Our hearts are broken. However, we smile knowing the thousands of lives that he touched and changed. Heaven has gained a dynamic salesperson and humanitarian. We love you! “
“He was an outstanding businessman and human being,” his son, Joe Dudley Jr., wrote about his father on Facebook.
“An underdog himself, he always believed in everyone's potential for success especially if you were willing to work hard, strive diligently and walk by faith. My family and I carry on his legacy with love and commitment to these principles.”
It was March 13, 2019, when this reporter drove to Dr. Dudley’s mansion in Kernersville to interview him on tape about his legacy. The assignment was for a proposed film that never got off the ground, but meeting this gracious and welcoming man, beloved institution of wisdom and knowledge, and legendary figure of true Black history, was an experience I will never forget.
The story of Joe Louis Dudley Sr. is one of inspiration, especially for African-Americans.
Born in Aurora, N.C. in 1937 in a three-bedroom farmhouse, the fifth of eleven children born to Gilmer and Clara Dudley, young Joe failed the first grade and was held back, was labeled mentally retarded, and suffered a speech impediment.
“Nine of us slept in one room, “ Dr. Dudley recalled in 2019. He remembered praying as a child, “Lord if you help me, I promise I will help other people.”
His mother, Clara, believed in him, pushing Joseph to overcome those obstacles by telling him, “Prove them wrong, Joe,” and helping him become a man who would remake himself into an extraordinary success story.
In 1957 at th age of 20, young Joe Dudley, while a student at N.C A&T University in Greensboro, invested $10.00 to purchase a sales kit and begin selling black-owned Fuller Products door-to-door. It was how he paid for his college classes. He eventually graduated from N.C. A &T with a degree in business administration.
Ten years later, from 1967 through 2008, that door-to-door Fuller Products Distributorship by Joe Dudley would mushroom into the Dudley Haircare Products Company, and with his wife, Eunice (who he had met in New York selling door-to-door, and married in 1961), move to Greensboro, and become listed in the top 50 in Black Enterprise Magazine’s Top 100 Black Owned Businesses.
During our interview, Dr. Dudley credited the mentorship of Fuller Products founder, S.B. Fuller for “changing his life.” In his youth, Fuller had many of the same struggles young Dudley had, including also being branded mentally retarded. Fuller ultimately became one of the richest Black men in America during his time.
“Mr. Fuller helped me to save time, “ Dr. Dudley said. “ that’s one of the great values of mentorship - pointing you in the right direction, and helping you become successful. It helps save time, save money and save frustration.”
Dudley Products was started in the kitchen of the Dudley’s home, and grew into the largest Black manufacturing plant between Washington D.C. and Atlanta, Ga. The company, from its inception, provided opportunity for the downtrodden, college students and those needing an opportunity to prove themselves.
“It’s so exciting to help people, and watch them grow, and become successful.“ he said in 2019. “[African-Americans] need to become job-makers.”
During this time, the Dudley Beauty School System was created with for strategically located schools all over the country and the world., led by Dudley Cosmetology University in Kernersville.
The company has trained over 30,000 cosmologists all over the world, something Dr. Dudley said he was most proud of, as well as expanded its cosmetics line and beauty salons. Dr. Dudley became a millionaire by the time he reached age 40. “Dudley” became a household name in the Black community along with Ebony and Johnson Products.
Dr. Dudley has been the recipient of numerous awards during his tenure, including The Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award from Pres. Barack Obama, the Maya Angelou Tribute to Achievement Award, and Inc. Magazine’s North Carolina Master Entrepreneur Award, among others. Soon he was taking pictures with world leaders like South African Pres. Nelson Mandela.
The tremendous work of the Dudleys was noted in the 2009 Chris Rock documentary, “Good Hair” about the black hair care industry.
It was also during this time that Dr. Dudley used his success to become a national and internationally renowned speaker. This was also a period during which Dr. Dudley literally saved the life of nationally syndicated Black radio talk show host Tom Pope who had gone bankrupt. Dr. Dudley helped save Pope’s business and stay on the air, without asking for a dime in return.
“Tom had the right spirit, the right heart. So we talked about it, and we [helped him],” Dr. Dudley recalls. In his autobiography, From Incognito Gangster to God: An American Story of Redemption and Restoration,
Tom Pope thanked the Dudleys for helping him when he was “bruised and broken.”
Dr. Dudley also wrote his book Walking by Faith: I AM, I CAN AND I WILL, detailing some of his principles for success, such as change your attitude to change your life; accept challenge in faith; Don’t add loss to loss; and make a difference in the world.
“So many lives have changed, because I wrote that book,” Dr. Dudley said, noting how one man serving time in prison read his book, and became a millionaire when he got out.
