Madam C. J. Walker

File:Sarah breedlove.jpg

Sarah Breedlove

Madam C. J. Walker (December 23, 1867 - May 25, 1919), was an African American philanthropist and tycoon. Born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana, the daughter of former slaves, she was raised on farms in Louisiana and Mississippi, picking cotton. She was orphaned at age seven, married at age fourteen, became a mother at seventeen and was widowed at twenty. By the age of fifty, the company she founded was the largest business in the United States owned by an African American. Through tenacity and faith she sculpted a life not only of personal success, but as one of a role-model at a crucial time in America's history.

Despite such odds, Sarah Breedlove, with vision and determination, developed a remarkable work-ethic. She was instrumental as a role model for African-Americans, especially women, of her day. At a time when women were believed to be neither physically nor emotionally suited for business, and African Americans were believed to be incapable of developing their own communities, Madam C. J. Walker refuted the stereotypes and broke the barriers which had held back so many. She is thus respected as a great pioneer in the fight for equality among genders and races in America.

Madam C. J. Walker, never forgetting the poor and less fortunate, became a charitable philanthropist giving to such institutions as Tuskegee Institute, Charlotte Hawkin’s Palmer Memorial Institute, Bethone’s Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls and Lucy Laney’s Haynes Institute in Augusta, Georgia. She also contributed to homes for the aged in St. Louis and Indianapolis and to the Young Women’s Christian Association, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. [1]

Truly an African American icon, Madam C. J. Walker overcame astonishing odds to become a leader of her people. Even as her life drew to an end, she yearned for more years in order to "Do more than ever for my race. I've caught the vision. I can see what they need."

One of her final statements gives a hint to the source of her strength: "It was through His divine providence that I am what I am, for all good and perfect gifts come from above." (Scribner, 2001, 269)

Family Background

Sarah Breedlove, known in her later life as Madam C. J. Walker, was born to former slaves Owen and Minerva Breedlove in Delta Louisiana. She had one older sister, Louvenia and brothers Alexander, James, Solomon and Owen, Jr. Her parents died in 1874, possibly victims of the cholera epidemic. Several years later, when she was ten years old, Sarah and her sister moved across the river to Vicksburg Mississippi in 1878 and obtained work as maids. At the age of fourteen, Sarah married Moses McWilliams to escape the abuse of her sister's husband. They had a daughter, born June 6, 1885. Lelia, who is best known as A'Lelia Walker, a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. When Lelia was only two years old, Moses McWilliams died. Sarah's second marriage to John Davis August 11, 1894 failed and ended sometime in 1903. She married for the third time in January, 1906 to newspaper sales agent, Charles Joseph Walker, whom she divorced in 1910. [2]

New Beginnings

After the death of her first husband, Sarah McWilliams traveled to St. Louis to join her four brothers who had established themselves as barbers. Working as a laundrywoman, she managed to save enough money to educate her daughter. Friendships with other black women who were members of the St. Paul A.M.E. Church and the National Association of Colored Women exposed her to a new way of viewing the world.

Sarah Breedlove's life in Mississippi, difficult as it may have been, could not have prepared her for life in St. Louis. Though she had the support of her brothers and their families, life in a big northern city did not offer the same support and familiarity as the life her family had known for generations in the South.

St. Paul AME Church was the second-oldest black protestant church in St. Louis and the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation west of the Mississippi. The AME churches had a long tradition of political militancy and self-reliance, its ministers had advocated abolition, conducted clandestine schools during slavery and harbored emigrants new to the city. (Scribner, 2001, 49)

Sarah Breedlove, faced with family tragedies, an abusive marriage and a dangerous neighborhood sought solace in the comfort and hope that St. Paul's offered. Sarah found strength through the church as well as through the St. Louis Colored Orphans Home, where her daughter Lelia lived part of every week.

The church community, besides offering spiritual solace and physical assistance, also offered new ideas and dreams to the black race who had suffered generations of demoralizing slavery.

