Madam C.J. Walker and the Business of Growing Hair

How does a woman go from earning $1.50 a day washing other people's clothes to building a business empire in under fifteen years? Sarah Breedlove was born in Delta, Louisiana in 1867, orphaned by age seven, and spent nearly two decades as a washerwoman in St. Louis. ¹ Struggling with her own hair loss, she moved to Denver around 1905 and went to work as a sales agent for Annie Malone's Poro hair products, before developing her own formula, built around petrolatum, beeswax, sulfur, and copper sulfate, and renaming herself Madam C.J. Walker. ² By 1910 she had a factory and a beauty school in Indianapolis, training Black women as Walker agents, a sales force that grew to roughly 20,000 by the end of her life. ¹

The speech Booker T. Washington did not want her to give

In August 1912, Walker attended the National Negro Business League's convention in Chicago, where Booker T. Washington had repeatedly declined to give her a speaking slot. On the convention's final day, she stood up from the audience and spoke anyway. "I am a woman who started in business seven years ago with only $1.50," she told the room. "I am not ashamed of my past. I am not ashamed of my humble beginning." ³ She went further, describing an ambition that reached past her own company: "My ambition is to build an industrial school in Africa, a Tuskegee Institute in Africa." ³

A union of businesswomen, five years before women could vote

In August 1917, Walker convened what may have been one of the first national gatherings of businesswomen in the country, the Madam C.J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America, at Philadelphia's Union Baptist Church, with more than 200 sales agents and beauty culturists attending. ⁴ Margaret Thompson, president of the Philadelphia union, told delegates she had gone from earning $5 a week as a servant to $250 a week as a Walker agent. ⁴ On the convention's closing day, under the theme Women's Duty to Women, delegates sent a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson urging federal anti lynching legislation in response to recent violence in Memphis and East St. Louis. ⁴

What she never claimed, and what she was careful to say instead

Walker is often credited with inventing the hot comb used to straighten Black women's hair. She did not, and the Smithsonian's own account is direct about it: "Although Walker did not invent the hot comb, she and her hair culturists regularly used it for hair styling." ⁵ Her own training manual described the process in modest, technical terms, noting that the treatment "is much in vogue now and when given correctly, will produce a decided improvement in the appearance of hair that is inclined to be very curly." ⁵ She died in 1919 at 51, leaving a personal fortune estimated at $600,000 to $700,000, well documented through company and tax records that survive to this day, which is a large part of why her name, more than any of her contemporaries, has lasted. ¹

The mansion, and the delegation to the White House

Walker's wealth showed up in more than her balance sheet. She built Villa Lewaro, a mansion in Irvington, New York, designed by Vertner W. Tandy, one of the first licensed Black architects in the state. ¹ In 1917, the same year as her Philadelphia convention, she helped lead a Harlem delegation to the White House to press the case against lynching and to raise concerns about how Black soldiers were being treated in the country's World War One mobilization. ¹ Asked in 1917 whether she was a millionaire, she declined the label outright, telling a reporter simply, "but I hope to be." ¹ It is a small, telling detail. The woman now remembered as America's first self made female millionaire was, in her own lifetime, more careful about that claim than most of the people who have repeated it since.

References

1. "How Business Executive Madam C. J. Walker Became a Powerful Influencer of the Early 20th Century." Smithsonian Magazine. smithsonianmag.com
2. "Annie Malone and Madam C.J. Walker: Pioneers of the African American Beauty Industry." National Museum of African American History and Culture. nmaahc.si.edu
3. "Business, Madam C.J. Walker." Speaking While Female Speech Bank. speakingwhilefemale.co/business-walker
4. Bundles A. "Madam C.J. Walker's First National Convention, August 30-31, 1917." aleliabundles.com. aleliabundles.com
5. "Sizzle: The History of the Hot Comb." National Museum of African American History and Culture. nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/sizzle