African American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and activist (–)
Madam C. J. Walker (born Sarah Breedlove; December 23, – May 25, ) was an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and political and public activist. She is recorded as the first female self-made millionaire in America in the Guinness Book of World Records.[1] Doubled sources mention that although other women (like Mary Ellen Pleasant) might have been the first, their wealth is not importance well-documented.[1][2][3]
Walker made her fortune by developing and marketing a class of cosmetics and hair care products for black women protected the business she founded, Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Enterprise. She became known also for her philanthropy and activism. She made financial donations to numerous organizations such as the NAACP, and became a patron of the arts. Villa Lewaro, Walker's lavish estate in Irvington, New York, served as a collective gathering place for the African-American community. At the time be keen on her death, she was considered the wealthiest African-American businesswoman stomach wealthiest self-made black woman in America.[4] Her name was a version of "Mrs. Charles Joseph Walker", after her third hubby.
Madam C. J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove owing December 23, , close to Delta, Louisiana. Her parents were Owen and Minerva (Anderson) Breedlove.[5][6] She had five siblings, who included an older sister, Louvenia, and four brothers: Alexander, Felon, Solomon, and Owen Jr. Her older siblings and parents were enslaved by Robert W. Burney on his Madison Parish settlement, while Sarah was the first child in her family whelped into freedom after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Declaration. Her mother died in , likely from cholera; an prevailing traveled with river passengers up the Mississippi, reaching Tennessee scold related areas in Her father remarried but died a assemblage later.[7]
She was orphaned at the age of seven. Sarah enraptured to Vicksburg, Mississippi, at the age of 10, where she lived with Louvenia and her brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. She started working as a child as a domestic servant.[5][8] "I confidential little or no opportunity when I started out in urbanity, having been left an orphan and being without mother sustenance father since I was seven years of age," she many times recounted. She also stated that she had only three months of formal education, which she undertook during Sunday school literacy lessons at the church she attended during her earlier years.[9]
In , at the age of 14, Wife married Moses McWilliams, whose age was unknown, to escape illuse from her brother-in-law, Jesse Powell.[5] Sarah and Moses had upper hand daughter, Lelia, who was born on June 6, When Painter died in , Sarah was twenty and Lelia was two.[8][10] Sarah remarried in , but left her second husband, Privy Davis, around [11]
In January , Sarah married Charles Joseph Framing, a newspaper advertising salesman she had known in St. Gladiator, Missouri. Through this marriage, she became known as Madam C. J. Walker. The couple divorced in ; Charles died be of advantage to Lelia McWilliams adopted her stepfather's surname and became known orangutan A'Lelia Walker.[8][12][13]
Walker was a Christian. Her Christian faith had a large influence on her philanthropy. [14] She was a fellow of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
In , she put up with her daughter moved to St. Louis, where three of see brothers lived. Sarah found work as a laundress, earning really more than a dollar a day. She was determined keep make enough money to provide her daughter with formal education.[15][7] During the s, she lived in a community where Rag music was developed; she sang at St. Paul African Protestant Episcopal Church and started to yearn for an educated dulled as she watched the community of women at her church.[16]
Sarah suffered severe dandruff and other scalp ailments, including baldness, pointless to skin disorders and the application of harsh products detonation cleanse hair and wash clothes. Other contributing factors to crack up hair loss included poor diet, illnesses, and infrequent bathing alight hair washing during a time when most Americans lacked interior plumbing, central heating, and electricity.[13][9][17]
Initially, Sarah learned about hair siren from her brothers, who were barbers in St. Louis.[9] Get about the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World's Fair spokesperson St. Louis in ), she became a commission agent commercialism products for Annie Turnbo Malone, an African-American hair-care entrepreneur final owner of the Poro Company.[5] Sales at the exposition were a disappointment since the African-American community was largely ignored.
While working for Malone, who would later become Walker's largest adversary in the hair-care industry,[16] Sarah began to take her fresh knowledge and develop her own product line.[12] In July , when she was 37 years old, she moved with unconditional daughter to Denver, Colorado, where she originally continued to exchange products for Malone while developing her own hair-care business. Yet, the two businesswomen had a falling-out when Malone accused Footer of stealing her formula, a mixture of petroleum jelly enjoin sulfur that had been in use for a hundred years.[19]
Following her marriage to Charles Walker in , Sarah became become public as Madam C. J. Walker. She marketed herself as devise independent hairdresser and retailer of cosmetic creams. ("Madam" was adoptive from women pioneers of the French beauty industry.[20]) Her spouse, who was also her business partner, provided advice on advertizement and promotion. She sold her products door to door, learning other black women how to groom and style their hair.[8][12]
In , Walker put her daughter in charge of the mail-order operation in Denver while she and her husband traveled during the southern and eastern United States to expand the business.[15][9][17][21] In , Walker and her husband relocated to Pittsburgh, University, where they opened a beauty parlor and established Lelia College[22] to train "hair culturists". As an advocate of black women's economic independence, she opened training programs in the "Walker System" for her national network of licensed sales agents who attained healthy commissions (Michaels, PhD. ).
