Annie Turnbo Malone

Annie Minerva Turnbo was born in Metropolis, Illinois, on the ninth of August 1869, the tenth of eleven children of Robert and Isabella Turnbo. Her parents both died before Annie was twelve; she was raised by her elder sister Ada in Peoria.

She developed and patented her hair-care product line — the Wonderful Hair Grower formula and the related straightening process — in the late 1890s, two years before Sarah Breedlove (Madam C. J. Walker, also placed in this archive) would purchase one of Turnbo's products in Saint Louis around 1903 and begin her own competing line. Turnbo's Wonderful Hair Grower was, in this strict chronological sense, the foundational product of the entire twentieth-century Black hair-care industry.

She founded Poro College in Saint Louis in 1918 — the principal hair-care training institution for Black women in the United States, with classroom and laboratory facilities for hair styling, the chemistry of hair products, business management, marketing, and personal etiquette. Poro College graduated approximately seventy-five thousand Black women across the 1920s and 1930s; its branch network operated in over forty American cities at its 1930 peak.

She was the wealthiest Black woman in the United States across approximately 1920-1925 — her personal net worth was estimated at fourteen million dollars at the peak, roughly equivalent to two hundred million in current terms.

Her philanthropy across her career was the principal individual Black-led charitable enterprise of the early twentieth century. She gave approximately ten million dollars across her lifetime — to Howard University Medical School, to the Saint Louis Colored Orphans Home (which she renamed Annie Malone Children's Home), to the Tuskegee Institute, to the NAACP, and to dozens of smaller Black-led organizations.

She died of complications from a stroke in Chicago on the tenth of May 1957, age eighty-seven.

She is honored here as the entrepreneur whose Poro College trained seventy-five thousand Black women and whose philanthropy funded a generation of Black-led institutions.