In the early years of the twentieth century, a young black girl from a poor family in Oklahoma became the focus of national attention, not because of anything she had done, but because of what lay beneath the land she had been given. Sarah Rector was born on March 3, 1902, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to Joseph Rector and Rose McQueen. Her ancestors had been enslaved by Muskogee Creek Indians, and after the Civil War, they were declared freedmen and made citizens of the tribes that had once held them in bondage. In the decades that followed, the federal government passed a series of laws that divided tribal lands, redistributing them to white settlers and, in some cases, to tribal members themselves.
As a descendant of Creek freedmen, Sarah and two of her siblings were each allotted a plot of land, about 160 acres each. The land given to her was in Glenpool, roughly sixty miles from her family home, and it was considered rocky, infertile, and unfit for farming. The more valuable property had been set aside for white settlers. But beneath the surface of the land given to the younger generations lay something the government had not predicted: oil.
Sarah’s family was poor. Her father could barely afford the thirty dollars a year in property taxes on his children’s allotments, and he petitioned the Muskogee County court for permission to sell Sarah’s land. Because she was still a minor, the request was denied. In February 1911, Joseph Rector reached an agreement with Standard Oil Company, leasing Sarah’s land and finally relieving the family of financial strain.
Two years later, an independent oil driller named B. B. Jones struck oil on the property, and it produced a gusher. Within months, tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil were being extracted each day, and Sarah began receiving a fortune in royalties.
At the time, Oklahoma law required that all children who were citizens of Indian Territory with significant property be assigned a white guardian, even if their parents were alive. A local judge appointed T. J. Porter, a white man known to the Rector family, to oversee Sarah’s financial affairs.
News of the discovery spread quickly across the nation. Sarah, at just eleven years old, was earning thousands of dollars a month. One account states that in October 1913 alone she received eleven thousand five hundred dollars in royalties. In 1913, the Oklahoma Legislature even made an attempt to have her legally declared white so that she could ride in the first-class car on trains.
Newspaper reports claimed she was the richest black girl in America, with an income that exceeded the president’s. Yet despite her wealth, rumors persisted that she continued to live in poverty, in a two-room shack with her large family. People began to question what was happening to her fortune. In 1914, the Chicago Defender published an article claiming Sarah and her siblings were uneducated, living in poor conditions, and that her wealth was being mismanaged.
The article drew the attention of prominent African Americans, including agents of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. An investigation was launched to determine whether T. J. Porter was properly handling her estate.
A memo sent by James C. Waters Jr. , an agent affiliated with the NAACP, reached W. E.
B. Du Bois. Waters detailed that Sarah’s estate was in fact being mismanaged. According to him, she received no education, wore cheap dresses, and had no shoes, while her guardian earned a large sum of money.
Waters asked whether it was not possible to have her cared for in a decent manner by people of her own race, rather than by a member of a race that would deny her the treatment accorded a good yard dog. Newspapers across the country challenged the position of Sarah’s guardian, and other similar cases came to light. Hundreds of Native American and black children had found wealth due to oil discoveries on their land, and like Sarah, they had been assigned white guardians who frequently mismanaged their estates. Sarah’s case became the focal point of the issue.
The exact details of Sarah’s situation remain unclear. Shortly after the press brought the matter to light, correspondence between the judge and Du Bois revealed that Sarah and her family had moved into a five-room cottage and that she was attending school in her hometown of Taft with all her siblings. The judge also stated that it was the family who had chosen Porter as guardian and that he received only two percent of Sarah’s income. Even if the situation was greatly exaggerated, the NAACP’s investigation exposed the existing problems of guardianship and the corruption that came with it.
Du Bois later established the Children’s Department of the NAACP to investigate claims of white guardians who were suspected of depriving black children of their land and wealth. Sarah and her older sister were enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute’s Children’s School, where they received a better education. While there, a group of criminals plotted to kidnap Sarah and demand a ransom, but various students prevented the abduction. Her wealth made her a frequent target for violence and exploitation, which may be one of the reasons she stayed away from the press in later life.
In 1915, production on Sarah’s allotment was approximately one hundred sixty thousand barrels of crude oil a month. As she had a one-eighth share, she earned about eighteen thousand dollars a month, a colossal sum when the average household income was less than sixty dollars a month. Due to the intense press coverage, she began receiving gifts, requests for loans, and marriage proposals from much older men, who undoubtedly wanted to control her fortune. In 1917, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and within a few years they moved into a brick mansion known as the Sarah Rector Mansion.
By the time she was eighteen, Sarah was easily a millionaire, owning stocks, a boarding house, and land. Her mother managed her finances until Sarah was twenty. After moving to the city, Sarah met a local businessman named Kenneth Campbell, and the couple married in 1920. They had three sons and divorced in 1930.
