Madam C. J. Walker

American businesswoman

• Born: December 23, 1867
• Birthplace: Delta, Louisiana
• Died: May 25, 1919
• Place of death: Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

Vastly successful as a self-made entrepreneur, Walker provided African American women with effective hair-care techniques and products as well as less arduous, higher paying employment as Walker Agents. She also made sizeable contributions to African American charities and educational institutions, spoke out against racial injustices, and supported African American architects, artists, and literary figures.

Early Life

Madam C. J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove to Owen and Minerva Breedlove, former slaves who remained as sharecroppers on the one-thousand-acre cotton plantation of Robert W. Burney in Delta, Louisiana (across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg). When Walker was seven years old, her parents died during a major outbreak of yellow fever. She and her sister Louvenia soon moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and worked as launderers. Louvenia married, so Walker lived with her and her husband, Willie Powell. At age fourteen she married Moses McWilliams, partly to escape her domineering brother-in-law. When she was seventeen, she gave birth to her daughter, Lelia. Two years later, Walker’s husband was killed. She then moved to St. Louis, Missouri (which had one of the country’s largest African American populations), because she had heard wages for laundresses would be higher there.

Walker continued working as a laundress or cook for nearly twenty years while taking classes at night and saving money. She ensured that Lelia graduated from St. Louis public schools and then sent her to Knoxville College, a small, private African American school in Knoxville, Tennessee. She seemed unable to earn more than $1.50 per week, and she wondered how she would endure such hard, physical work when she got older.

Walker joined the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church, the National Association of Colored Women, and the Mite Missionary Society, which aided needy people in St. Louis. Through these organizations she met and came to admire such prosperous, influential African American women as Margaret Murray Washington, wife of educator Booker T. Washington. She longed for the poised, elegant demeanor they presented. Partly to advertise her skills as a laundress, she made sure her clothes were neat and crisp, but she disliked her hair, which was broken and had fallen out (especially at her temples), revealing patches of her scalp.

Like many African American women at the time, Walker had strained her hair through the practice of dividing it into sections, wrapping string around each section, and twisting it to make it straighter. She and other women were also troubled by conditions such as dandruff and psoriasis, possibly caused by stress, poor diet, health problems, or use of damaging hair treatments. Walker tried several products, including Poro’s Wonderful Hair Grower, but was not helped by them. Around 1904, she worked briefly for the St. Louis-based Poro selling their products door to door. She experimented with her own formulas, trying them on herself. By early 1905 she was satisfied with her own Wonderful Hair Grower, which had her hair “coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.”

Life’s Work

On July 21, 1905, with $1.50 in savings, Walker moved to Denver, Colorado, to be near her recently widowed sister-in-law and to develop her business. She worked as a cook for E. L. Schoty, a pharmacist who may have helped her plan ingredients for her products. Her three basic products were Vegetable Shampoo; Wonderful Hair Grower, which contained medications to combat various conditions causing hair loss and dandruff; and Glossine, a light oil. Walker also modified the steel comb popular in France, making the teeth wider and farther apart to suit African American hair. The comb was heated to press the oiled hair and soften the tight curls. She married Charles Joseph Walker, a sales agent for an African American newspaper who had become a close friend in St. Louis. She adopted the name Madam C. J. Walker for herself and her new company to convey an image of dignity in her business dealings and to evoke the glamour of France, where married women were called madame.

By September, 1906, Madam Walker had been advertising in local African American newspapers (which generated some mail-order business) and doing personal treatments and door-to-door sales. She was making $10 per week and was ready to expand the business. She and her husband began an extended sales trip that covered nine states and lasted a year and a half.

Walker’s business, the Madam C. J. Walker Company, grew at breakneck speed. She opened an office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where here daughter Lelia lived, in 1908. Lelia managed the mail-order business as well as the company’s first beauty school, Lelia College, where hair stylists (who were called hair culturists) could learn the Walker System. Walker continued to travel extensively, stopping in towns of all sizes. She spoke at churches, public halls, and Masonic lodges on how women could achieve financial independence as Walker Agents or hair culturists.

Walker encountered resistance from some African American ministers when she asked to speak at their churches. They charged that she was trying to straighten women’s hair and make them look white. Walker countered that she was trying to help women’s hair grow and their scalps heal, as well as teaching them good grooming. More important to her was giving women alternatives to domestic work, even if they had no formal education. Her own appearance was one of her best tools for selling her products. Nearly six feet tall, the calm, dignified Walker was fashionably dressed and wore fine jewelry. She wore her long, beautifully groomed hair pinned up, often complemented by a hat. Unlike her competitors who used images of comely biracial or white women on their products, Walker displayed her own likeness on her decorative tins.

In 1910 Walker consolidated her company’s operations in Indianapolis, Indiana, by building a factory there and later hiring Freeman Briley Ransom as the company’s attorney and general manager. Because of business differences, Walker and her husband divorced in 1912. By that point, the company employed 1,600 agents and earned $1,000 per week.

