On December 23, 1867, Sarah “Madam C.J.” Walker was born in Delta, LA. An entrepreneur and philanthropist, she became America’s first black female millionaire — and the first female of any race to become a self-made millionaire. She achieved this groundbreaking success by creating a new line of hair care products for African American women. Overcoming many hardships during the Jim Crow era, she is the epitome of the
rags to riches American success story.
As the fifth child of former slaves, Walker (née Breedlove) was the first in her family to be born into freedom. She grew up on a cotton plantation until her parents died when she was seven. She then moved with her sister and brother-in-law to Vicksburg, MS where she worked as a cotton picker and domestic worker. At age 14, she married Moses McWilliams to escape hardships. In 1885, she gave birth to her daughter A’Lelia. Yet, by age 20 she was a widow. After his 1887 death, she moved with her daughter to St. Louis, MO where she worked as a washerwoman earning $1.50 a day. While in St. Louis, she met her second husband, Charles J. Walker, who worked in advertising.
In the 1890s, she developed a scalp disorder that made her loose hair. She was determined to find a cure. In that search, she ended up creating a lucrative business. In 1905, she moved to Denver, CO to work for a well-known black hair care entrepreneur. In that time, she continued to perfect her own product: a tonic that she claimed made her hair grow back. She commissioned her husband to create an advertising campaign for the new product. He came up with the brand name, Madam C.J. Walker. He advertised her line of hair products in black newspapers as a “wonderful hair product” that would give hair a “beautiful silky sheen.”
In 1907, she and her husband traveled around the South to promote the wonders of the product. They also offered demonstrations of the “Walker Method.” By 1910, her Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company was generating a modern-day equivalent of several million dollars in profit. She moved the company to Indianapolis, IN, where she expanded the business model beyond manufacturing products. She created a precursor to modern-day, multi-level marketing beauty companies, by training sales beauticians, called “Walker Agents,” to sell the products to black communities.
After promoting her brand in Latin America and the Caribbean, Walker and her daughter settled in Harlem, NY in 1916. While living in the Harlem community, she founded various philanthropic groups and donated her money to scholarship funds, elderly homes, the NAACP, and the National Conference on Lynching. She also helped restore the Washington, D.C. home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and donated money to build a black YMCA in Indianapolis.
When she died in 1919 at age 51, Walker was worth over one million dollars. At the time of her death, she was living in a mansion in an elite Westchester, NY neighborhood amidst Gilded Age captains of industry, like John D. Rockefeller. Her journey from a cotton picking daughter of freed slaves to beauty industry titan was a rare feat, especially at the turn of the twentieth century. Her beauty care empire is an inspiration to this day for female entrepreneurs looking to make their mark in the business world.