Madam Walker’s name at birth was Sarah Breedlove, and her family lived in Delta, La., not far from Vicksburg, Miss. Walker was born on Dec. 23, 1867, shortly after the Civil War. In fact, Walker was born on the same plantation where her parents had once lived as slaves and where Ulysses S. Grant presided over the siege of Vicksburg. Walker was orphaned at 7, married at 14 and became a mother at 17, when her only child, Lelia, was born. She was widowed at 20 and married twice again, the last time to Charles Joseph Walker, whose name she adopted in 1906, adding the title Madam, which, Ms. Bundles explained, was the custom of women in business.
Madam Walker’s rise to fortune was prompted by her hair falling out in the 1890s, leaving bald spots. Walker decided she would pray to God to give her a solution. “He answered my prayer,” Walker vouched. “For one night I had a dream, and in that dream a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix for my hair.”
Eventually, Walker concocted a potion containing sulfur, which seemed to cure her baldness and some black women’s scalp diseases that Bundles suspected resulted from their belief in an old wive’s tale that discouraged frequent shampoos, especially in the winter. The three main products Walker manufactured were Vegetable Shampoo, Wonderful Hair Grower and Glossine.
Villa Lewaro, Madam Walker’s home in Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. The home was designed in 1918 by Vertner Woodson Tandy, New York’s first licensed black architect. Asked why she built such a palatial home, Madam Walker replied that she had not built it for herself, but so that blacks could see what could be accomplished with hard work and determination.
Walker was very interested in self-improvement. She was not afraid to hire people with more education than she had. She hired a tutor to teach her English, proper grammar and other subjects she felt would increase her ability to operate more effectively in her business. She learned to love luxurious living— cars, opera and the arts, her mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y., that her friend, tenor Enrico Caruso, named “Villa Lewaro” for Walker’s daughter, Lelia Walker Robinson, who supported her mother’s enterprise. Ms. Bundles said her research helped refute some of the myths that surrounded Walker, for example, that her first husband, Moses McWilliams, was lynched in 1888 (she found no documentation for that statement); that Walker invented the straightening comb (she did not); and that Walker was a millionaire (Bundles estimates Walker’s actual wealth between $600,000 and $700,000).
Ms. Bundles reported two incidents that reveal Walker’s character. In 1912, at a National Negro Business League Conference, after Booker T. Washington, who was presiding over the conference, refused to recognize her, Walker stood up and announced: “Surely you are not going to shut the door in my face. I feel that I am in a business that is a credit to the womanhood of our race. I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. I was promoted from there to the washtub. Then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself.” It was also in this speech that Walker stated: “I have built my factory on my own ground.” The next year, Walker was invited as the main speaker.
At a convention of hair culturalists and agents in 1917, Walker stated: “If I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard. … There is no royal, flower-strewn road to success, and if there is, I have not found it, for what success I have obtained is the result of many sleepless nights and real hard work. That is why I say to every Negro woman present: Don’t sit down and wait for opportunities to come. … Get up and make them!”
Interested in more than making money, Madam Walker gave $1,000 toward the construction of a YMCA for blacks in Indianapolis; participated in anti-lynching and women’s suffrage campaigns; sought and received an audience with President Woodrow Wilson; founded Lelia College to train stylists in Walker Beauty Shops across the nation and abroad; and gave to nonprofit and charitable organizations.
Ms. Bundles presented Walker as a lover of life, an aggressive and assertive woman who established a business that employed thousands of women. She gave women with little education work that they could do. As Ms. Bundles noted, in the early part of the last century, black stylists in beauty shops made more money than teachers and nurses. Walker amassed a fortune through hard work. She was a woman with a vision, who saw an opportunity and seized it.
Madam C.J. Walker
Linear Mode
