Madam C. J. Walker

Sarah Breedlove was born on the twenty-third of December 1867 at the Delta cotton plantation of Robert Wallace Burney at Delta, Louisiana, the youngest of the five children of Owen Breedlove and Minerva Anderson Breedlove — sharecropper parents who had been emancipated three years before her birth. She was the first member of the Breedlove household born free.

She was orphaned by seven — both parents died of yellow fever in 1873 and 1874 — and was raised by her elder sister Louvenia in the Vicksburg, Mississippi household of Louvenia and her husband Jesse Powell. She was married at fourteen in 1882 to Moses McWilliams at Vicksburg to escape the household of her abusive brother-in-law.

She was widowed at twenty in 1887 — Moses McWilliams died of unrecorded causes — and migrated north with her two-year-old daughter Lelia to Saint Louis in 1887, where she worked as a laundress at the Saint Louis World’s Fair Centennial laundry of 1904 at one dollar and fifty cents per day for the following seventeen years.

She suffered across the same period the systematic scalp condition then common to Black women of the period — a combination of low-protein diet, infrequent washing on the laundry-worker’s schedule, and the harsh lye soaps of the period — that had caused most of her hair to fall out by 1904.

She began across 1904 and 1905 the experimental development of a hair-and-scalp-care formula based on petroleum jelly, sulphur, and bee’s wax — the formula she named Madam C. J. Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower — and moved to Denver in 1905 on the offer of a position as cook at the household of the Denver physician Edmund L. Scholtz, who advanced her on credit a small mail-order chemistry laboratory.

She was married in January 1906 at Denver to Charles Joseph Walker, a Saint Louis newspaper advertising salesman, and took the trade name Madam C. J. Walker. She moved the business to Pittsburgh in 1908 and to Indianapolis in 1910 — opening the principal manufacturing operation at 640 North West Street, Indianapolis on the twenty-fourth of February 1910.

The Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company sold across the following nine years over twenty thousand units per week of the Wonderful Hair Grower and the associated Walker line of hair-and-scalp products. The Company employed at the time of Walker’s death over three thousand Black women as door-to-door Walker Sales Agents across the United States.

She accumulated by the time of her death a personal fortune of approximately six hundred thousand dollars and a Walker Company valuation of approximately one and a half million dollars — the combined rough equivalent of forty million dollars in the dollars of the current period — making her the first self-made woman millionaire of any race in the United States.

She died at the Villa Lewaro at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York on the twenty-fifth of May 1919 of complications of kidney disease and hypertension, at fifty-one.

She is honored here as the first self-made woman millionaire of the United States.