By March 1922, Sarah’s wealth was estimated at more than one million dollars. She enjoyed a comfortable, lavish life, wearing fine clothing that sometimes led designer stores that typically admitted only whites to close and allow only the Rectors to shop. She and her mother drove Cadillacs, Lincolns, and Rolls-Royces, racing around the city and earning Sarah speeding tickets. She threw grand parties at her home for leading members of the nation’s African-American community, including jazz celebrities.
Sarah lost a great deal of money following the Wall Street crash of 1929, particularly because the year before she and her husband had created a car dealership that went bust. After her divorce, she married William Crawford, a restaurant owner, in 1934. Sarah Rector died on July 22, 1967, at the age of sixty-five, from a cerebral hemorrhage. She was buried in Taft Cemetery in her hometown.
Another woman who rose from slavery to remarkable success was Biddy Mason, believed to have been born on August 15, 1818, in Hancock County, Georgia. Born into slavery, she was named Bridget at birth but became known as Biddy. In her youth, she was separated from her parents and sold to a Georgia plantation owner named Robert Smithson. Over the years, she learned much about agriculture, folk medicine brought from Africa, and the skills of a midwife.
In 1836, she was either given away as a wedding present or sold to Robert and Rebecca Smith, a young couple with a plantation in Mississippi. She spent the next ten years there, during which time she had three daughters: Ellen, born in 1838, and two others in 1844 and 1847. In 1847, Mormon missionaries arrived in Mississippi, and Robert Smith converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He decided to move to Utah, taking his family and slaves with him, including Biddy and her daughters.
During the journey, Biddy’s medical skills proved useful, and she was an integral member of the convoy. When they arrived in Utah, the Smiths settled at Cottonwood, near Salt Lake City. The Church of Latter-day Saints was not an abolitionist denomination, and slavery was allowed in Salt Lake City and surrounding settlements. However, in 1851, Brigham Young decided to establish a church presence in California, which had been admitted to the Union as a free state.
He sent missionaries to San Bernardino and instructed them that anyone who brought slaves with them from Utah to California would effectively be granting them freedom. Robert Smith joined this mission, taking his family and slaves with him. Upon arriving in California, Smith did not set his slaves free, and many enslaved people like Biddy were unaware they were entitled to freedom upon entering the state. In 1855, one of Biddy’s daughters began seeing a free black man named Charles Owens.
It was from Owens that Biddy learned California law had banned slavery and that she had the right to appeal against her and her daughters’ continued enslavement. Owens helped her file a petition in the Los Angeles County Court. Robert Smith failed to appear, and a decision was made to grant Biddy and her three daughters their freedom in line with California law. The case was adjourned in January 1856, when Biddy was around thirty-eight years old.
Upon winning her freedom, Biddy took the name Mason, the middle name of a Mormon in San Bernardino for whom she had worked. She and her daughters went to live with the Owens family, and her daughter Ellen soon married Charles Owens. Biddy secured work as a nurse, putting her medical skills to good use. As California was ravaged by a smallpox outbreak in the late 1850s and early 1860s, her skills as a midwife were constantly in demand.
She lived frugally and saved her money. By 1866, she had saved enough to buy a house on Spring Street in Los Angeles for two hundred fifty dollars. She became one of the first black women to own property in California. She continued to buy cheap real estate on the edges of the city and sold it a few years later for a handsome profit as property values rose.
By the early 1880s, she had accumulated considerable wealth and began erecting commercial buildings in the city, which she rented out as office spaces. By the late 1880s, Biddy Mason, the woman born as a slave in Georgia seventy years earlier, had accumulated a fortune estimated at about three hundred thousand dollars. Her activities extended beyond business. In 1872, she and her son-in-law founded the Los Angeles branch of the first African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first African-American church in Los Angeles.
The land on which the church was constructed was donated directly by her. She is also widely regarded for her philanthropy, playing a significant role in establishing the first elementary school in the city for African-American children and making considerable donations to local charities. She often visited jail inmates to see what could be done to provide them with legal aid. In the 1880s, when severe floods struck Los Angeles and thousands were left destitute, Biddy opened accounts in her name in several grocery stores and paid for the shopping of flood victims for many weeks.
In her later years, she turned her home into a mixture of an orphanage and a care home for the destitute. She became known within the African-American community as Grandma Mason. She died on January 15, 1891, at the age of seventy-three. She was buried in an unmarked grave at Evergreen Cemetery.
It was nearly a hundred years later that her contribution to early California history was recognized, when a large tombstone was erected over her grave in 1988. A year later, the California Afro-American Museum held an exhibit honoring her life and declared November 16, 1989, Biddy Mason Day. Today, Biddy Mason Memorial Park in Los Angeles is named in her honor. Another woman born into poverty and slavery who rose to become one of the most successful businesswomen in American history was Sarah Breedlove, known to history as Madame C.
