1953 -- Born into a poor African American farming family in Aurora, North Carolina, Joe Dudley not only grew up in perilous economic circumstance, but he had the additional burden of having a terrible speech impediment that led most people to assume he was stupid.. Labeled a "slow learner" at school, he was held back in the first grade and again several years later. Though his mother encouraged him to believe he could do anything he wanted, Joe Dudley instead accepted the impressions of others. He slacked off in his classes and exhibited a bad attitude toward his teachers. By the time he was a junior in high school, most people -- including Dudley himself -- believed he was heading toward a bleak future.
2003 -- From his 80,000 square foot corporate office, a 66-year-old Joe Dudley reflected on the mission of his company, Dudley Products, which took in $30 million annually with its line of cosmetics marketed to black consumers. In addition to his line of hair and beauty products, Dudley also ran a chain of cosmetology schools that operated throughout the world, including campuses in Japan, Korea and Brazil as well as two in Zimbabwe. Even with large conglomerates like L'Oreal and Alberto-Culver competing with his business, Dudley remained a powerful, independent presence in the market. And he was determined to retain his independence and not sell out to a larger corporation. "I don't have anything against people who sell their company," he explained. "But I didn't build my company to sell it. I built my company as an example of what you can do with difficulties in life . . . . I want to show young African Americans that they can run a business too."
During his junior year of high school, Joe Dudley was dumped by a girl who explained that she was leaving him for another boy. "He is smart," she explained, "and you are dumb." Humiliated by the rejection, Dudley was for the first time in his life determined to show everyone that he wasn't "slow" or "dumb" after all. His motivation led him back to the education he'd taken lightly for so many years. Beginning with his elementary school textbooks, Dudley went back and taught himself everything he had refused to learn up to that point. He graduated the following year and enrolled at North Carolina A&T, the state's historically black university in Greensboro. While pursuing his degree in Business Management, he financed his tuition by selling Fuller hair care products door-to-door. (Fuller Products had been founded by a Louisiana sharecropper named Samuel Fuller, who was by the 1950s the wealthiest African American man in the US.) Dudley continued to sell Fuller products until 1967, when he and his wife struck out on their own, creating a line of hair care products that sold well t throughout North Carolina. In 1976, Samuel Fuller hired Dudley to take over the operations of Fuller Products; by then, Dudley had become so successful that he was able to merge the two companies under his own name. Just six years after its founding, Dudley Products had just absorbed the largest black hair products company in the nation.