Volume 2, No. 3 (Spring 1998) -- Women's History Month Issue

   Madame C. J. Walker -- Entrepreneur of the early 1900s

One of the first American women of any race to become a millionaire through her own efforts was Sarah Breedlove Walker. Born in 1867, her parents, both ex-slaves, were sharecroppers who lived on a plantation in Louisiana. Orphaned at the age of six, she was raised by her sister. Because of her impoverished background, she had only a limited formal education. She was married at fourteen and had a daughter, A'Lelia, in 1885. Widowed at twenty, Sarah moved with her daughter to St. Louis. For eighteen years, she supported herself and her daughter by working as a washerwoman.

Walker said she got the idea to begin a cosmetics business in 1905 when she began to lose her hair. She said that in a dream, she received a formula for a unique hair treatment for Negro women. At that time, African American women who wanted to de-kink their hair had to place it on a flat surface and press it with an iron. Walker invented a hair softener and a special straightening comb. She mixed her ointments and soaps using washtubs and kitchen utensils, adapted existing tools and techniques, and sold her products door-to-door.

The elements of the "Walker System" were a shampoo, a pomade "hair-grower," vigorous brushing, and the application of heated hair combs. The method transformed stubborn, lusterless hair into shining smoothness.

The Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company employed mostly women who carried the treatments to homes. Known as "Walker Agents," they became familiar figures throughout the United States and the Caribbean, making house calls with black satchels containing preparations and tools to dress hair.

Sales of the hair grower and sixteen other beauty products, packaged in tin containers with the portrait of Madame Walker, were accompanied by heavy advertising in Negro newspapers and magazines and frequent instructional tours. This made Walker one of the best known African American women in the country in the early 1920s. Her fame spread to Europe, where the "Walker System" coiffure of dancer Josephine Baker so fascinated Parisians that a French company produced a similar pomade, "Baker-Fix."

After moving to Denver to expand her business, she married newspaperman, Charles J. Walker. She kept the name even after business differences ended the marriage. She added the prefix Madame C. J. to challenge the practice of whites addressing Negros by their first names only. She demonstrated the "Walker System," attracting not only clients for her products but agent-operators. She called them "hair culturists" rather than "hair straighteners." With her agents conducting sales, she could concentrate on instruction methods and the manufacture of her products.

After establishing a manufacturing headquarters in Denver, Madame Walker traveled extensively, giving lectures and demonstrations of her products in Negro homes, clubs, and churches.

In 1910, she transferred operations to new headquarters in Indianapolis, where a plant was constructed to serve as center of the Walker enterprises (see photo). By that time, Walker had turned over the mail order business and training college in Pittsburgh to her daughter, A'Leila. Today the headquarters of Walker Manufacturing Company is in Tuskegee, Alabama.

The Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, of which Madame Walker was president and sole owner, provided employment for some 3,000 people - assistants, agents, trainers. Before her death in 1919, Madame Walker had more than 2,000 agents selling an ever-expanding line of products and demonstrating the "Walker System" of treating hair.

A generous donor to black charities, Walker encouraged her agents to support black philanthropic work. She was the largest donor in the successful 1918 drive to purchase and preserve the home of Frederick Douglass as a museum. She contri-buted generously to the NAACP, homes for the aged, the needy in Indianapolis, and the local YMCA. She funded scholarships for young women at Tuskegee Institute and contributed to Palmer Memorial Institute, a private school for blacks in North Carolina.

Beginning in 1913, Walker organized her agents into "Walker Clubs," and gave cash prizes to the clubs doing the most community philanthropic work. At the annual convention of Walker agents, she always rewarded the most generous local affiliate. Walker made generous gifts to educational institutions such as Mary McLeod Bethune's Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls. Walker even founded a girl's academy in West Africa and bequeathed $100,000 to it. She was highly regarded by Mary McLeod Bethune as a business leader for girls and women to emulate.

Walker required her agents to sign contracts specifying the exclusive use of her products and methods, and binding them to a hygienic regimen which anticipated provisions of future state cosmetology laws. She influenced a revolution in the personal habits and appearance of millions of human beings in her lifetime.

Madame Walker constantly made headlines, both with her business and her social activities. Her possessions were valued at a million dollars and included extensive real estate. When she moved to New York in 1916, she built a $90,000 limestone townhouse. After Walker's death, her daughter A'Lelia, presided over a salon there, where talented Negro authors, musicians, and artists met influential white intellectuals. A "Who's Who" of African American history entered her doors. In attendance were publishers, critics, and potential patrons who helped to stimulate the "Harlem Renaissance" of the arts in the 1920s .

In 1917, Madame Walker built an Italianate neo-Palladian-style country home designed by the first registered black architect, Vertner Woodson. Walker furnished the mansion with a 24-carat gold-plated piano and phonograph, a $15,000 pipe organ that gently awoke house guests, Hepplewhite furniture, Persian rugs, many huge oil paintings, and two Japanese prayer trees imported at a cost of more than $10,000.

Warned by physicians that her hypertension required a reduction of her activities, Madame Walker nevertheless continued her busy schedule. She died in 1919 at her estate. Despite her impoverished beginnings, Madame Walker achieved notable business success. Several generations of the Walker family continue the business she established.

Included in Madame C.J. Walker's will was a provision that women would always head the company she founded. Two-thirds of the company stock was owned by five Negro trustees named by Madame Walker for the benefit of certain charities. To raise money during the depression, the NAACP sold Villa Lewaro in 1932 to a fraternal organization. In 1950, the building housed the Annie Potts Home for the Aged. In 1976, Villa Lewaro was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, A'Lelia Perry Bundles, a producer for "ABC World News Tonight" and great-great-grand-daughter of Madame C.J. Walker, has initiated a movement to restore the home as a museum. Among the other properties left by the entrepreneur is a five-story million dollar plant in Indianapolis, The Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company Building. The block-square building houses a Greek-style theater, lunchroom, drugstore, beauty parlor, and private offices.