Annie Turnbo Malone

Early life

Annie Minerva Turnbo was born on 9 August 1869 in Metropolis, Illinois, the tenth of eleven children of Robert Turnbo and Isabella Cook, who had both been enslaved. Orphaned young, she was raised by an older sister. She attended high school in Peoria, Illinois, but did not graduate.

Building Poro

Turnbo became interested in chemistry and in hair care for Black women, and around 1900, after moving to Lovejoy, Illinois, she began making and selling her own scalp treatments and a "Hair Grower". In 1902 she moved the business to St. Louis, which was booming ahead of the 1904 World's Fair, and the fair helped her company reach a national market. In 1906 she registered the trade name Poro for her product line. A first marriage, to a man named Pope in 1903, ended in divorce.

She built a national network of mostly female "Poro agents", aged from 16 to 80, who were trained in the "Poro system" and sold her products. According to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), tens of thousands of people sold Poro products over the company's life. One early agent was Sarah Breedlove, who went on to found her own company as Madam C. J. Walker.

Poro College

In 1914 Turnbo married Aaron E. Malone, a St. Louis school principal. In 1918 she opened Poro College in St. Louis's Ville neighbourhood: a four-story complex combining a factory and a cosmetology school with dormitories, dining halls, a chapel and an auditorium. It employed more than 175 people and served as a meeting place for Black organisations shut out of most public venues, such as the National Negro Business League. By then her fortune had passed one million dollars, and in 1924 she paid more than $38,000 in Missouri state income tax.

Philanthropy

Malone gave generously, including to Howard University's medical school, the YMCA and Black orphanages. She was board president of the St. Louis Colored Orphans Home from 1919 to 1943, and in 1946 the home was renamed in her honour.

Decline and legacy

In 1927 Aaron Malone filed for divorce and sought half the business; she settled with him for $200,000. Lawsuits and the Great Depression followed, and in 1930 she moved her headquarters to Chicago. The St. Louis building was sold under foreclosure in 1937. The business survived on a smaller scale, and by the mid-1950s Poro had 32 branch schools. Malone died in Chicago on 10 May 1957.

Sources differ on whether Malone or Walker should be called America's first self-made woman millionaire. The NMAAHC notes the dispute and credits Malone with pioneering the path Walker followed.