In June 2008, Dr. Dudley’s daughter, Ursula Dudley Oglesby, took over the day-to-day responsibilities of the business as president, and thus was born Dudley Beauty Corp. LLC. Today Dudley Beauty Corp. in High Point sells 400 hair care and cosmetology products in the U.S. and 18 countries.
“Loving GOD is loving people,” Dr. Dudley said.
The wake for Dr. Joe Louis Dudley, Sr. will be held this Sunday, Feb. 18th at
Providence Baptist Church on 1106 Tuscaloosa street in Greensboro. Visitation will be held
Monday, Feb. 19 at 8:30 a.m. at Mount Zion Baptist Church. Interment at 2 p.m. at Guilford
Memorial Park, 6000 High Point Road in Greensboro, 27407.
All visitors are asked to wear navy blue.
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NC ATTORNEY GENERAL’S
OFFICE COULD DISRUPT
PATH TO RACIAL JUSTICE
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
136 inmates on North Carolina’s death row could be resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, provided the state Attorney General’s Office does not interfere.
It all begins with the case of Hasson Bacote, an African-American male convicted in 2009 of a murder he committed during a robbery, and was sentenced to death for by ten white and two black jurors in Johnson County.
But Bacote’s attorneys have invoked the Racial Justice Act (RJA), which was enacted in 2009 by Democratic lawmakers, later repealed by the Republican-led General Assembly in 2013, and restored by a Democrat-majority state Supreme Court in 2020 for those defendants who originally filed to have their capital cases reviewed before the law was repealed.
The RJA allows death row defendants to argue that juries in their cases were tainted by racial bias by prosecutors. If a judge finds evidence to support that claim, those defendants are resentenced from death, to life in prison without parole.
In the case of Hasson Bacote, his attorneys are prepared to argue and present evidence at a February 26th hearing in Johnston County Superior Court that prosecutors in Bacote’s case used the defendant’s race against him with the jury, which is unconstitutional.
The law states that a defendant is to be judged by a jury of his or her peers.
In 2022, a Superior Court judge ordered the state to turn over 680,000 pages documenting how prosecutors across the state chose jurors for capital cases. Bacote’s attorneys say what they found contained in those pages was evidence enough to prove their contention that North Carolina prosecutors still unconstitutionally invoke the race of black capital case defendants while choosing jurors.
If a Johnston County Superior Court judge agrees, that ruling would set the standard for other pending death row cases that were filed under the RJA.
But now comes the state Attorney General’s Office.
It has argued in papers filed to the state Supreme Court that “…a claim of racial discrimination cannot be presumed based on the mere assertion of a defendant; it must be proved.” The AG’s Office maintains that such evidence in Bacote’s case is “insufficiently flawed.”
Bacote’s attorneys counter that they have evidence of prosecutorial racism in at least 176 capital cases in North Carolina between 1985 - 2011, where black prospective jurors were two and a half times more likely to be dismissed from the jury pool in cases involving black defendants in capital cases.
Bacote’s attorneys particularly pointed towards Johnson County capital prosecutions, where they allege blacks were four times as likely as whites to be dismissed from jury pools in cases involving black defendants.
But the allegations don’t stop there. Attorneys for Hassan Bacote say Johnston County prosecutor Gregory Butler is responsible for striking black jurors from jury pools at least ten times more than whites in at least four capital cases, and Butler was the prosecutor in Bacote’s case.
Bacote’s attorneys point to a newspaper article where prosecutor Butler reportedly compared black defendants to “…wild dogs and hyenas, hunting their victims “like the predators of the African plain.”
They also point to updated information from a study by law professors at Michigan State University of a pattern of racial animus in death penalty cases involving black defendants in North Carolina. Those findings served as the basis for establishing the original RJA.
However, it was just last year when the NC Supreme Court determined that a study by those same MSU researchers was “…unreliable and fatally flawed” because it “assumed racial animus in cases in which defendants did not make any such claim, or in which the trial court or appellate courts did not make or sustain any such findings.”
On the basis of that, the AG’s Office petitioned the Johnston County Superior Court judge to deny Bacote’s attorneys petition for a Feb. 26th hearing on their claims of racial bias in jury selection. The judge has denied that request.
So now the AG’s Office has petitioned the state Supreme Court to step in and give guidance to lower courts as to how to use the MSU study results, saying that the Feb. 26th hearing would “waste time and resources if it is later determined on subsequent appeal that the claims should have been dismissed at the pleadings stage.”
Depending on how the High Court rules, this could indeed change the way lower courts use the MSU study findings in determining whether a death row defendant gets life in prison without parole.
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