As Walker’s success and visibility grew, she increasingly used her influence to help others. She lowered the cost of joining her business from $25 to $10 for women who could not afford the normal price but promised to repay her when they could. She organized her agents into Walker Clubs and later formed the Madam C. J. Walker Hair Culturists Union. Clubs that excelled at philanthropy in their communities won cash prizes. Two much-publicized gifts by Madam Walker herself were $1,000 to the African American Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Indianapolis (1912) and $500 to the National Association of Colored Women (1918) for their fund to retire the mortgage on the home of African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Walker also used her influence to combat injustice against her race. In 1915 she was charged 25 cents as a “colored person” rather than the usual dime for admission to a motion picture at the Isis Theater in Indianapolis. She sued the Central Amusement Company, which operated the theater, asking for a $100 fine against their “unwarranted discrimination.” Race riots erupted in several cities during the summer of 1917, and African Americans were murdered, beaten, drowned, and driven from their homes, reportedly as white policemen watched. On July 28, 1917, many Walker Agents participated in the Negro Silent Protest parade, an event that Walker and other prominent African Americans had planned. Over ten thousand African Americans marched down Fifth Avenue in New York carrying banners protesting mob violence. Soon thereafter, Walker, along with African American leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Adam Clayton Powell, prepared a petition urging President Woodrow Wilson to make lynching a federal offense.

Walker’s wealth drew her much acclaim, particularly when she began to build her thirty-five-room, three-story, Renaissance Revival home in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. She purchased the four-and-one-half-acre lot in 1916 for $60,000. She was reportedly charged twice its worth when realtors discovered she was African American. She deliberately chose that area because of the prestige it enjoyed among New York industrialists and was determined that the house exemplify what could be achieved by someone of her race and sex. The mansion, named Villa Lewaro, was designed by Vertner Woodson Tandy, New York’s first registered African American architect. It was completed in 1918 at a cost of $350,000. Walker had begun to experience fatigue during her travel. At her doctor’s urging, she rested for several weeks at Hot Springs, Arkansas, but by then her high blood pressure had permanently damaged her kidneys. She died at Villa Lewaro on May 25, 1919, about seven months after its completion.

Significance

Although Walker was frequently described as a millionaire toward the end of her life, she denied this label. When federal taxes were paid in 1922, her total estate value was $509,864. Always thinking of others, she had willed more than $100,000 to various charities. In 1927, her daughter Lelia opened a building in Indianapolis as a tribute to her mother, who had hoped someday to build a movie theater where African Americans were welcome. The Walker Building was more like a city within a building; it housed a factory, a pharmacy, a theater, an auditorium, a restaurant, and offices for African American professionals. Renovated in the late 1980’s as the Walker Urban Life Center, it has been added to the state and national registers of historic places.

Walker’s combination of accomplishments as an employer and motivator of African American women, a social pioneer, a contributor to African American charities, and a beauty products innovator led to much broader recognition. Noted African American novelist Alex Haley, with help from Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Perry Bundles, was writing a biography of her when he died. Haley’s widow obtained the rights to complete the book. In 1922, Walker was elected to the National Business Hall of Fame. In February, 1998, she became the twenty-first African American and the first African American entrepreneur to be the subject of a commemorative stamp.

Bibliography

Bundles, A’Lelia Perry. “Madam C. J. Walker Cosmetics Tycoon.” Ms. 12 (July, 1983): 91-94. This account opens with a description of Madam Walker’s bold speech at the 1912 convention of the National Negro Business League. It also explains the hair conditions Walker sought to remedy with her products and outlines charities and causes to which she contributed.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Madam C. J. Walker, Entrepreneur. New York: Chelsea House, 1991. Clear and readable, this copiously illustrated biography contains far more factual details and historical context than the other available sources, which are much briefer.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker. New York: Scribner, 2001. Bundles, the great-great-granddaughter of Walker, recounts Walker’s life, career, and position within the African American community.

Doyle, Kathleen. “Madam C. J. Walker: First Black Woman Millionaire.” American History Illustrated 14 (March, 1989): 24-25. Doyle gives the essential facts of Walker’s career and accomplishments, interspersed with quotations from Madam Walker.

Indiana Historical Bureau. “Focus Madam C. J. Walker.” The Indiana Junior Historian (February, 1992). A special issue of a juvenile magazine containing helpful, interestingly presented biographical information on Walker.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Focus Madam Walker Entrepreneur.” The Indiana Junior Historian (March, 1992). A special issue of a juvenile magazine containing information on such topics as Walker’s mail-order business, her involvement with the World War I recruitment of African Americans as soldiers, her protests against lynchings, and the Walker Building in Indianapolis.

Lathan, Charles C. “Madam C. J. Walker & Company.” Traces of Indiana and Midwest History 2 (Summer, 1989): 29-36. Lathan, while working at the Indiana Historical Society, processed eighty-seven boxes and forty-nine ledgers of material on Walker and used this information to write his article. The article contains much useful and reliable information, particularly about Walker’s real estate purchases, donations to charities, the intricacies of her will, and the company’s progress after her death.

Lowry, Beverly. Her Dream of Dreams: The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Lowry has gathered many primary-source materials to chronicle Walker’s life and career.