Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867, in Delta Louisiana, where her parents and elder siblings were enslaved, Madam C.J. Walker went on to become a cosmetics and business pioneer, developing beauty and hair products for Black women. She was the first in her family to be born free after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Life was not easy, the Breedlove family were poor sharecroppers and shared an income with the owner of the land they farmed. She became an orphan at the age of seven and went to live with her older sister and brother-in-law in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where she took a job as a laundress or washerwoman, backbreaking and strenuous work.
"I had little or no opportunity when I started out in life, having been left an orphan and being without mother or father since I was seven years of age," Breedlove often recounted. By her fourteenth birthday, Sarah married Moses McWilliams of Vicksburg, MS. Widowed at 20 with a young daughter, she moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where her elder brothers were barbers. She worked as a poorly paid washerwoman for more than a decade and joined St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church, where she sang in the choir and was mentored by teachers and members of the National Association of Colored Women. In 1894, Sarah tried marrying again, but her second husband, John Davis, was less than reliable, and he was unfaithful.
At 35, her life remained anything but certain. “I was at my tubs one morning with a heavy wash before me,” she later told the New York Times. “As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself: ‘What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?” Adding to Sarah’s woes was the fact that she was losing her hair. During that time she tried various commercial hairdressings and began experimenting with her own formula to cure scalp infections that caused baldness. For about two years, she was a sales agent for Annie Turnbo, the founder of the Poro Company.
It was here that she learned methods for treating Black women’s hair and was inspired to create her own line of hair care products for African Americans. In 1905, Breedlove moved to Denver, Colorado where she sold hair care products for St. Louis businesswoman Annie Pope-Turnbo. It was in Denver that she married her third husband, newspaper sales agent Charles Joseph Walker. She began achieving local success with what later became known as the “Walker Method” or the “Walker System of Beauty Culture.” Breedlove adopted a new professional name, Madam C.J. Walker, which she retained after her divorce from Charles Joseph Walker in 1912. The Madam (sometimes spelled Madame) was a nod to the French beauty industry and to her husband, C.J.
Around the same time, she awoke from a dream, in which, in her words: “A big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up for my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for it, put it on my scalp, and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.” It was to be called “Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.” Her initial investment: $1.25. Sarah’s industry had its critics, among them the leading Black institution-builder of the day, Booker T. Washington, who worried (to his credit) that hair-straighteners (and, worse, skin-bleaching creams) would lead to the internalization of White concepts of beauty.
Perhaps she was mindful of this, for she was deft in communicating that her dream was not emulative of Whites, but divinely inspired, and, like Turnbo’s “Poro Method,” African in origin. Turnbo took her product’s name from an African word, and Madame C.J. claimed that the crucial ingredients for her product were also African in origin. In pumping her “Wonderful Hair Grower” door-to-door, at churches and club gatherings, then through a mail-order catalog, Walker proved to be a marketing magician, and she sold her customers more than mere hair products. She offered them a lifestyle, a concept of total hygiene and beauty that in her mind would bolster them with pride for advancement.
To get the word out, Walker also was masterful in leveraging the power of America’s burgeoning independent Black newspapers (in some cases, her ads kept them afloat). It was hard to miss Madam C.J. Walker whenever reading up on the latest news. In her placements, she was a pioneer at using Black women — actually, herself — as the faces in both her before and after shots, when others had typically reserved the latter for White women only. Success came quickly, and after traveling the country selling her product, Walker and her husband settled in Pittsburgh, where she opened the Lelia College of Beauty Culture, a school named for her daughter. By 1910, as the business expanded Walker relocated her operations to Indianapolis, then the largest inland shipping hub in the nation, to establish a factory for her line of beauty products.
Madame C.J wanted Black people to work for her, so she employed thousands of Black women and was the largest Black owned business in the nation. Along with her husband, she traveled across the country by train to sell and teach women how to use the hair preparations. Walker later built a factory, hair salon, and beauty school to train her sales agents and added a laboratory to help with research. Walker also assembled a staff that included Freeman Alice Kelly, and Marjorie Stewart Joyner, among others, to assist in managing the growing company. Many Black women were using products created specifically for their hair for the first time in their lives. She provided career opportunities and economic independence for thousands of African American women who otherwise would have been consigned to jobs as maids, cooks, laundresses, and farmhands.
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Walker had the Mona Lisa of black-beauty brands. Among the most ridiculous knockoffs was the White-owned “Madam Mamie Hightower” company. To keep others at bay, Walker insisted on placing a special seal with her likeness on every package. So successful, so quickly, was Walker in solidifying her presence in the consumer’s mind that when her marriage to C.J. fell apart in 1912, she insisted on keeping his name. After all, she’d already made it more famous. In 1913 she expanded internationally when she visited the Caribbean and Central America.
By 1915, Madam C. J. Walker was by far the wealthiest African American woman in the nation. Walker was now invited to major gatherings of Black leaders and shared the platform with notables such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. After establishing her own thriving cosmetics business, she threw herself into teaching Black women how to build, budget, and market their own businesses. To keep her agents more loyal, Walker organized them into a national association and offered cash incentives to those who promoted her values. In the same way, she organized the National Negro Cosmetics Manufacturers Association in 1917.
By 1919 she had claimed 25,000 active Walker sales agents. As a result of her successful business, Madam Walker became wealthy and she wanted to help people in her community–Black people who struggled like she had. Walker donated to churches, hospitals, and schools and encouraged her sales agents to follow her lead. She started an annual conference for her employees and provided awards to those who raised the most for charity organizations. The intention behind purchasing her house, Villa Lewaro in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, was to create a gathering place for African American leaders, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, and to inspire other community members.
Careful to position herself as a “hair culturalist,” Walker was building a vast social network of consumer-agents united by their dreams of looking — and thus feeling — different, from the heartland of America to the Caribbean and parts of Central America. As her business flourished in Indianapolis and across the U.S., Walker turned her attention to political matters. She became more involved in the National Negro Business League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, giving speeches at some of their national gatherings. Walker used her influence to serve her community and speak out against the lynching of Black men and women and donated to the NAACP's anti-lynching fund. Her personal triumph inspired other women and she was often invited to lecture on business and politics.
She provided scholarships for students at several Black colleges and boarding schools and financial support for orphanages, retirement homes, and the fund to preserve Frederick Douglass’s home in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C. She also became politically active, speaking out against lynching at the Negro Silent Protest Parade and during a visit to the White House in 1917 and advocating for the rights of African American soldiers who served in France during World War I. Perhaps above and beyond her fame as a self-made millionaire, Madam Walker is remembered as one of the first advocates for the financial independence of Black women.
Madam Walker’s business provided access for generations of women to, in her words, “abandon the wash-tub for more pleasant and profitable occupation.” Even after she moved to New York, Indianapolis remained the hub of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. She is recorded as the first female self-made millionaire in America. Even after her death in May 1919, her popular international hair care empire continued to expand and her legacy of dreaming big and donating to important charities lives on. At the time of her death, she was considered the wealthiest self-made Black business woman in America. Her daughter, A'Lelia Walker, later became the president of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company.