Walker, Madam C.J. (Sarah Breedlove)

Impact on the world

Built the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company from a $1.25 initial investment into a hair care empire that, by some estimates, trained over 40,000 Black women as licensed sales agents across the United States, Caribbean, and Central America, earning recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first female self-made millionaire in American history, though some historians note other women, including Mary Ellen Pleasant, may have achieved comparable wealth without leaving documentation as thorough as Walker's; she developed her signature hair care formula after beginning as a sales agent for Annie Turnbo Malone, already profiled in this collection, a professional relationship that ended in lasting acrimony after Malone accused Walker of stealing her formula, a claim complicated by the fact that the underlying combination of petroleum jelly and sulfur had already been in common use for roughly a century before either woman began selling it.

Life & background

Born Sarah Breedlove on a Louisiana plantation in 1867 to formerly enslaved sharecropper parents, she was the first of her family born free, after the Emancipation Proclamation, and was orphaned by age seven, working cotton fields alongside her older sister before marrying at 14, partly to escape an abusive brother-in-law, and becoming a widowed single mother at 20 after her first husband's death. She moved to St. Louis in 1889, supporting her daughter A'Lelia by working as a laundress for $1.50 a week while attending night school, and found mentorship through her church choir and the National Association of Colored Women before developing severe hair loss in the 1890s, a condition common among Black women of the era due to harsh soaps and infrequent washing made difficult by the lack of indoor plumbing. Around 1903 she began using and then selling products for Annie Turnbo Malone's hair care line, moving to Denver in 1905 to continue that work while developing her own formula, and after marrying advertising man Charles Joseph Walker in 1906, she adopted the name Madam C.J. Walker and launched her own company with just over a dollar to her name, building a national sales force of trained 'Walker Agents' who earned substantial commissions, far exceeding typical domestic wages available to Black women, while spreading her signature 'Walker Method' of scalp treatment, gentle washing, and styling through demonstrations across the South and Southeast. She relocated her headquarters to Indianapolis in 1910 to take advantage of its rail access and large Black population, building a factory, laboratory, and beauty school there, divorced Charles in 1913 over disagreements about the scale of her ambitions, and continued expanding her business internationally while becoming an outspoken philanthropist and political activist, donating substantially to the NAACP, funding scholarships at the Tuskegee Institute, and personally lobbying President Woodrow Wilson to support federal anti-lynching legislation. Her 1916 move to Harlem and her lavish Hudson River estate, Villa Lewaro, designed by architect Vertner Tandy, already profiled in this collection, became gathering places for the city's Black community, and at her 1919 death from complications of high blood pressure at age 51, her estate was valued between one and two million dollars; her daughter A'Lelia took over the company, which continued operating in various forms for decades, was the subject of a 2020 Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, and remains commemorated through two properties on the National Register of Historic Places.

Sources

1. Biography.com; History.com; Women's History Museum; Library of Congress (This Month in Business History); Women & the American Story (New-York Historical Society); History Hit