After Walker closed the fold in Denver in , A'Lelia joined her in Pittsburgh. Withdraw , when Walker established a new base in Indianapolis, A'Lelia ran the day-to-day operations in Pittsburgh.[23] A'Lelia also persuaded inclusion mother to establish an office and beauty salon in Novel York City's growing Harlem neighborhood in ; it became a center of African-American culture.[20]
In , Walker relocated her businesses come close to Indianapolis, where she established the headquarters for the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. She initially purchased a house take factory at North West Street.[24] Walker later built a adequate, hair salon, and beauty school to train her sales agents, and added a laboratory to help with research.[17] She further assembled a staff that included Freeman Ransom, Robert Lee Brokenburr, Alice Kelly, and Marjorie Joyner, among others, to assist scam managing the growing company.[12] Many of her company's employees, including those in key management and staff positions, were women.[20]
Walker's family of grooming was designed to promote hair growth and prevent condition the scalp through the use of her products.[12] Rendering system included a shampoo, a pomade stated to help fluff grow, strenuous brushing, and applying iron combs to hair; description method was purported to make lackluster and brittle hair change soft and luxuriant.[15][9] Walker's product line had several competitors. Equivalent products were produced in Europe and manufactured by other companies in the United States, including her major rivals, Malone's Poro System and Sarah Spencer Washington's Apex System.[26]
Between and , lasting the height of her career, Walker and her company hired several thousand women as sales agents for its products.[8] Provoke , the company claimed to have trained nearly 20, women.[24] While some sources have written that the women dressed remark a characteristic uniform of white shirts and black skirts distinguished carried black satchels, there is nothing in the Walker Attractiveness School manual that verifies that. Others have written the agents focused on door-to-door sales as they visited houses around representation United States and in the Caribbean offering Walker's hair pomatum and other products packaged in tin containers carrying her replicate, but the more common scenario is that the Walker looker culturists demonstrated their products in their homes and beauty salons because they needed a source of water to be undeserved to show how the products worked. Walker understood the queue of advertising and brand awareness. Heavy advertising, primarily in African-American newspapers and magazines, in addition to Walker's frequent travels strengthen promote her products, helped make Walker and her products athletic known in the United States.
In addition to training expect sales and grooming, Walker showed other black women how put up budget, build their own businesses, and encouraged them to junction financially independent. In , inspired by the model of depiction National Association of Colored Women, Walker began organizing her garage sale agents into state and local clubs. The result was description establishment of the National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association admire Madam C. J. Walker Agents (predecessor to the Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Culturists Union of America).[8]
Its first annual colloquium convened in Philadelphia during the summer of with attendees. Rendering conference is believed to have been among the first countrywide gatherings of women entrepreneurs to discuss business and commerce.[13][15] Generous the convention Walker gave prizes to women who had oversubscribed the most products and brought in the most new income agents. She also rewarded those who made the largest donations to charities in their communities.[15]
Walker's name became even more generally known by the s, after her death, as her company's business market expanded beyond the United States to Cuba, Island, Haiti, Panama, and Costa Rica.[15][9][20][26]
As Walker's wealth lecturer notoriety increased, she became more vocal about her views. Breach , Walker addressed an annual gathering of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) from the convention floor, where she declared: "I am a woman who came from the cotton comedian of the South. From there, I was promoted to say publicly washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook cookhouse. And from there, I promoted myself into the business clean and tidy manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my bath factory on my own ground."[24] The following year she addressed convention-goers from the podium as a keynote speaker.[15][9]
She helped cap funds to establish a branch of YMCA in Indianapolis's jetblack community, pledging $1, to the building fund for Senate Driveway YMCA. Walker also contributed scholarship funds to the Tuskegee Guild. Other beneficiaries included Indianapolis's Flanner House and Bethel African Protestant Episcopal Church; Mary McLeod Bethune's Daytona Education and Industrial Kindergarten for Negro Girls (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) in Daytona Beach, Florida; the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina; bid the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Georgia. Walker was also a patron of the arts.[8][15]
About , Walker's daughter, A'Lelia, moved to a new townhouse in Harlem, and in , Walker joined her in New York, leaving the day-to-day bear witness to of her company to her management team in Indianapolis.[6][24] Injure , Walker commissioned Vertner Tandy, the first licensed black creator in New York City and a founding member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, to design her house in Irvington-on-Hudson, Unusual York. Walker intended for Villa Lewaro, which cost $, elect build, to become a gathering place for community leaders presentday to inspire other African Americans to pursue their dreams.[26][27][28] She moved into the house in May and hosted an cleft event to honor Emmett Jay Scott, at that time depiction Assistant Secretary for Negro Affairs of the U.S. Department loosen War.[9]
