The first American woman to become a self-made millionaire started out with a simple wish: to earn enough money to give her only daughter the formal education she herself never received. What she did instead was prove the ability of women to succeed on their own terms.
Madam C.J. Walker’s million-dollar idea was a line of hair and skin care products specifically for Black women. It was an unlikely success story, given her early life.
Born Sarah Breedlove on Dec. 23, 1867, Walker lived with her family on the Louisiana plantation where her parents and older siblings had been enslaved. Sarah was the only one to be born free, after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
Her parents died when she was seven, and Sarah went to live in Vicksburg, Miss., with her older sister and her husband. As a child she worked as a domestic servant; her only education was from Sunday school at church.
Sarah married at the age of 14 to escape her abusive brother-in-law, and three years later gave birth to her only daughter, A’Lelia. After her husband died Sarah, age 20, and her two-year-old daughter moved to St. Louis, to be near her brothers. She married twice more, divorcing both husbands but keeping her third husband’s surname.
Sarah’s first job in St. Louis was as a laundress, making less than $1 a day. To make money for her daughter’s education, in 1904 she began working as a sales representative for Annie Malone, a local entrepreneur whose company made hair care products for Black women.
Like many Black women at the time, Sarah suffered from severe scalp conditions, including baldness. They sought out treatments to improve their hair and scalps, products Sarah was familiar with from her brothers, who were barbers.
Sarah began experimenting with her own hair formula while working for Malone. In 1905, she and A’Leia moved to Denver, and Sarah began to sell her own products.
It was a crowded market, and Walker’s former employer, Annie Malone, was her toughest competitor. Malone accused Walker of stealing her formula; Walker denied it and insisted that her system of teaching women how to treat their hair rather than just selling products was what made her company different.
In 1906, Sarah adopted the name Madam C.J. Walker and began selling Walker products door to door. A year later she and Charles Walker, her third husband, drove through the South and eastern United States, advertising their products in African American newspapers and magazines, and meeting women at home, in churches and at street markets. A’Leia ran the mail order department from Denver as word of mouth spread, and Walker’s business exploded.
In 1908 the family left Denver for Pittsburgh, opening a beauty parlor and cosmetology school, Lelia College, where women could learn the Walker System. Two years later Walker relocated again, this time to Indianapolis, where she established the headquarters for the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. Her management team handled day-to-day operations; the majority of her executives were women.
The brick building on Indiana Avenue, today known as the Madam Walker Legacy Center, not only housed the company’s operations; it also included a beauty school, hair salon, barbershop, drug store, and restaurant. Walker established a theatre in the building after she was forced to pay a “Black tax” to attend a performance in downtown Indianapolis; the ballroom hosted social and political events, and concerts by, among others, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole.
By 1919, the Walker company employed thousands of sales agents and trained more than 20,000 women in how to use its products. Walker organized her sales reps into local and state clubs, and hosted national sales meetings with prizes for top sales and agents who contributed to their communities. She educated her employees in how to budget and run a business, and encouraged women to become financially independent.
That was the business side. Walker’s success enabled her to fund arts organizations, and she became involved in social justice and political issues important to her. She helped to fund the first YMCA in Indianapolis and scholarships to institutions such as the Tuskeegee Institute. She was the first woman keynote speaker at the National Negro Business League in 1913, the same year A’Leia convinced her to open an office and beauty salon in Harlem.
In 1916 Walker moved to New York, commissioning the first licensed Black architect to design Villa Lewaro, her estate in the Hudson Valley. The house became a gathering place for leading Black figures, among them Booker T. Washington and educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Berthune. She joined the executive committee of the New York chapter of the NAACP, raised money to support the WWI war effort, and in 1918 made the largest individual contribution to preserve Frederick Douglass’s home in New York.
In all, Walker gave more than $100,000 in philanthropic contributions, including the largest (at the time) donation ever to the NAACP’s anti-lynching fund.
Walker died on May 25, 1919 from complications of diabetes and hypertension. At the time, she was the wealthiest Black woman in the country, worth close to $1 million.
After her mother’s death, A’Leia took over as president of the company, overseeing its expansion into the Caribbean and several Latin American countries. Today, the Madam Walker Company line of hair and skin care products is available through a partnership with Sephora.
Walker’s social justice and philanthropic efforts continue to be recognized. In 1993 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and dozens of scholarships in her name are awarded each year. Two of her properties, Villa Lewaro and the Madame Walker Theatre Center, are on the National Register of Historic Places, and she is the subject of several movies, documentaries and books that detail her extraordinary life.
In an interview held two years before she died, Walker talked about what money meant to her. She told a reporter she earned money not so she could have it herself, but for the good she could do with it. Her legacy matches her words.