Sarah Breedlove was born on December 23 1867. She was the first person in her family to be born free, instead of into slavery. Her parents died when she was young, and she worked hard at different jobs. She got married when she was fourteen, and her husband died shortly after. She and her daughter moved to St. Louis, where she worked as a washerwoman. Here, she met her second husband, Charles J. Walker, who would later help her with her business. She developed a scalp disorder which caused her to lose much of her hair, and began experimenting with different remedies for her hair. In 1905, she was hired as a commission agent for another successful black entrepreneur who sold hair products, Annie Turnbo Malone and moved to Denver, Colorado. While there, she and her husband began advertising for the hair treatments she had created. She began using a name that she and her husband thought would be more recognizable: Madame C.J. Walker. Her success only grew from there. She and her husband traveled around the South and Southeast, and in 1908, she opened a beauty school and factory in Pittsburgh. In 1910, she moved her factories to Indianapolis. Her company worked to educate and train black people to work as representatives and salespeople for her company. In 1913, she divorced her husband and set out to travel and promote her company in Latin America and the Caribbean. When she returned, she moved to Harlem, New York and dedicated her time and money to activism for African American people. She died on May 25, 1919 in New York, as the country's first female self-made millionaire, as she was the only owner of her company. Her daughter, A'Leila Walker would later become a part of the Harlem Renaissance. Madame C.J. Walker's legacy lives on today, as many of the places she lived in or built are now National Historic Landmarks, and her company is still around and selling products today.
Source: https://www.biography.com/people/madam-cj-walker-9522174
Picture from: http://time.com/3641122/sarah-breedlove-walker/
Brooke - this is such an interesting post! I think it's really cool that she made herself her own millionaire and was black. That must have been really difficult during this time period. It turns out she died of hypertension (high blood pressure). I also think it is really cool that she chose hair products, it seems kind of odd to choose hair products out of all things out there but they were clearly successful! Great post!
ReplyDeleteThis is a very fascinating post about someone who is not quite as well-known as some of the other people who became very wealthy around the same time. Madam C.J. Walker is an inspiring figure for many reasons. She was not only the first female self-made millionaire of the United States but she also was able to achieve this having started out in a very different position, as the first person in her family to not be a slave. In addition, Walker's story is also inspirational and unique because the very product that she would make so much money from was developed because of a struggle she had to face- losing her hair. The fact that she decided to use an issue in her life that must have been very difficult for her as an opportunity to create a solution and work extremely hard in order to accomplish even more is really amazing. I also read that her daughter, A'Lelia Walker, actually helped her found her manufacturing company in 1906, before she was part of the Harlem Renaissance, and A'Lelia Walker was also the one to become president of her mother's company after her mother died in 1919.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.madamcjwalker.com/bios/alelia-walker/
Sarah Breedlove's story is a prime example of human ingenuity and resilience because as a black female, she had to overcome and bypass many of the time's social norms to become as successful as she was. Not only was she an incredibly successful woman, but she also spent time and effort to help blacks in her community; first by training her "Walker Agents" to promote "cleanliness and loveliness" to uplift blacks, donating large amounts of money to the NAACP and other black organizations, and then also by providing scholarships for black women at the Tuskegee Institute. Madame C.J. Walker was an incredibly interesting figure in history that receives much less attention than she deserves.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.history.com/topics/black-history/madame-c-j-walker