J. Walker. Born on December 23, 1867, on a cotton plantation near Delta, Louisiana, she was the first member of her family to be born free. Her parents and five older siblings had been enslaved.
When she was six years old, her mother died, and a year later her father also died. She moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to live with her older sister and brother-in-law, and she began working as a domestic servant as young as ten. She received little education, the best being literacy lessons on Sundays at a local church. She disliked living with her sister because her brother-in-law mistreated her, and she married when she was just fourteen to escape his abuse.
Three years later, she had a daughter, Alielia, born on June 6, 1885. When Sarah was twenty, she became a widow. She took her daughter to St. Louis, where her brothers had established themselves as barbers, and found work as a laundress earning just over a dollar a day.
She became determined to give her daughter a formal education and began attending night school. Sarah started to experience hair loss, due to a variety of factors including harsh products, a poor diet, and a lack of hair washing. She began to experiment with hair care treatments and home remedies. In 1904, she was hired by Annie Turnbull Malone as a commission agent, selling products aimed at the African-American hair care market.
While working from her own home, she began to develop her own hair treatment products. In July 1905, she moved to Denver, Colorado, where she established herself as a hairdresser and retailer of cosmetic creams. Her former employer accused her of stealing her formula, but the mixture had been around for hundreds of years. In January 1906, she married a salesman named Charles Joseph Walker, and she became known as Madame C.
J. Walker. The couple promoted the business together, with Charles taking charge of advertising. One strategy Madame Walker used was door-to-door selling, and she taught other African-American women how to properly look after their hair.
Her daughter was put in charge of the mail order operation in Denver, while Madame Walker and her husband traveled throughout the South and Southeast giving demonstrations of the Walker method. The Walker method involved preparing the scalp with special lotions, custom-made pomade, and brushing the hair with iron combs. Her personal approach to sales won her loyal customers. Her saleswomen became known in many African-American communities throughout the states.
In 1908, Madame Walker and her husband moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she established a college to train hair culturists and opened a beauty parlor. Two years later, she set up a new headquarters in Indianapolis, purchasing a factory and building more hair salons and beauty schools. Her company, the Madame C. J.
Walker Manufacturing Company, became extremely successful. As the company expanded, she hired many women into key management positions, which was uncommon at the time. She also became a major philanthropist and activist. In 1912, she spoke at an annual gathering of the National Negro Business League, stating that she came from the cotton fields of the South, was promoted to the wash tub, then to the cook kitchen, and from there she promoted herself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.
In 1913, she donated a large amount of money to raise funds for the construction of a YMCA building in Indianapolis. She also created educational scholarships, donated money to elderly homes, and supported the NAACP and the National Conference on Lynching. In 1913, Madame Walker and her husband divorced, and she traveled to the Caribbean and parts of Latin America to promote her business. In 1916, she moved into a townhouse in Harlem, overseeing that the business was running smoothly.
By 1917, her company had trained nearly twenty thousand women. In 1917, she established the National Beauty Culturalists and Benevolent Association of Madame C. J. Walker Agents, and during World War One, she advocated for the establishment of a training camp for black army officers.
She joined the executive committee of the NAACP and was instrumental in organizing the silent protest parade, attended by around ten thousand African Americans to protest lynchings and violence. She donated five thousand dollars to the NAACP’s anti-lynching fund. Sarah Walker died in her mansion on May 25, 1919, from kidney failure and hypertension, aged just fifty-one. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
She was the richest African-American woman in the states, with a net worth estimated between half a million and a million dollars. In her will, she left one third of her estate to her daughter, while the rest was donated to various charities and institutions. Her daughter became president of the company and an important part of the Harlem Renaissance. The Madame Walker Theatre Center in Indianapolis was finally opened in 1927, and for decades it was an important cultural center for African Americans.
The woman who had given Sarah Breedlove her start, Annie Malone, was born as Annie Minerva Turnbo in Metropolis, Illinois, on August 9, 1877. Her parents had formerly been enslaved in Kentucky, and fled north to Illinois during the Civil War, with her father eventually joining the Union Army. Annie was the tenth of eleven children, and her parents died when she was young. She showed an interest in chemistry, but her education was cut short by her circumstances and frequent illness.
As a teenager, she moved to Peoria, where she worked for the first time as a hairdresser. By the early 1900s, she had developed enough knowledge to establish her own small business in the town of Lovejoy, Illinois, selling hair oils, hair straighteners, and other products. The turn of the century was a time of a burgeoning African-American middle class, especially in northern states like Illinois, and there was room for entrepreneurs like Annie to make a good living. It was when she moved to St.
Louis in 1902 that she began to meet with great success. The city was growing rapidly, and many African Americans were heading north from the segregated South as part of the Great Migration. She opened a shop on Market Street and began advertising her products in black neighborhoods and newspapers. She also managed to branch out into white neighborhoods by employing white salespeople.
