I’m sure that not too many people were familiar with her name, before March 2020, when the Netflix mini-series “Self Made” was aired and the amazing Octavia Spencer interpreted her life on screen. We were at the very beginning of the Covid -19 pandemic and in lock down so we suddenly had much more time to spend on our couch binging tv series, and that’s how the fascinating story of Madame CJ Walker entered our homes. She was an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and activist, Madam C.J. Walker rose from poverty in the South to become one of the wealthiest African American women of her time ( it is believed that she was the first woman of color millionaire in America) but more importantly she used her position to advocate for the advancement of black Americans and for an end to lynching.
Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867, on a plantation in Delta, Luisiana one of six children of Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, former slaves-turned sharecroppers after the Civil War. While the rest of her siblings had been born slaves, Sarah was born free. Unfortunately when she was only 7 her parents suddenly died leaving her no option but to move in with her older sister and work on the cotton fields. To escape her abusive brother-in-law’s household, Sarah married at 14 with Moses McWilliams with whom soon had one daughter, Lelia (later “A’Lelia”). When her husband misteriously died in 1887, Sarah became a single parent of two-year old daughter Lelia, so she decided to move to St. Louis, where her four brothers were barbers, to work as a laundress and cook for $1.50 a week. She struggled financially to even send her daughter to public school, but when she joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, she was able to meet leading black men and women, whose education and success inspired her. In 1894, she married John Davis, but the marriage was troubled, and the couple later divorced. The hard work, the stress of the financial strain and the preoccupation for her daughter future took a toll on her; this and the precarious hygienic situation she unfortunately was leaving in, contributed to a dramatic hair loss (as her great-granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles explains in an essay “During the early 1900s, when most Americans lacked indoor plumbing and electricity, bathing was a luxury. As a result, Sarah and many other women were going bald because they washed their hair so infrequently, leaving it vulnerable to environmental hazards such as pollution, bacteria and lice.”) . This is the moment in which her wheel turned. She met a very successful businesswoman of color, Annie Turbo Malone’s who invented a formula to strengthen the hair, “The Great Wonderful Hair Grower” and she was not only selling the hair products to women but also recruiting them as sales agents. The “miracle” product really worked on Sarah, who later decided to join Malone’s team of black women sales agents using her own experience as a sale point. A year later, Walker moved to Denver, Colorado, where she married Charles Joseph Walker ( who was in the advertising business) and renamed herself “Madam C.J. Walker” She decided to step out her “boss” shadow and investing just $1.25, launched her own line of hair products and straighteners for African American women, “Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.” ( she always claimed that she received the new formula from a dream : “A big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up for my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for it, put it on my scalp, and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.”). She never wanted to emulate the “white” standards of beauty with her products, that’s why she always advertised the use of African ingredients in her formula. Her goal was to help women of color to reach a status of financial independence through better jobs ,which were easier to obtain if oneself’s image was more curated and presentable. She educated them to a concept of total hygiene and beauty that in her mind would bolster them with pride for advancement. The name of her brand was also very effective, using the “Madam” in front, she had the advantage of French cache, while defying many white people’s tendency to refer to black women by their first names, or, worse, as “Auntie.” At first she was selling her products door to door or in the church community and in the market place. Later she decided to use the power of the newspaper establishing a mail order system. In her advertisements, she was a pioneer because using black women — actually, herself — as the faces in both her “before and after ” shots, when other brands usually used only white women (implying that every woman’s dream was to look like white women). At the same time, Madame CJ Walker had the foresight to incorporate in 1910 and even though she couldn’t find any important investors, she decided to put $10,000 of her own money, making herself sole shareholder of the new Walker Manufacturing Company, headquartered at a state-of-the-art factory and school in Indianapolis, at the time a major distribution hub. Perhaps most importantly, Madam Walker transformed her customers into sales agents, who, for a handsome commission, multiplied her ability to reach new markets while providing them with ways to escape from poverty. In a short matter of time, Walker’s company had trained something like 40,000 “Walker Agents” at her hair-culture colleges she founded or set up through already established black institutions. She succeeded in building a vast social network of consumer-agents united by their dreams of social advancement, from the heartland of America to the Caribbean and parts of Central America. “Open your own shop; secure prosperity and freedom” one of Madam Walker’s brochures announced. Those who enrolled in “Lelia College” even received a diploma. In 1917 she organized the National Negro Cosmetics Manufacturers Association . “I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself, I am endeavoring to provide employment for hundreds of women of my race.”
By 1913 Madam Walker’s hair care empire had grown tremendously, and her daughter A’Lelia convinced her to expand into New York City. So in the same year she purchased a townhouse on 108 West 136th Street in Harlem and two years later they expanded to the adjacent townhouse at 110 West 136th Street. They hired noted architect Vertner Woodson Tandy ,the first licensed black architect in New York City at the time, to do a complete remodel, turning the two townhouses into one sprawling unit. After the remodel was completed in 1916, the property, with its Neo-Georgian brick and limestone facade, was open for business. On the ground-floor was the Walker Hair Parlor and in the basement the Lelia College of Beauty Culture, where new Walker Company hair agents were trained. The upper three levels were A’Lelia and Madame Walker’s living and entertaining quarters. Here the woman dubbed by Langston Hughes “The Joy Goddess of Harlem’s 1920s”, hosted cultural soirees for the Harlem Renaissance most important figures such as, Countee Cullen , Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Muriel Draper, Nora Holt and many others. Langston Hughes later wrote that A’Lelia’s parties “were as crowded as the New York subway at the rush hour.”
Madam CJ Walker quickly immersed herself in the social and political culture of the Harlem Renaissance. She founded philanthropies that included educational scholarships and donations to homes for the elderly, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ), and the National Conference on Lynching, among other organizations focused on improving the lives of African Americans.
In 1918, at Irvington-on-Hudson — about 20 miles north of New York City in the Hudson Valley — Walker built an Italianate mansion she called Villa Lewaro. It was designed by Vertner Tandy, the same architect who had renovated the two townhomes in Harlem .Villa Lewaro was a gathering place for many luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
Walker died of hypertension on May 25, 1919, at age 51, at Villa Lewaro.
In 1981, the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company ceased operations. A line of cosmetics and hair-care products bearing the name Madam C.J. Walker Beauty Culture is still available at Sephora retailers and online.
Walker left one-third of her estate to her daughter, who would also become well-known as an important part of the Harlem Renaissance, and the remainder to various charities. Walker’s funeral took place at Villa Lewaro, and she was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.
