Biog­ra­phy of Madam C.J.Walker

Pre­pared by A’Lelia Bun­dles, Fam­ily His­to­rian
Madam C.J. Walker Website

Born Sarah Breedlove on Decem­ber 23, 1867 on a Delta, Louisiana plan­ta­tion, this daugh­ter of for­mer slaves trans­formed her­self from an une­d­u­cated farm laborer and laun­dress into of the twen­ti­eth century’s most suc­cess­ful, self-made women entrepreneur.

Orphaned at age seven, she often said, “I got my start by giv­ing myself a start.” She and her older sis­ter, Lou­ve­nia, sur­vived by work­ing in the cot­ton fields of Delta and nearby Vicks­burg, Mis­sis­sippi. At 14, she mar­ried Moses McWilliams to escape abuse from her cruel brother-in-law, Jesse Powell.

Her only daugh­ter, Lelia (later known as A’Lelia Walker) was born on June 6, 1885. When her hus­band died two years later, she moved to St. Louis to join her four broth­ers who had estab­lished them­selves as bar­bers. Work­ing for as lit­tle as $1.50 a day, she man­aged to save enough money to edu­cate her daugh­ter. Friend­ships with other black women who were mem­bers of St. Paul A.M.E. Church and the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Col­ored Women exposed her to a new way of view­ing the world.

Dur­ing the 1890s, Sarah began to suf­fer from a scalp ail­ment that caused her to lose most of her hair. She exper­i­mented with many home­made reme­dies and store-bought prod­ucts, includ­ing those made by Annie Mal­one, another black woman entre­pre­neur. In 1905 Sarah moved to Den­ver as a sales agent for Mal­one, then mar­ried her third hus­band, Charles Joseph Walker, a St. Louis news­pa­per­man. After chang­ing her name to “Madam” C. J. Walker, she founded her own busi­ness and began sell­ing Madam Walker’s Won­der­ful Hair Grower, a scalp con­di­tion­ing and heal­ing for­mula, which she claimed had been revealed to her in a dream. Madam Walker, by the way, did NOT invent the straight­en­ing comb, though many peo­ple incor­rectly believe that to be true.

To pro­mote her prod­ucts, the new “Madam C.J. Walker” trav­eled for a year and a half on a dizzy­ing cru­sade through­out the heav­ily black South and South­east, sell­ing her prod­ucts door to door, demon­strat­ing her scalp treat­ments in churches and lodges, and devis­ing sales and mar­ket­ing strate­gies. In 1908, she tem­porar­ily moved her base to Pitts­burgh where she opened Lelia Col­lege to train Walker “hair culturists.”

By early 1910, she had set­tled in Indi­anapo­lis, then the nation’s largest inland man­u­fac­tur­ing cen­ter, where she built a fac­tory, hair and man­i­cure salon and another train­ing school. Less than a year after her arrival, Walker grabbed national head­lines in the black press when she con­tributed $1,000 to the build­ing fund of the “col­ored” YMCA in Indianapolis.

In 1913, while Walker trav­eled to Cen­tral Amer­ica and the Caribbean to expand her busi­ness, her daugh­ter A’Lelia, moved into a fab­u­lous new Harlem town­house and Walker Salon, designed by black archi­tect, Vert­ner Tandy. “There is noth­ing to equal it,” she wrote to her attor­ney, F.B. Ran­som. “Not even on Fifth Avenue.”

Walker her­self moved to New York in 1916, leav­ing the day-to-day oper­a­tions of the Madam C. J. Walker Man­u­fac­tur­ing Com­pany in Indi­anapo­lis to Ran­som and Alice Kelly, her fac­tory fore­lady and a for­mer school teacher. She con­tin­ued to over­see the busi­ness and to run the New York office. Once in Harlem, she quickly became involved in Harlem’s social and polit­i­cal life, tak­ing spe­cial inter­est in the NAACP’s anti-lynching move­ment to which she con­tributed $5,000.

In July 1917, when a white mob mur­dered more than three dozen blacks in East St. Louis, Illi­nois, Walker joined a group of Harlem lead­ers who vis­ited the White House to present a peti­tion favor­ing fed­eral anti-lynching legislation.

