The First Black Millionaire: Madam Cj Walker

“I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don’t sit down and wait for opportunities to come. Get up and make them.” Famous words by the First black millionaire in America. Madam CJ Walker went from having $1.50 to becoming a self- made entrepreneur with the most successful black owned business at the time while also being a civil rights activist, philanthropist, and a political and social activist.

Before she was known as Madam CJ Walker she was born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 near a cotton plantation in Delta Louisiana. She had five other siblings and her parents were Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove both of which were former slaves and after the civil war they still picked cotton on a plantation. Sarah was the first in her family to be born free but most children at the time still worked on cotton field with their parents which is what Sarah did. When she turned six both of her parents die of yellow fever. She needed a place to live seeing as she was orphaned so, she moved in with her older sister Louvenia to work as a housemaid while also working in the cotton fields. Louvenia’s husband was abusive to Sarah so she got married at fourteen years old to Moses McWilliams and had a child four years later. This only lasted four years because at the age of eighteen he died and it was just Sarah and her daughter A’Leila then moved to ST Louis in 1889 where she got a job as a washerwoman where she was paid one dollar and fifty cents per day. During the day she would work and at night she would go to night school so she could potentially have a better life for her and her child she worked and saved enough for her daughter to go to Knoxville College. This is a significant part of her life because not even through half her life she has gone through much more than the average entrepreneur in the 20th or 21st century has gone through in their childhood. However, a lot of black women at the time would be in identical or similar situations.

While in St Lewis in 1904 she started working for Annie Turbo Malone as a Malone agent sold The Great Wonderful Hair Grower. At this point in her life she is struggling financially and while being in her thirties she is losing her hair because o fa scalp disorder she has. At the time there was no plumbing and unless you could afford to bath and wash your hair frequently you didn’t do it a lot. This is when she came up with the idea of creating home remedies to try and help her condition. “After experimenting with various methods, she developed a formula of her own that caused her hair to grow again quickly.” This growth was noticed by her friends which is when she started selling the product to her friends, family and door to door. While working on selling her product she got word that one of her brothers has died. She then moves to Denver to help her sister in law and their four kids. There she meets her second husband Charles Joseph Walker who was newspaper salesman. He helped with advertising while they were married by developing materials for Wonderful Hair Grower in the African American papers. In the public everyone knew her as Madam CJ Walker so she kept that name for her business. When she starts earning ten dollars a day she thinks that she can expand her business. Her and Charles start traveling around to explain the product and the “Walker System” which was a “combination of scalp preparation, application of lotions, and use of iron combs.” She eventually made other products that “included the “Wonderful Hair Grower”, “Glossine” pressing oil for straightening hair, and “Vegetable Shampoo.” They became so successful that they had to implement a mail order system for when she was too busy travelling. At some point in their relationship Charles thinks that the business reached its full potential and should not grow. Rather than stay with him they got divorced so she could continue expanding her business because she believed that all black women in the country would be interested in her products.

After she divorced Charles she relocated the business to Pittsburgh because a part of the walker system involved the use of hot combs and at this time Pittsburgh is known for steel production. While working on getting patents for the mail order business and the hot combs “She also took the opportunity to establish Lelia College which operated from 1908 to 1910, a beauty parlor and training school for Walker agents.” Here the women would learn the walker system and after it was completed they were given the title “hair culturist.” This allowed over 3000 black women to earn a living. At this point her business is still becoming more and more successful and her hair culturist are not enough to run the business out of Pittsburgh so she decides to open a factory to manufacture and transport goods. Which ultimately led her to move to Indianapolis. “Madame Walker Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis, Indiana. Between 1911 and 1919, she grossed more than $100,000 each year, had as many as 15 employees in the factory, and had several thousand agents working around the country.” These women were known as the Walker agents. They were well known in the black communities and promoted Walkers philosophies of “cleanliness and loveliness.”

Although it may seem that Walker was greedy and money driven she actually was really big on philanthropy. She made large donations to charities schools and orphanages. She also “began construction on a million dollar facility that [would] house not only her company headquarters and factory, but also a African motif theater with 944 seats, a beauty salon, a ballroom, a drug store, a coffee shop and several offices, all for blacks who were discriminated against in a white society.” She also donated money to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) because she supported Anti Lynching because her first husband was lynched. In Indianapolis she helped pay for the restoration of the black YMCA and the restoration of Fredrick Douglass home in Washington DC. She also founded the National Negro Cosmetics Manufacturers Association in 1917. When she made it and became successful with her business she did a lot of good for the world.

In the final year of her life she made five hundred thousand dollars with her total net worth being 1 million dollars. When she died of kidney failure in 1919 she didn’t get to see her home or the company HQ finish being built but she left a legacy of being the wealthiest black woman in the country during her lifetime. “Just prior to dying of kidney failure, Walker revised her will, bequeathing two-thirds of future net profits to charity, as well as thousands of dollars to various individuals and schools.” The walker theater opened in 1927 for blacks that were not allowed in white theaters and in and in 1999 “she was inducted into the American Health and Beauty Aids Institution Hall of Fame.” Madam CJ Walker saw her hair care line as not just a way to make money but as a way to help her community and communities like it around the united states. She trained and had jobs for a lot of black women and opened the doors for them to go into business themselves. However, she did not only focus on the communities she focused on bettering our country by donating to certain charitable organizations that helped all black people in America survive the common racism they faced every day.