Madam C. J. Walker

Early life

Sarah Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867, in Delta, Louisiana, on the cotton plantation where her parents and older siblings had been enslaved. The Library of Congress notes that she was the first in her family born free. She was orphaned by age seven and went to live with her sister in Vicksburg, Mississippi. She married at 14 and had a daughter, Lelia, later known as A'Lelia Walker. Widowed young, she moved to St. Louis around 1888, where she worked as a laundress for as little as $1.50 a week.

Building the business

Around 1900 a scalp ailment caused much of her hair to fall out. While searching for a remedy she worked as a commission agent selling products made by Annie Turnbo Malone, who later became her main competitor. In 1905 she moved to Denver and developed her own scalp formula. After marrying Charles Joseph Walker in 1906, she began selling as "Madam C. J. Walker." The "Madam" echoed the French beauty trade.

The Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company grew through advertising in Black newspapers, sales tours by train, and training. She opened Lelia College of Beauty Culture in Pittsburgh in 1908. In 1910 she moved to Indianapolis, where the company was incorporated in 1911 and built a factory, laboratory, salon and beauty school. Her system of independent sales agents gave Black women a route to earn their own income. At her first national convention, in 1917, she claimed to have trained nearly 20,000 agents.

Philanthropy and activism

Walker's first major public gift was $1,000 toward a YMCA for Black residents of Indianapolis. She funded scholarships, schools, orphanages and the preservation of Frederick Douglass's home in Washington, and in 1916 she founded a benevolent association among her agents. She helped organize the 1917 Silent Protest Parade in Harlem after the East St. Louis massacre, telegraphed President Wilson urging that lynching be made a federal crime, and supported the NAACP's anti-lynching work. She worked with figures including Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and avoided taking sides in their disputes.

In 1918 she moved into Villa Lewaro, an estate in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, designed by Vertner Woodson Tandy. The house is now a National Historic Landmark.

Death and the "millionaire" question

Walker died on May 25, 1919. Her will directed large sums to schools, churches and charities.

She is often described as America's first self-made female millionaire, but that claim is debated. Many newspaper obituaries called her the wealthiest Black woman in America, and the Guinness Book of World Records has listed her as the first American woman to become a millionaire through her own business. The Library of Congress more cautiously calls her "one of the first." The Philanthropy Roundtable says the "first millionaire" label may not be correct and puts her remaining estate at about $600,000 when she died.