Born in 1867, in the midst of a very polarised and unequal society in the United States, Madam CJ Walker clawed her way to the top in becoming “America’s first black female millionaire.” All thanks to what, you may ask? Homemade hair products tailored specifically to black women.
Madam CJ Walker was born under the name of ‘Sarah Breedlove’, on December 23, 1867. Both of her parents had been born into slavery and, at the time of her birth, they were Louisiana sharecroppers. Sarah was their first child to be born free after the Emancipation Proclamation. However, after a series of unfortunate events, she became an orphan at 6, a wife and mother at 14, and then a widow at 20.
Yet, she persevered. Struggling financially, facing hair loss, and feeling the strain of years of physical labor, Walker’s life took a dramatic turn in 1904. That year, she not only began using African American businesswoman Annie Turbo Malone’s "The Great Wonderful Hair Grower,” but she also joined Malone’s team of black women sales agents. And then, she became an active member of the ‘NACW’, the National Association for Coloured Women.
A year later, she moves to Denver, Colorado, where she meets her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, and renames herself “Madam C.J. Walker”. Following this, and with $1.75, she launched her own line of hair care for African American women “Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower”. Initially, her husband, an ad man, helped her advertise and establish the business. However, after the couple divorced in 1910, she relocated to Indianapolis and built a factory for her manufacturing Company.
Furthermore, she opened training programs for her national network of licensed sales agents who earned healthy commissions. As an advocate of black women’s economic independence, she employed 40,000 African American women and men in the US, Central America, and the Caribbean. Ultimately, she founded the National Negro Cosmetics Manufacturers Association in 1917. Meanwhile, Walker’s business grew rapidly, with sales exceeding $500,000 in the final year of her life and topped at $1 million.
Madam Walker died on May 25, 1919, at the age of fifty-one. The plans of her headquarters, ‘The Walker Building’ was carried out after her death, and now stands as a testament to her legacy. Today, the Walker Building is a non-profit Organisation with the sim of preserving her memory via cultural education, promoting social justice, and empowering the youth to be entrepreneurs themselves, just like Madam Walker. In fact, on March 20, 2020, Netflix premiered a series called ‘Self-made: inspired by the life of Madam CJ Walker’ starring the revered actress, Octavia Spencer.
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