“I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.”
Madam C.J. Walker
(1867-1919) — Entrepreneur, philanthropist, activist, first female self-made millionaire according to the Guinness Book of World Records
The staff
Sarah Breedlove was born in the shadow of slavery in 1867, in Louisiana two years after the end of the Civil War. She was orphaned at 7, married at 14, pregnant at 16, and widowed at 20. At age 35, she simply wanted a life that did not include bending over a washboard.
When she died at age 51, she had transformed herself into Madam C.J. Walker, a savvy businesswoman and philanthropist who had amassed a fortune creating and marketing hair care products for black women.
“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South,” Walker often said. “From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.”
Walker was born Dec. 23, 1867, on a Louisiana plantation, the daughter of newly freed slaves Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove.
At age 10, she moved with her sister’s family to Mississippi, where she worked washing clothes. At 14, she married Moses McWilliams; he died when she was 20. With her 2-year-old daughter in tow, she moved to St. Louis. For the first time, she saw a black middle- class community. She, however, was still a laundress and a cook.
Misfortune became fortune
Her second marriage to John Davis left her no better off. Then misfortune became fortune. She lost her hair to a scalp disease. The search for a cure led her to the discovery of hair products by black entrepreneur Annie Malone. She joined Malone’s company as a sales agent.
She soon developed her own hair products and founded the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Co.
By this time, a third marriage to newspaper salesman Charles Joseph (“C.J.”) Walker had ended, but she kept his name and added “Madam.” “I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself,” Walker said. “I am endeavoring to provide employment for hundreds of women of my race.”
She also contributed thousands of dollars to social causes, such as the NAACP’s anti-lynching movement, and commissioned the work of black artisans, including the designer of her townhouse in New York where she’d moved in 1916.
Walker died May 25, 1919, from complications of hypertension at her Irvington-on-the-Hudson estate in New York. She is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, N.Y.
