Black History Month • Madam CJ Walker
Early Years
Born on December 23rd 1867, given name Sarah Breedlove, was an African American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and political and social activist. She is recorded as the first self-made female millionaire in America in the Guinness Book of World Records. She was born in Delta Louisiana to Owen and Minerva Breedlove with 5 siblings. Walker was the first child in her family born into freedom, the other siblings being enslaved by Robert W. Burney on his Madison Parish plantation. After her mother died in 1872 and then her father almost a year later, she was orphaned at the age of 7. At the age of 10 she moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi where she lived with her sister Louvenia and brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. Here is where she began working as a child as a domestic servant. She recounted that she had only three months of formal education, learning during Sunday school literacy lessons at the church she attended during her earlier years.
In 1882, at the age of 14, she married Moses McWilliams. In 1885 they had a daughter, Lelia McWilliams, Moses died in 1887 when Walker was 20 and Lelia was two. She remarried by 1884 to John Davis but left him in 1903.
An Entrepreneur was Born
In 1888, she and her daughter Lelia Walker moved to St. Louis where she found work as a laundress, earning barely more than a dollar a day. Walker suffered from severe dandruff and other scalp ailments, including baldness. This was due to skin disorders and the application of harsh products to cleanse her hair and clothing. Other factors in her hair loss were poor diet, illnesses, and infrequent bathing and hair washing, this was during a time when most Americans lacked poor indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity. Walker first learned about hair care from her brothers, barbers in St. Louis. Around 1904 she became a commission agent selling products for Annie Malone, an African American hair-care entrepreneur, millionaire and owner of Poro Company. While working for Malone, Walker began to take her new knowledge and develop her own product line .
In 1905, at 37, Walker and her daughter moved to Denver, Colorado where she continued to sell products for Malone while also still developing her own products. However, a problem developed between Malone and Walker after Malone accused her of stealing her formula. The formula was a mixture of petroleum jelly and sulfur, a combination that had been in use for over a hundred years.
Booming Business
In January of 1906 she remarried again to Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper advertising salesman from St. Louis. (Walker and Charles divorced in 1912; Charles died in 1926. Lelia McWilliams adopted her stepfather’s surname and became known as A’Lelia Walker.) This is where she adopted the name Madam C.J. Walker and Charles became her business partner in her endeavors. She began marketing herself as an independent hairdresser and retailer of cosmetic creams. She sold her products door to door, educating other black women how to groom and style their hair. While traveling with her husband through the southern and eastern U.S. her daughter Lelia stayed in Denver, in charge of the mail-order operation. In 1908 she and Charles settled in Pittsburg opening a beauty parlor and established Lelia College to train “hair culturalists.” After closing the business in Denver, she established a new base in Indianapolis, establishing the headquarters for the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company and Lelia moved to Pittsburgh to cover day to day operations. Around this time persuaded her mother to establish an office and beauty salon in Harlem. Walker’s method of grooming was designed to promote hair growth and to condition the scalp through the use of products like shampoo, a pomade that made hair that was lackluster and brittle to then become soft and luxuriant.
Between 1911 and 1919, the height of her career, Walker and her company employed several thousand women as sales agents. By 1917, the company claimed to have trained approximately 20,000 women. These employees would go door to door and often demonstrate the products in either the consumer’s home or their own homes, needing a source of water for most of the demonstration. In addition to training in sales and grooming, Walker showed other black women how to budget, build their own business and encouraged them to become financially independent. In 1917, inspired by the model of the National Association of Colored Women, Walker began organizing her sales agents into state and local clubs. The result was the establishment of the National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association of Madam C. J. Walker Agents (predecessor to the Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Culturists Union of America).
Later Years
As Walker’s wealth and notoriety increased, she became more vocal about her views. In 1912, Walker addressed an annual gathering of the National Negrow Business League (NNBL) from the convention floor, where she declared: “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there, I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground.” Walker became more involved in political matters after her move to New York. She delivered lectures on political, economic, and social issues at conventions sponsored by powerful black institutions. Her friends and associates included Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and W.E.B. Du Bois. During World War I. Walker was a leader in the Circle For Negro War Relief and advocated for the establishment of a training camp for black army officers. In 1917, she joined the executive committee of the New York chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which organized the Silent Protest Parade on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. The public demonstration drew more than 8,000 African Americans to protest a riot in East Saint Louis that killed 39 African-Americans.Profits from her business significantly impacted Walker’s contributions to her political and philanthropic interests. In 1918, the National Association of Colored Women’s Club (NACWC) honored Walker for making the largest individual contribution to help preserve Frederick Douglass’s Anacostia house. Before her death in 1919, Walker pledged $5,000 (the equivalent of about $77,700 in 2019) to the NAACP’s anti-lynching fund. At the time, it was the largest gift from an individual that the NAACP had ever received.
At the time of her death, Walker was considered to be worth between a half million and a million dollars. She was the wealthiest African-American woman in America. According to Walker’s obituary in The New York Times, “she said herself two years ago [in 1917] that she was not yet a millionaire, but hoped to be some time, not that she wanted the money for herself, but for the good she could do with it.”
