Madam C. J. Walker

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Madam Walker in a photograph ca. 1914 by Addison Scurlock.
Madam Walker in a photograph ca. 1914 by Addison Scurlock.

Madam C.J. Walker (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919) was an American businesswoman, hair care entrepreneur, tycoon and philanthropist.

Her fortune was made by developing and marketing a hugely successful line of beauty and hair products for black women. The Guinness Book of Records cites Walker as the first female, black or white, self-accomplished millionaire.

Contents

Biography

She was born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana, the first member of her family born free. Her parents were slaves. At age 14, she married a man named Moses McWilliams and was widowed at age 20. She then moved to St. Louis, Missouri to join her brothers. Sarah worked as a laundress for as little as a dollar and a half a day, but she was able to save enough to educate her daughter. While living in St. Louis, she joined the St. Paul's African Methodist Episcopal Church, which helped develop her speaking, interpersonal and organizational skills. She was married in 1894 to John Davis, and divorced about nine years later.

Her idea for a line of hair care products came to her when she began to lose her hair. Like most other Americans in the early 1900s, Walker's home lacked indoor plumbing, electricity and central heating. And like many women of that era, she washed her hair only once a month. As a result, she suffered from severe dandruff and scalp disease that caused her to go nearly bald. In 1905, Sarah moved to Denver, Colorado, working as a sales agent for Annie Malone, another black woman entrepreneur who manufactured hair care products. She also consulted with a Denver pharmacist, who analyzed Malone's formula and helped Walker formulate her own products. In addition, she often told reporters that the ingredients for her "Wonderful Hair Grower" had come to her in a dream.

In 1906 she married Charles Joseph Walker, a St. Louis newspaperman, changed her name to "Madam C.J. Walker," and founded the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company to sell hair care products and cosmetics.

Madam Walker divorced her third husband in 1910 and moved her growing manufacturing operations to a new industrial complex in Indianapolis, and by 1917, it was the largest business in the United States owned by a black person.

Madam 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.[1] ”
“ There is no royal, flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it for if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard.[1] ”

Walker saw her personal wealth as not an end in itself, but a means to help promote and expand economic opportunities for others, especially black people. 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. Her agents could earn from $5 to $15 a day, in an era when unskilled white laborers were making about $11 a week.[2] One of her employees, Marjorie Joyner, started under her influence and went on to lead the next generation of African American beauty entrepreneurs. Walker was also known for her philanthropy, leaving two-thirds of her estate to educational institutions and charities including the NAACP, the Tuskegee Institute and Bethune-Cookman College. In 1919, her $5,000 pledge to the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign was the largest gift the organization had ever received. She died soon after on May 25, 1919, at age 51, at her estate, Villa Lewaro, due to kidney failure and other complications resulting from hypertension. She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Walker's daughter, A'Lelia Walker, carried on this tradition, opening her mother's home and her own to writers and artists of the emergent Harlem Renaissance and promoting important members of that movement.[3] She converted a section of her Harlem townhouse at 108-110 West 136th Street into The Dark Tower, a salon and tearoom, where Harlem and Greenwich Village artists, writers and musicians gathered. Poet Langston Hughes called her "The joy goddess of Harlem's 1920s" in his autobiography, The Big Sea, because of the lavish parties she hosted in Harlem and Irvington.

Walker had a mansion called "Villa Lewaro" built in the wealthy New York suburb of Irvington on Hudson, New York, near the estates of John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on furnishings.[4] The Italianate villa was designed by architect Vertner Tandy, the first registered black architect in the state of New York, in 1915. She also owned townhouses in Indianapolis and New York.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Twelve Famous Dreams. brilliantdreams.com. Retrieved on 2006-10-03.
  2. ^ Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Madam's Crusade", Time magazine, December 7, 1998 Canadian edition.
  3. ^ Portraits of Philanthropy. Slate. Retrieved on 2006-12-04.
  4. ^ "Madam C.J. Walker–Beauty Culturist Dies", Chicago Defender, Robert Abbott, 1919-05-31. 

Further reading

External links