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Madam
C.J. Walker was one of the first American women to become a self-made
millionaire. An astute businesswoman, she built a hair care empire from
the ground up, starting with $1.50 worth of ingredients she mixed herself
in a washtub.
Sarah
Breedlove Walker was born on December 23, 1867, in Louisiana. Her father
was a sharecropper who died when she was only six. An older sister raised
her, but she received little formal education. When she was fourteen she
married Moses McWilliams, and they had a daughter they named A'Lelia.
Two years later McWilliams died, and Walker moved with the baby to St.
Louis, Missouri, where some of her relatives lived. She worked as a laundress
in a hotel for the next 18 years.
In
her late thirties she began to suffer from a scalp condition that caused
her to begin losing her hair. She tried various hair products to treat
the condition but was not satisfied with them and began to create her
own. She mixed the ingredients in her washtub and began to sell mixtures,
such as her, "Wonderful Hair Grower", door to door. By 1905
she employed fifty people in her factory.
In 1906 she moved to Denver, Colorado, and married Charles Joseph Walker,
a sales agent for an African American newspaper. She adopted the name
"Madam C. J. Walker" for business purposes. Her husband used
his marketing skills to assist her in the expansion of her company. Her
line of hair care products grew rapidly after she developed the "Walker
Hair Care Method" and thousands of women were trained in this method
at Madam Walker's beauty school, Lelia College, and throughout the country.
Many
women were trained to be "Walker Agents" to sell the hair products
and other cosmetics door to door. Madam Walker eventually added a mail
order department to the business, and at one time she had about 20,000
sales agents throughout the United States, the Caribbean and Central America.
By 1915 the "Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company" was the
largest African American-owned business in the U.S.
Madam
C. J. Walker was well-known as a philanthropist. She was a major financial
contributor to the NAACP. When she died, her mansion on the Hudson River
in New York, (designed by New York's first African American architect,
Vertner Tandy) was bequeathed to her daughter who, at her mother's request,
left it to the NAACP. (The mansion, Villa Lewaro, is now a National Historic
Landmark.) In addition to her support of the NAACP, Madam Walker
contributed to African American chapters of the YWCA and various local
charities and orphanages. She established scholarships for women at the
Tuskegee Institute and other African American colleges. Madam C. J. Walker
was outspoken in her realization that her fortune had come from the African
American community, and she made it a point to give something back to
benefit African American people.
Madam
Walker's daughter and granddaughter continued to run her hair care empire
after her death in 1919. The business was finally sold in 1985. A'Lelia,
Madam Walker's daughter, held a famous "salon" for artists and
intellectuals during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s.
Madam
Walker once said: "If I have accomplished anything in life,
it is because I have been willing to work hard. I never yet started anything
doubtingly, and I have always believed in keeping at things with a vim.
There is no royal flower-strewn road to success, and if there is, I have
not found it, for what success I have obtained is the result of many sleepless
nights and real hard work."[]
by
Susan Robinson
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