Never forgetting her situation as a young widowed mother in an unfamiliar city and the assistance she received to help her get on her feet, Sarah Breedlove Walker in turn became an activist and philanthropist in her later years.

Madam Walker's connection the the church remained throughout her life. In her early days of traveling as a saleswoman, her first stop in any town was the church, where she visited the pastor and was introduced to the congregation. After she was well-established and well-known she spoke in churches on "The Negro Woman in Business" in order to 'inspire women to rise above laundry and the kitchen' and to aspire to much more wealth, happiness and fulfillment in their lives.

Business

During the 1890s, Sarah began to suffer from a scalp ailment that caused her to lose most of her hair. Embarrassed by her appearance, she experimented with a variety of home-made remedies and products, including those made by another black woman entrepreneur, Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone. In 1905, Sarah became a sales agent for Pope-Turnbo Products and moved to Denver, where she married Charles Joseph Walker, whom she had met in St. Louis.

Eventually, Sarah developed her own product, which she reported came to her in a dream as an answer to her prayers. Claiming a 'secret ingredient' from Africa, her formula contained coconut oil, petrolatum, beeswax, copper sulfate, violet extract and carbolic acid.

Black women of Sarah's day endured daily emotional and psychological pressure to assimilate by minimizing the physical reminders of slavery. To be considered beautiful in those times one had to have long flowing locks, not the "short, nappy, woolly" heads that were common among the poor, often former slave, women of that day. Ms. Breedlove's products healed an unhealthy scalp and enabled hair to grow long and luxurious.

Changing her name to Madame C. J. Walker, she founded her own business and began selling Madame Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower, a scalp conditioning and healing formula. To promote her products, she embarked on an exhausting sales drive throughout the South and Southeast United States selling her products door to door, giving demonstrations, and perfecting sales and marketing strategies. In 1908, she moved her base temporarily to Pittsburgh and opened Lelia College to train her growing number of "hair culturists". [3]

In 1910 she moved her central operations to Indianapolis, then the country's largest manufacturing base, to utilize that city's access to eight major railway systems. At the height of success, Madame Walker gathered a group of key individuals to run the company. During this period she and her husband divorced. [4]

Eventually, her products formed the basis of a thriving national corporation employing at one point over 3,000 people. Her Walker System, which included a broad offering of cosmetics, licensed Walker Agents, and Walker Schools offered meaningful employment and personal growth to thousands of African-American women. She was recognized for her innovative methods of mass production, distribution, marketing, and advertising that transformed the local patterns of buying and selling of the day. Her aggressive marketing strategy combined with relentless ambition led her to be labeled as the first known African-American woman to become a self-made millionaire. [5]

Contemporaries

The late 1800s and early 1900s was a time during which Americans of African descent were recovering from the effects of slavery. The black leaders of that day were necessarily people of strength and conviction. Madam Walker thus had powerful contemporaries.

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was the founder of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama and helped to establish the National Negro Business League. Washington's major thesis was that blacks could secure their constitutional rights through their own economic and moral advancement rather than through legal and political changes. He kept a conciliatory stand, which angered some blacks who feared it would encourage the foes of equal rights, though whites approved of his views. He felt this stance was necessary in order to attain support for the programs he envisioned and brought into being. [6]

Walker tried for several years to arrange a meeting with Washington in order to gain his endorsement of her business. Washington did not support the type of business Madame Walker operated, stating that it "fostered imitation of white beauty standards". When Walker attended the National Negro Business League national convention she was not invited to speak. When she did speak out, Washington ignored her presence. After several years, Walker was eventually invited as a speaker and in 1914 Washington named her the Foremost Business Woman of Our Race.

In 1914 Walker spent some time at the Tuskegee Institute, addressing the students each morning after daily religious exercises. However, her efforts to convince Washington to adopt her work as part of the curriculum of his school were unsuccessful.

W.E.B. DuBois

One of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, William Edward Burghardt DuBois was one of the first male civil rights leaders to recognize the problems of gender discrimination. He was among the first men to understand the unique problems of black women, and to value their contributions. He supported the women's suffrage movement and strove to integrate this mostly white struggle.