As her busi­ness con­tin­ued to grow, Walker orga­nized her agents into local and state clubs. Her Madam C. J. Walker Hair Cul­tur­ists Union of Amer­ica con­ven­tion in Philadel­phia in 1917 must have been one of the first national meet­ings of busi­ness­women in the coun­try. Walker used the gath­er­ing not only to reward her agents for their busi­ness suc­cess, but to encour­age their polit­i­cal activism as well. “This is the great­est coun­try under the sun,” she told them. “But we must not let our love of coun­try, our patri­otic loy­alty cause us to abate one whit in our protest against wrong and injus­tice. We should protest until the Amer­i­can sense of jus­tice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be for­ever impossible.”

By the time she died at her estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, she had helped cre­ate the role of the 20th Cen­tury, self-made Amer­i­can busi­ness­woman; estab­lished her­self as a pio­neer of the mod­ern black hair-care and cos­met­ics indus­try; and set stan­dards in the African-American com­mu­nity for cor­po­rate and com­mu­nity giving.

Tenac­ity and per­se­ver­ance, faith in her­self and in God, qual­ity prod­ucts and “hon­est busi­ness deal­ings” were the ele­ments and strate­gies she pre­scribed for aspir­ing entre­pre­neurs who requested the secret to her rags-to-riches ascent. “There is no royal flower-strewn path to suc­cess,” she once com­mented. “And if there is, I have not found it for if I have accom­plished any­thing in life it is because I have been will­ing to work hard.”

2009 MCJW Awardee Sum­mary Bios

Cor­po­rate

MELANIE TERVALON, MD, MPH, is Direc­tor for the National Diver­sity Insti­tute for Cul­tur­ally Com­pe­tent Care which is a key com­po­nent of Kaiser Permanente’s strate­gic plan to achieve the organization’s mis­sion and lever­age diver­sity to dif­fer­en­ti­ate Kaiser Per­ma­nente in the mar­ket­place. As Direc­tor, Dr. Ter­valon leads the vital work of help­ing to increase Kaiser Permanente’s orga­ni­za­tional capa­bil­ity to deliver cul­tur­ally com­pe­tent med­ical care reduce health dis­par­i­ties, and assist the Cen­ters to develop, val­i­date and repli­cate effec­tive cul­tur­ally com­pe­tent care prac­tices across the Pro­gram. Dr. Ter­valon is uniquely qual­i­fied to lead this inno­v­a­tive work and brings to this role, a wealth of knowl­edge, skill, expe­ri­ence and exper­tise in mul­ti­cul­tural health and health dis­par­i­ties, clin­i­cal instruc­tion, busi­ness con­sul­ta­tion, pub­lic speak­ing and process facil­i­ta­tion. Prior to join­ing Kaiser Per­ma­nente, Dr. Ter­valon served as Direc­tor of Edu­ca­tion for the National Cen­ter for Minor­ity Health Dis­par­i­ties at Children’s Hos­pi­tal Oak­land Research Insti­tute and UC Davis. Dr. Ter­valon received her MPH from UC Berke­ley, MD from UCSF School of Med­i­cine, and is a board cer­ti­fied pediatrician.

Advo­cacy

REGINA JACKSON, is the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the East Oak­land Youth Devel­op­ment Cen­ter (EOYDC) where she devel­ops and over­sees EOYDC’s gen­eral admin­is­tra­tion and pro­gram man­age­ment, super­vises pub­lic rela­tions and fis­cal man­age­ment, raises funds, devel­ops and main­tains part­ner­ships with cor­po­ra­tions and other orga­ni­za­tions and serves on statewide and com­mu­nity boards and task forces. Regina Jack­son has made it her mis­sion to invest heav­ily in the future of chil­dren, our nation’s great­est resource. She has taken on the chal­lenge of mold­ing, train­ing and inspir­ing young peo­ple here in her home­town of Oak­land, CA. Her involve­ment with EOYDC actu­ally began in 1984 when, as a recent grad­u­ate of UC Berke­ley with a degree in polit­i­cal sci­ence; she worked at EOYDC as an intern on the CORO Foun­da­tion grad­u­ate fel­low­ship in Pub­lic Affairs. Ms. Jack­son has done an excel­lent job of get­ting the Cen­ter rec­og­nized as a valu­able com­mu­nity resource. The Cen­ter offers a safe, nur­tur­ing envi­ron­ment where young peo­ple can learn, dream and aspire by devel­op­ing their self-esteem. She has led the way for thou­sands of youth at EOYDC to real­ize the impor­tance of con­tin­ued per­sonal growth.

