Madam C. J. Walker

Sarah Breedlove

Madame 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 there and in Mississippi, picking cotton. She was orphaned at age seven, married at age fourteen, and 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' history.

Born into poverty as the daughter of sharecroppers, uneducated, Sarah Breedlove lived with abuse from her caretaker; yet with vision and determination she developed a remarkable work-ethic. She was instrumental as a role model for African-Americans, especially women, of her day. Employing and training many in her cosmetics company, she gave them hope and brought dignity and meaning into their lives. She is respected as a great pioneer in the fight for equality among genders and races in America.

Madame 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 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]

When she died in 1919 in New York, she was believed to be the wealthiest black woman in the country. On Jan. 28, 1998, the United States Postal Service issued the Madam C.J. Walker Commemorative stamp as a part of its Black Heritage Series. [2]

Family Background

Sarah Breedlove, known in her later life as Madam C. J. Walker, was born to former slaves Owen and Minerva Breedlove. She had one older sister, Louvenia and brothers Alexander, James, Solomon and Owen, Jr. Her parents died in 1874, during an epidemic of yellow fever. Several years later, when she was ten years old, Sarah and her sister moved across the river to Vicksburg 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. [3]

Business

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 their 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.

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 Malone. In 1905, Sarah became a sales agent for Malone and moved to Denver, where she married Charles Joseph Walker.

Changing her name to Madame CJ Walker, she founded her own business and began selling Madam 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 selling her products door to door, giving demonstrations, and working on sales and marketing strategies. In 1908, she temporarily moved her base to Pittsburgh and opened Lelia College to train her growing number of "hair culturists". [4]

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. [5]

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. Madame Walker’s 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. [6]

Causes

Madame 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.

Madame 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. [7]

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." [8]

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. [9]

She was honored later that year in the summer of 1918 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. [10]

Legacy

Villa Lewaro was built in August of 1918 on Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. The grand estate served not only as Madame 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 Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company always have a woman president. In 1927 the Walker Building, planned by Madame Walker, was completed in Indianapolis to serve as company headquarters. [11] The trustees of the Walker estate sold the original Madame 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 Madame 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. [12]

By the time of her death, Madame 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. [13]

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. [14]

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