HONORING BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Madam C.J. Walker

Madam C. J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove (1867–1919), was an inventor, businesswoman, philanthropist, and political activist who founded the Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, which sold and manufactured hair care and beauty products for African Americans and people of African descent across the world.

The first American woman to become a self-made millionaire, by 1918 she had turned her company into the nation’s largest African American–owned business, employing more than 25,000 women as agents who sold the company’s products door to door. The same year, the company reported sales of more than $250,000 per year (approximately $6 million in 2014 dollars). The company’s success promoted the growth of African American beauty shops across the country, which served as autonomous social, political, and economic spaces for black women.

Walker was inspired to develop her first hair product in 1904 after suffering from alopecia, a scalp ailment that causes hair loss. She began by selling products designed by another prominent African American businesswoman, Annie Turnbo Malone (1896–1957), who taught Walker how to manage a business. In 1906 Walker moved to Colorado and founded her company, producing shampoos, pomades, and heated combs. The company later expanded to produce hair strengtheners, toiletries, fragrances, and facial treatments. Walker sold her products door to door—first locally, then throughout the South and Southeast, and eventually throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America. She advertised in African American newspapers and started a mail-order business, which her daughter, Lelia, ran.

Walker was also known for developing new marketing techniques that transformed the industry. She was one of the first to use direct sales marketing (a method of selling products that relies on face-to-face contact and personal demonstrations).

In 1908 she moved to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, which was easily accessible to cites in the Northeast with large populations of Black women. It was also home to the steel industry, which she drew on to manufacture her new steel combs. There she opened Lelia College to train her agents. In 1910 she moved to Indianapolis and built a factory employing 3,000 workers, renaming the company the Walker College of Hair Culture and Walker Manufacturing Company.

In 1916 she moved to New York and continued overseeing the business, leaving the day-to-day operations to her attorney Freeman Ransom (1884–1947) and factor forelady Alice Kelly, a former school teacher. In 1917 she held the Madam C. J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America convention, where she presented agents with awards for both business success and political activism.

In 1917 she built a posh, ornately decorated villa in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. She died there in 1919 at age 51. She was posthumously inducted into the National Business Hall of Fame and National Women’s Hall of Fame and was honored with a U.S. postage stamp in 1998.

Source: “Walker Becomes First Female Self-Made Millionaire in America.” Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History, edited by Thomas Riggs, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Gale, 2015, pp. 1429-1430. Gale In Context: High School, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3611000963/SUIC?u=edwa30873&sid=SUIC&xid=a246811b. Accessed 5 Feb. 2021.

Compiled by the Edwardsville Public Library.