Sara Spencer Washington

Sarah Elizabeth Phillips was born on June 6, 1889, in the Berkley section of Norfolk, Virginia, to Ellen Phillips. (Some sources record her birth as June 17, 1883.) She was raised in the segregated Black community of the post-Reconstruction South and educated in the public schools of Berkley before studying at Lincoln Preparatory School in Philadelphia and Norfolk Mission College.

She trained in hairdressing and dressmaking, working for a time in York, Pennsylvania, and completing further study in the trade. By 1913 she had opened her own beauty shop in Atlantic City, New Jersey, working the salon by day and canvassing her own cosmetic preparations door to door by night. From that single room she built the Apex News and Hair Company, founded in Atlantic City around 1920.

Apex grew into a national enterprise of hair and beauty products, a chain of beauty colleges, a laboratory, and a newspaper. At its height the company employed hundreds of workers and thousands of sales agents, and Washington's fortune helped make her one of the earliest African American women to attain millionaire standing. At the 1939 New York World's Fair she was honored among the nation's most distinguished businesswomen.

Her wealth flowed back to her people: she funded scholarships and charities, delivered coal to struggling neighbors, and built the Apex Golf Club, among the first Black-owned courses in the country. Sara Spencer Washington died on March 23, 1953. May the builder of the Apex empire, who turned a one-room shop into a wellspring of Black dignity and opportunity, be forever honored.