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

Madam C.J. Walker (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919) was an African-American businesswoman, hair care entrepreneur and philanthropist. She died after World War I.

Her fortune was made by developing and marketing a hugely successful line of beauty and hair products for black women, under the company she founded Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. The Guinness Book of Records cites Walker as the first female who became a millionaire by her own achievements. She died in 1919.

[edit] Biography

She was born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana, the first member of her family to be born free. Her parents had been 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 St. Paul's African Methodist Episcopal Church, which helped develop her speaking, interpersonal and organizational skills.

When she began to lose her hair, she had a craving for a line of hair care products. Like that of most other Americans in the early 1900s, Walker's home lacked indoor plumbing, electricity and central heating. Like many women of that era, she washed her hair only once a year. As a result, she suffered from severe dandruff and scalp disease that nearly caused her to go bald.

In 1905, Davis worked as a sales agent for Annie Malone, another black woman entrepreneur who manufactured hair care products. Sarah 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 vagrant, and changed her name to "Madam C.J. Walker". She founded the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company to sell hair care products and cosmetics. Madam Walker divorced Walker in 1910 and moved her growing manufacturing operations from St. Louis to a new industrial complex in Indianapolis. By 1917 she had the largest business in the United States owned by a black person.

Walker saw her personal wealth not as an end in itself, but as a means to promote 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. Her agents could earn from $5 to $15 per day in an era when unskilled white laborers were making about $11 per week.^[2] Marjorie Joyner, who started work as one of her employees, went on to lead the next generation of African-American beauty entrepreneurs.

Walker was 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.

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. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on furnishings.^[3] The Italianate villa was designed by architect Vertner Tandy, the first registered black architect in the state of New York, in 1915. Walker also owned townhouses in Indianapolis and New York.

The grave of Madam C. J. Walker

Madam Walker died on May 25, 1919, at age 51, at her estate Villa Lewaro. She died due to kidney failure and other complications resulting from a massive yeast infection. She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Her daughter A'Lelia Walker carried on the tradition of hospitality, opening her mother's home and her own to writers and artists of the emergent Harlem Renaissance. She promoted important members of that movement.^[4] 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.

Ms. Walker was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1992 and in 2002, Molefi Kete Asante listed Madam C. J. Walker on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[5]

[edit] See also

• Madame Walker Theatre Center

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Bundles, A'Lelia P. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (Scribner's, 2001) ISBN 0-7434-3172-9.
• Due, Tananarive The Black Rose (Ballantine Books, 2000) ISBN 0-345-4396-0

[edit] External links

• Madam Walker Biography Website - Authorized site and biographical information about Madam Walker
• Walker Theatre National Historic Landmark and Original Walker Company Factory
• Official Website The Official Madame Walker Website
• Obituary, "Wealthiest Negress Dead", The New York Times, May 26, 1919
• Madam C. J. Walker at Find a Grave
• Breedlove, Sarah. Contemporary Black Biography: "Madame C. J. Walker". Gale Research via Gale Cengage Learning
• Profile of Madame C. J. Walker, The Black Inventor Online Museum
• “Two American Entrepreneurs: Madam C. J. Walker and J.C. Penney”, a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP)