Before Mary Kay, There Was Madam C.J. Walker—The First Self-Made Female Millionaire

And we continue with our American Stories. Up next, we have the story of Madam C.J. Walker. Many believe that she was the first female self-made millionaire, and she just happens to be African American. She was also the first person to bring hair care products to the masses. You to tell her story is her great-great-granddaughter, an author of the book On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J.

Walker.

Here’s A’Lelia Bundles.

She started life as Sarah Breedlove on the same plantation in Delta, Louisiana, where her parents had been enslaved, and she was the first child in her family born free in December of 1867. They lived in an area that had been devastated by the Civil War. Everything—the plantations—had been burned down, and now the formerly enslaved people were struggling to just live a life, and they had very little money. At the end of every season, they owed money to the plantation owners, who had been their former slave owners. And Sarah Breedlove, as the young child in her family, she had had very little formal education. There were schools for Black children in Louisiana. Even though her family minister, Curtis Pollard, had been a Black state senator during Reconstruction, when African Americans had gained a great deal of political power, that power was taken away from them by the Ku Klux Klan, so that by the time Sarah was old enough to go to school, there were no schools for Black children. She knows how to pick cotton, she knows how to wash clothes, she knows how to do domestic work. And then when she was seven years old, both of her parents died. She had to move in with her older sister, Lavigna, and Lavigna was married to a man who was so cruel, as Sarah later said, that she got married at 14 to get a home of her own.

She married a man named Moses McWilliams.

They had one daughter named A’Lelia when Sarah was 17, and when Sarah was 20, Moses died, so now Sarah Breedlove McWilliams was a widow. She knew she wasn’t going to move back in with her sister, so she moved up the Mississippi River to Saint Louis, where her older brothers had moved about a decade earlier as part of an exodus. In the 1870s and 1880s, African Americans—formerly enslaved people—just left Louisiana and Mississippi because the conditions were so horrible. There was so much racial violence. Her brothers had moved to Saint Louis to escape that treatment.

So she joined her brothers in Saint Louis.

They had become barbers, and they were doing relatively well.

They had a barbershop very near Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church.

She doesn’t really have enough money to make ends meet, but the women of the church really encourage her to make sure that her daughter is educated. So during the week she is having to work away from home, having to live in as a domestic, she leaves her daughter at what was called the Colored Orphans Home. There were a number of Black women who had organized because they knew there were

families who were struggling. There was no day care in the

way that we think about it now, so her daughter, A’Lelia, spent part of the week at the Colored Orphans Home. She went to kindergarten with the other children from the school, and then on the weekends, or whenever Sarah could be with her, she helped to raise her daughter. They went to church every Sunday at Saint Paul AME Church, and even though Sarah was struggling, she had a good enough voice that she was in the choir. Being in the choir allowed her to meet some of the more middle-class women, to travel around the city when the choir performed, and so she was being exposed to a way of life that made her aspire to something better. So time went on, and in 1894, a couple of her brothers had died, and so now her support system—her emotional and financial support system—was really crumbling, and she met a man named John Davis. She married John Davis. She thought that that would be helpful to her—that she would be helpful in raising her daughter.

And that turned out to be a disaster.

John Davis was a heavy drinker, and he had a lot of girlfriends. And even though, it’s, you know, thinking about him, it’s hard to believe that anybody would be interested in John Davis, but, you know, she was. You know, her life was hard, and sometimes people make really unwise decisions.

So she married John Davis, and they fought a lot, and he

was arrested for, you know, public drunkenness, and he really just was, you know, not a good partner. So

they ended up splitting up.

But around this time, she was under so much stress, and she was having so many problems that her hair began

to fall out.

And I think one thing that is really important for us to understand in this era, in the 21st century,

is that in 1906, most

Americans didn’t have indoor plumbing. That meant people didn’t bathe very often, which we don’t like to think about. But, you know, people would have to go outside and pump water at the well by hand, put it in a bucket, heat it on a wood stoveboard an open fire, get the water hot enough to fill a big, large tin tub, and

take a bath.

And that might happen once a week, and everybody in the family might use the same bathwater.

So it’s really gross.

But as you can see, this would not, you know, bathing was not the sort of luxury thing that we think about now. So most people didn’t have indoor plumbing; they didn’t bathe very often. They washed their hair even less often—sometimes once a month, sometimes not at all during the winter.

Because you think about what that would take: if it’s snowing outside, how were you going to pump the water?

And Sarah was one of those women, and there were many women like her. Because they weren’t washing their hair very often, they had really horrible scalp infections, and as a result, they were going bald. So that was really Sarah’s real problem: she was going bald, and she wanted to figure out a way to have healthier hair.

She said, “I was so ashamed

of my frightful appearance that I prayed to the Lord for a solution. And one night, in a dream, a big African man appeared, and he told me what to mix up for my formula. And some of the ingredients came from Africa.”

“I sent for them.”

“I mixed them together, I applied into my scalp, and my hair began to grow back faster than it had ever fallen out.”

That is part of the truth.

It’s also true that she sold products for a while for women who became her competitor, woman named Annie Malone. It’s also true that she worked for a while as a cook for—after she moved to Denver—for man named El Schaltz, who owned the largest pharmacy west of the Mississippi River, and he was well aware of products that were already on the market, like Cuticura and formulas that pharmacists had been using, and the medical profession had been using, really for hundreds of years.

A basic formula.

that was cleaning your hair more often with a shampoo and then an ointment that contained sulfur, and sulfur is a centuries-old remedy for healing dandruff on scalp infections. She moved to Denver in 1905, and her good friend Charles Joseph Walker, whom she had met in Saint Louis, who was a newspaperman, moved to Denver, and they got married, and she began to take out ads in the newspaper. All of a sudden, instead of being Sarah McWilliams and her ads in the Black newspaper in Denver, now

she was Mrs. C.J.

Walker. And then in April of 1906, she began to call herself Madam C.J. Walker. And you can think, “Well, that’s a bit of an affectation,” but it was really a nod to the fact that Paris, where people were called Madam rather than Mrs.

Paris was the center of fashion and beauty culture. And she, like,

women who were her contemporaries—Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein—they all called themselves Madam, and that gave them a bit of respect, you know, made them sort of stand out. And then if you looked at the old newspapers of the time, see that women who own boarding houses, or who were seamstresses, or who were caterers called themselves Madam. So it was really kind of a business honorific as well as a way to have some respect and some dignity.

And what a story you’re hearing from A’Lelia Bundles, who happens to be the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker. And what a life! I mean, Moore said stories—more tragic stories than anything you’d read in the Old Testament. Loses her parents young, lives in a home that’s so brutal with her sister that she has to get out and get married. Her husband dies, she moves to Saint Louis, her brothers die, and, my goodness, somehow she just manages to keep going. And the stress in her life is so terrible that her hair keeps falling off. And then we learned about this partnership with this newspaperman; the ads start, and up comes the new and improved Madam C.J. Walker. When we come back, more of the life of Madam C.J. Walker here on our American Stories. And we continue with our American Stories and our story on the first female millionaire, Madam C.J.

Walker.

Telling this story is her great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles. Let’s get back to the story. Here again is A’Lelia Bundles.

She really was. She really was a marketing and distribution genius.

She begins to sell her products.

You know, her hair is now growing longer, and other women who had scalp infections like she did are wondering, “Sarah, what have you done? How come your hair is growing?” And she and her new husband traveled around Colorado to the various mining towns—to Trinidad, to Pueblo, to Colorado Springs—and it really became clear to her that she could only grow her market so much in a state where there were very few Black residents. So she and Charles Joseph Walker began to travel around the southwestern part of the United States. In the South, they went to Texas, to Kansas, to Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana; she’d take out a little ad in whatever Black newspaper for the town where she was going the next week, so that she would have a crowd, and every town she would go to, she would demonstrate the products. She would find a woman in the town who seemed to have a scalp infection. In that, she would hire a room in a church and get the water heated and wash the woman’s hair, and then show just

what her products could do.

And, you know, you figure, at this point in time, there’s no radio, there’s no television.

There are very few places that actually have movie houses.

So when somebody comes to do a lecture, and they have a little few bells and whistles, and they’ve gotten the local minister to pay attention, she’s the entertainment perhaps for the month. She knew how to develop a crowd and how to create buzz. And then she was always very good about picking out the women who seemed to have the most personality, who might be leaders in their church, who might be with their missionary society or with their choir.

She had a

really great knack for finding women who were leaders, and she would pick that woman to be her sales agent. So that

when she left the town, she would leave a supply

of products with that person, and then she would stay in touch. And then as the woman began to develop a customer base, she would order more products from Sarah. By training thousands of women to be her sales agents, she developed a workforce—an army of women who were selling her products. One story I remember from her secretary: She had a secretary who came to work for her in 1914, when she was still a tea tea and when I was growing up and really starting to do my research, Violet Reynolds was still working for the Walker Company. When she talked about Madam Walker, she had a certain reverence for her, of course, but she said when Madam Walker, as she traveled, she would go to large towns, but sometimes she would go through on the train through a town that was really too small for the train to stop. And people may remember those old cowboy movies where a train would sort of slow down as it went through a town, and there was a big hook, and that was the hook that the mailbag went on, and so the train would slow down, and they would take the mail off the hook that was going away from the town, and then they would put a bag onto the hook for the mail that was to be delivered to the town. Well, Madam Walker, when she was going through a town that was too small for the train to stop, knew the train

would slow down.

She would make advance arrangements with her local sales agent to say, “I’m coming through this town at 3:28 on Thursday; please be there,” and she would throw off a little bundle of her flyers and her order forms and some products for the agent, and then the agent would be able to distribute that material

to her customers.

So Madam Walker used every available avenue to promote her products, to distribute her products, to sell her products. But she also understood the power of image. If she had Instagram, I know she would be all over Instagram. She needed to find a new base, and in 1909 she visited Indianapolis, and she was very impressed with Indianapolis. There was a very thriving Black business community.

There were three Black newspapers, including one that was a nationally distributed newspaper called the Indianapolis Freeman. So just imagine a Black USA Today in 1910.

It had a very robust current

events front; second, an excellent sports section that told you what was happening with Black baseball teams; and a very interesting entertainment section, like the Life section in USA Today, and it was writing about the Lafayette Players in Harlem and Bert Williams and the different singers and actors who were traveling all over the United States. So this Indianapolis Freeman was something Madam Walker immediately recognized as a great

place to advertise.

She took out an ad, and she used before-and-after photographs. The before pictures she put in the center, and her hair was very short. This was when her hair been falling out. And then on either side, in a sort of trio of pictures, she had a front view and a side view, and her hair was long, and her hair was down to the middle of her back and very healthy.

It was kind of like a Jenny Craig commercial.

I mean, you could really see the impact that her products really worked. And in that ad, she took a third of the page from top to bottom, placed the pictures at the top, and then the ad included letters that were testimonials from women who both were her customers and women who were her sales agents. One woman wrote her letter, and she said, “before I started using Madam Walker’s wonderful hair grewer, my hair was an eighth of an inch long, and now my hair is down my back, and I have been able to throw my wig away.” So this was real, you know, real endorsement. But there were also letters from women who had become her sales agents, and one woman said, “You have made it possible for a Black woman to make more money in a day selling your products than she could in a month working in somebody’s kitchen.” This was huge because there was so much discrimination against, you know, women in general working outside the home, but especially women of color. The only jobs that they could be hired for were maids and cooks and laundresses and sharecroppers. For a woman to be able to make her own money, her own independent money, meant she didn’t have to go work in somebody else’s house, live in somebody else’s house, and leave her children at home. She could have her own business in her house doing hair. So Madam Walker always was pushing not just the products, and you can feel beautiful at a time when very few people were

telling Black women they were beautiful.

She always pushed financial and economic independence and empowerment. So these ads were very powerful. Added to that, one of the reasons she had picked Indianapolis is because it was a transportation hub.

It was called the Crossroads

of America, and that was because of all of the trains that went through Indianapolis every day. At that point in 1910, it was near the center of population in America. The Western United States was still pretty sparsely populated. California was not the powerhouse that we think of it now with a large popular, so Indiana really had quite a bit of train traffic. And because the trains were going thro