DuBois, to his admirers, was by spirited devotion and scholarly dedication, an attacker of injustice and a defender of freedom. An outspoken Pan-Africanist, he gained the support of Madame Walker because of her great interest in the African Continent.

Booker T. Washington argued that Black people should temporarily forego "political power, insistence on civil rights, and higher education of Negro youth. They should concentrate all their energies on industrial education." DuBois believed in the higher education of a "Talented Tenth" who through their knowledge of modern culture could guide the American Negro into a higher civilization. [7]

Though Washington and DuBois were one-time friends who parted ways, Madame Walker continued a friendship with both men. She was unfortunately unable to assist them in reconciling their differences.

Causes

Madam Walker saw her personal wealth as not an end in itself, but a means to help promote and expand economic opportunities for others, especially African Americans. She took great pride in the profitable employment, and alternative to domestic labor, that her company afforded many thousands of black women who worked as commissioned agents for Walker's company. One of her employees, Marjorie Joyner, started under her influence and went on to lead the next generation of African-American beauty entrepreneurs.

Madam Walker was an inspiration to many black women. Fully recognizing the power of her wealth and success, she became a public speaker and lectured to promote her business which in turn empowered other women in business. She gave lectures on black issues at conventions sponsored by powerful black institutions. She also encouraged black Americans to support the cause of World War I and worked to have black veterans granted full respect.

After the bloody East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917, in which a white mob murdered more than three dozen black men, Madam Walker devoted herself to having lynching made a federal crime. She joined a group of Harlem leaders who visited the White House to present a petition favoring federal anti-lynching legislation. [8]

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 was 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. She told them:

"This is the greatest country under the sun, 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." [9]

In 1918 she was the keynote speaker at many National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fund raisers for the anti-lynching effort throughout the Midwest and Eastern United States. [10]

In the summer of 1918 Madam Walker was honored by the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) for making the largest contribution to saving the home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. A recognized philanthropist, she donated large sums of money to the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign and later in her life revised her will in order to support black schools, organizations, individuals, orphanages, retirement homes, as well as YWCAs and YMCAs.

Walker's daughter, A'Lelia Walker, carried on this tradition, opening her home and her mother's to writers and artists of the emerging Harlem Renaissance and promoting important members of that movement. [11]

Legacy

Villa Lewaro was built in August of 1918 in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. The grand estate served not only as Madam Walker's home but as a conference center for summits of racial leaders to discuss current issues. Her neighbors included industrialists Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller.

Madam Walker died at Villa Lewaro at 51 years old on Sunday, May 25, 1919 from complications of hypertension. Upon her death she was considered to be the wealthiest African-American woman in America and known to be the first African-American woman millionaire. In her will, Walker bequeathed two-thirds of her estate to charitable and educational institutions, many of which she had supported during her lifetime. The remaining third was left to her daughter, A'Lelia, who succeeded her as company president. True to her beliefs, a provision in the will directed that the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company always have a woman president. In 1927 the Walker Building, planned by Madam Walker, was completed in Indianapolis to serve as company headquarters. [12] The trustees of the Walker estate sold the original Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Co. in 1985, and ceased business operations.

In 1927, the Walker Theatre in Indianapolis was opened for blacks who were not allowed in the same theaters as whites or were forced to sit in the balconies. The theater was part of the Walker Building at 617 Indiana Ave, which formerly housed Madam Walker's company. A $2.3 million renovation of the theater was completed in 1987. The building was named in honor of its namesake and is listed as a National Historic Landmark. [13]

By the time of her death, Madam Walker 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. [14]

Madame C. J. Walker said of herself:

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. [15]

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Bundles, A'Lelia P. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker. New York, New York: Scribner, 2001 ISBN 0684825821.

External links

• A Biography of Madame C. J. Walker
• Detroit Free Press: Hairline: Black hair in time ...
• Gale: Black History

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