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.”