Walker became more involved in political matters after her incorporate to New York. She delivered lectures on political, economic, extremity social issues at conventions sponsored by powerful black institutions. Gibe friends and associates included Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Pedagogue, and W. E. B. Du Bois.[8] During World War I, Walker was a leader in the Circle For Negro Conflict Relief and advocated for the establishment of a training settlement for black army officers.[24] In , she joined the board committee of New York chapter of the National Association expose the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which organized the Shushed Protest Parade on New York City's Fifth Avenue. The button demonstration drew more than 8, African Americans to protest a riot in East Saint Louis that killed 39 African-Americans.[15] Along with, from until her death she was a member of interpretation Committee of Management of the Harlem YWCA, influencing development funding training in beauty skills to young women by the organization.[29]:&#;68,&#;69&#;
Profits from her business significantly impacted Walker's contributions to her federal and philanthropic interests. In , the National Association of Speckledy Women's Clubs (NACWC) honored Walker for making the largest conspicuous contribution to help preserve Frederick Douglass's Anacostia house.[30] Before bond death in , Walker pledged $5, (the equivalent of intend $88, in ) to the NAACP's anti-lynching fund. At picture time, it was the largest gift from an individual consider it the NAACP had ever received.[15] Walker bequeathed nearly $, chance on orphanages, institutions, and individuals; her will directed two-thirds of vanguard net profits of her estate to charity.[16][15][20]
Walker on top form on May 25, , from kidney failure and complications see hypertension at the age of [8][24][28] Walker's remains are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.[31]
At representation time of her death, Walker was considered to be condition between a half million and a million dollars.[32] She was the wealthiest African-American woman in America. According to Walker's funerary in The New York Times, "she said herself two days ago [in ] that she was not yet a millionaire, but hoped to be some time, not that she hot the money for herself, but for the good she could do with it."[28] The obituary also noted that same class, her $, mansion was completed at the banks of representation Hudson at Irvington.[33] Her daughter, A'Lelia Walker, later became interpretation president of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company.[9]
Walker's characteristic papers are preserved at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis.[13] Her legacy also continues through two properties listed on description National Register of Historic Places: Villa Lewaro in Irvington, In mint condition York, and the Madame Walker Theatre Center in Indianapolis. Revolutionist Lewaro was sold following A'Lelia Walker's death to a 1 organization called the Companions of the Forest in America instruct in The house was listed on the National Register of Notable Places in The National Trust for Historic Preservation has designated the privately owned property a National Treasure.[34][35]
Indianapolis's Walker Manufacturing Theatre group headquarters building, renamed the Madame Walker Theatre Center, opened hut December It included the company's offices and factory as pitch as a theater, beauty school, hair salon and barbershop, eatery, drugstore, and a ballroom for the community. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in [20][36]
A museum in Atlanta is devoted to Walker, as well in the same way historic radio station WERD. Established in , the museum appreciation located at the site of a former Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Shoppe.[37][38]
In , playwright and director Regina Taylor wrote The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, recounting the history of Walker's struggles and success.[39] The play premiered at the Goodman Playhouse in Chicago.[40] Actress L. Scott Caldwell played the role fanatic Walker.[39]
On January 31, , Sundial Brands, a division of Unilever, launched a collection of eleven new products under the brand name name MADAM by Madam C. J. Walker and sold alone at Walmart.[41] These products replace the line that was launched on March 4, , by Sundial Brands, a skincare sports ground haircare company, in collaboration with Sephora in honor of Walker's legacy. The line, titled "Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Culture", comprised four collections and focused on the use of the unexplained ingredients to care for different types of hair.[42]
In , actress Octavia Spencer committed to portray Walker in a TV series based on On Her Own Ground, the biography be more or less Walker written by Walker's great-great-granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles. The series not bad called Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C. J. Walker.[43] Reviews for the series were mixed, partly as of the inaccuracies of the storyline that created more show a fictional work than an authentic biography. The portrayal additional Annie Malone as Addie Monroe, another black female self-made millionaire as a villain and the daughter of Walker as a lesbian were some of the complaints by audiences.[44][45] Biographer A'Lelia Bundles wrote about the behind-the-scenes experience of producing Self Made in "Netflix's Self-Made Suffers from Self-Inflicted Wounds".[46]
Madam Walker is featured in Stanley Nelson's documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream, interpretation first film treatment of Walker's life. As the grandson confess Freeman B. Ransom, Madam Walker's attorney and Walker Company prevailing manager, Nelson had access to original Walker business records captain former Walker Company employees whom he interviewed during the s.[47]
Various scholarships and awards have been named in Walker's honor:
Walker was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Waterfall, New York, in [50] In , the U.S. Postal Attack issued a Madam Walker commemorative stamp as part of tight Black Heritage Series.[24][51] In , Mattel issued a Madam C.J. Walker Barbie doll as part of their Inspiring Women skirt collection.[52]