Pio­neer

SHARON WILLIAMS, MD was the first African Amer­i­can female to be the Chief Res­i­dent and then elected as Med­ical Staff Pres­i­dent of Children’s Hos­pi­tal of Oak­land. Edu­cated in the Oak­land pub­lic schools, Williams com­pleted her under­grad­u­ate stud­ies at U.C. Davis. She attended med­ical school at U.C. Davis with 120 class­mates where she was the only African Amer­i­can stu­dent to suc­cess­fully com­plete the pro­gram in a four year period. Upon grad­u­a­tion, she chose to pur­sue pri­mary care in the Fresno area. After a year of car­ing for under­served chil­dren, she decided to pur­sue a sub-specialty in car­diac care and post­op­er­a­tive care. She has con­tin­ued to share her exper­tise with other doc­tors where she was a Lec­turer in the first Pedi­atric Advanced Life Sup­port Lec­ture Series given to over 200 physi­cians of African and His­panic descent. She also shared her med­ical exper­tise with physi­cians in St. Peters­burg, Rus­sia. She is presently on assign­ment in Logos, Nige­ria to help cre­ate a Pedi­atric Crit­i­cal Care Unit. She is very active in the com­mu­nity and serves as the Chair­per­son of the Ever­green Mis­sion­ary Bap­tist Church.

Entre­pre­neur

C. DIANNE HOWELL is the Pub­lisher of the Black Busi­ness List­ings and Pro­ducer of the Oak­land Black Expo. In early 1989 How­ell decided to fol­low her desire to do some­thing to pro­mote African Amer­i­can busi­nesses. With no cap­i­tal reserves, she founded the Black Busi­ness List­ings (BBL) and desk­top pub­lished the pub­li­ca­tion on her Mac Plus. She designed the basic small busi­ness list­ing to include a 25 word descrip­tion of the busi­ness in order to give the pub­lic the infor­ma­tion they might need to deter­mine which busi­ness in a given cat­e­gory might best meet their needs. She included arti­cles to encour­age peo­ple to look for future issues of the pub­li­ca­tion and thus see new busi­nesses that were listed. She soon dis­cov­ered that the arti­cles would be a key fea­ture of the pub­li­ca­tion since there were many issues which needed to be addressed which affected the eco­nomic future of the African Amer­i­can com­mu­nity. Orig­i­nally pub­lished bi-monthly, How­ell started pub­lish­ing BBL 10 times a year in 1990. Through­out the last 19 years, How­ell has been deter­mined to pro­mote African Amer­i­can eco­nomic devel­op­ment in every way con­ceiv­able. She has spon­sored monthly net­work­ing break­fasts to encour­age net­work­ing among African Amer­i­cans in busi­ness. She has been a pop­u­lar speaker through­out the com­mu­nity always advo­cat­ing the self-empowerment of the African Amer­i­can com­mu­nity. Most recently she took on the task of pro­duc­ing the mul­ti­fac­eted Black Expo in Oakland.

Keynote Speaker

The Cen­ter for the Advance­ment of Women is a not-for-profit insti­tu­tion ded­i­cated to research-based edu­ca­tion and advo­cacy for women. An inde­pen­dent, non-partisan orga­ni­za­tion founded in 1995 and led by Faye Wat­tle­ton, their mis­sion is to con­duct national opin­ion research among women to mea­sure expe­ri­ences in their daily lives. Their research presents a pro­file of women that is used to edu­cate opin­ion lead­ers, pol­icy mak­ers and the gen­eral public.