Madam C.J. Walker

Sarah Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867, on the Robert W. Burney plantation in Delta, Louisiana. Her parents, Owen and Minerva Breedlove, had been enslaved by the Burney family until the end of the Civil War, which had concluded only two and a half years before Sarah's birth. She was the first of the Breedlove children born into freedom.

She was orphaned by age seven. Both of her parents died of disease, likely yellow fever. She moved in with her older sister Louvenia and Louvenia's husband, Jesse Powell, who was abusive. To escape him, Sarah married Moses McWilliams at fourteen. Their daughter, A'Lelia, was born in 1885. Moses died in 1887, when Sarah was twenty, leaving her a widow with a two-year-old.

She moved to St. Louis to join her brothers, who were barbers. For nearly twenty years, she worked as a washerwoman, earning roughly one dollar and fifty cents a day. She saved what she could to send A'Lelia to school. She also began losing her hair, a condition common among Black women at the time due to a combination of stress, poor diet, harsh hair products, and the infrequent washing forced by the lack of indoor plumbing.

In 1904, Sarah began using a product called the Wonderful Hair Grower, created by Annie Malone, another Black entrepreneur who would become one of the first Black female millionaires in her own right. Sarah joined Malone's sales force in 1905 and moved to Denver to work as a sales agent. In Denver, she met Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper advertising salesman. They married in 1906. From that point, she used the name Madam C.J. Walker.

She left Malone's company in 1906 and began selling her own products. She developed her own formulations. She traveled by train across the South and Midwest, giving demonstrations of her hair care system to Black women in homes, churches, and community centers. The system included a shampoo, a pomade called Wonderful Hair Grower, heated combs, and a specific method for applying all three.

But the real innovation was the sales model. She did not just sell products. She trained women to sell them. She built a school, Lelia College in Pittsburgh (named for her daughter), that taught women the method, the business skills, and the professional presentation required to become Walker Agents. Graduates received a certificate and became independent contractors operating under her brand.

By 1917, there were more than 20,000 Walker Agents. By 1919, there were an estimated 40,000. They earned between five and fifteen dollars a day at a time when most domestic workers earned less than two. A small percentage of them became wealthy themselves. Many of them had been washerwomen like Walker herself. She had built a path from domestic work to financial independence and had put thousands of women on it.

In 1910, she moved her company headquarters to Indianapolis, where she built a factory, an office, and a training school. The Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company building still stands today. It is now the Madam Walker Legacy Center.

In 1917, she purchased thirty-four acres in Irvington, New York, and commissioned Vertner Tandy, one of the first licensed Black architects in America, to design a mansion. The result, Villa Lewaro, became a gathering place for the Harlem Renaissance and for Black intellectual and political life. It is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

She gave away enormous sums. The largest single gift of her lifetime was $5,000 to the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign,the largest donation that organization had ever received. She funded scholarships at Tuskegee and at Palmer Memorial Institute. She made bequests to Black schools, orphanages, churches, and community organizations that continued after her death in 1919.