Madam C. J. Walker

Sarah Breedlove was born on the twenty-third of December 1867 near Delta, in Madison Parish, Louisiana, on the plantation of Robert W. Burney, where her parents, Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, had been enslaved. She was their fifth child, yet the first of the family to be born into freedom after emancipation — a distinction that framed her whole life. Orphaned by the age of seven and married at fourteen, she was widowed young and left to raise a daughter, Lelia, alone.

For more than a decade she labored as a washerwoman in St. Louis, Missouri, earning little more than a dollar a day while her brothers worked as barbers. Troubled by a scalp ailment that cost her much of her hair, she began, around 1905, to develop her own remedies and treatments for the hair and scalp of Black women, refining a system that would carry her name.

Taking the name Madam C. J. Walker after her marriage to Charles Joseph Walker, she built a manufacturing and mail-order enterprise, founding the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company at Indianapolis in 1910. She trained and employed thousands of Black women as sales agents and beauty culturists, offering them dignity, income, and independence, and by the time of her death her company counted agents in the tens of thousands.

She became the first self-made female millionaire of any race in the United States, and she poured her wealth into her people — endowing scholarships, funding institutions, and lending her voice against injustice. Madam C. J. Walker died on the twenty-fifth of May 1919 at her estate in Irvington, New York. Born the first free child of a family that had known bondage, she turned freedom into an empire and lifted a multitude of women with her.