Annie’s business flourished on the back of a specific product she had developed herself, which was good at straightening curly African-American hair without damaging the hair or scalp. Rather than relying on sales in her salon, she sold door-to-door in African-American neighborhoods. By the 1910s, she was one of the most successful businesswomen in the American Midwest. In 1917, she founded Poro College in St.
Louis, a cosmetology school and an offshoot of her beauty business. The complex consisted of business offices, the manufacturing operation for her products, classrooms, training centers, laboratories, an auditorium, dormitories, and a warehouse. It became the main center for production and shipping of her products, while also training women in cosmetics and hair care. This was a franchise business, with women training at Poro College before heading off to other parts of the country to start their own offshoots.
Poro College was integrated into the community and had a smoking parlor, cafeteria, dining rooms, a bakery, medical center, laundry services, an on-site seamstress, and an ice cream parlor. It was a forerunner of the kind of campuses built out in California many decades later. The college was enormously successful, training tens of thousands of young women during the 1920s, and it is estimated that it trained over seventy thousand women between the late 1910s and early 1940s. At its height, the college employed approximately one hundred seventy people, with franchise offshoots across North America, the Caribbean, South America, the Philippines, and parts of Africa.
By that time, Annie was a self-made millionaire. In 1926 alone, she paid forty thousand dollars in taxes, a huge sum that indicated the extent of her business empire. She became reputedly the first woman in Missouri to own a Rolls-Royce. Woman who had worked as agents for the business for five years were given an expensive service ring.
Annie Malone is known today as one of two African-American women who simultaneously became self-made millionaires in the interwar period by selling hair care products, the other being Madame C. J. Walker. Their stories are deeply intertwined.
Walker had been born a Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana in 1867, and like Annie, she was born to freed slaves, was orphaned at a young age, and moved to St. Louis, where in 1904 she began working for Annie. She continued for over a year before heading to Denver with her daughter and new husband Charles Walker. There Walker set up her own hair care business using a product very similar to that which Annie was selling, and her company became very successful.
Annie soon accused her former employee of stealing her ideas, but the charge never stuck, and Walker’s business continued to thrive. Walker refused to acknowledge Annie’s impact on her business and life, despite it being Malone who had trained her and laid the foundations for the industry. Annie acquired the Malone name in 1914, when she married Aaron E. Malone, a former school teacher who had become a door-to-door salesman of religious books.
The marriage was initially happy, and Aaron became involved in Annie’s business. But the marriage soured in the 1920s, and in 1927 Aaron filed for divorce, demanding half of her business as part of the settlement. The case generated much press attention, with Annie eventually settling for a payment of two hundred thousand dollars, which allowed her to maintain control of the company. She compensated for her domestic turmoil by investing her wealth in numerous philanthropic endeavors.
She made large donations to Howard University’s College of Medicine, and her most prolific philanthropy was in supporting the St. Louis African-American Orphans’ Home, to which she donated the equivalent of millions of dollars during the 1920s and 1930s, serving on the board of directors for much of that time. Following her divorce, Annie began relocating her business to Chicago and eventually moved there in the 1930s. She was wealthy enough to purchase an entire city block of property, but bleaker times followed.
Although Poro College survived the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, its business was greatly reduced, and this, combined with multiple lawsuits, ensured that she was cash-poor by the mid-1930s. She sold some of her properties in St. Louis to compensate and remained afloat. In 1939, the original Poro College building became the site of the first African-American law school in Missouri.
Annie lived out her last years in Chicago on South Parkway. She suffered a stroke in the late spring of 1957 and died shortly afterwards at Provident Hospital in the city, aged seventy-nine. Her role as one of the first self-made millionaires and great African-American philanthropists has been commemorated in numerous books, television shows, and a parade in St. Louis every year.
Notably, she features in a 2020 Netflix series called Self Made, based on the life of Madame C. J. Walker, in which Malone, described as a friend to all mankind, is portrayed as a villain. Another figure whose life was intimately linked to Madame C.
J. Walker’s rise was Walker’s daughter, A’Lelia Walker, born Lydia McWilliams on June 6, 1885, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Her mother, Sarah Breedlove, had been born into extreme poverty in rural Louisiana, the first member of her family to be born free. Her father, Moses McWilliams, died in 1887 when she was just two years old.
Lelia’s life story is intrinsically linked to her mother’s rise as a businesswoman. After her father’s death, she and her mother moved to St. Louis, where Sarah began learning about hair care. When the World’s Fair was held in St.
Louis in 1904, Sarah was hired as a saleswoman by Annie Malone. It was enough experience for Sarah to branch out on her own, and when she married Charles Joseph Walker, she began referring to herself as Madame C. J. Walker.
Lelia, who had spent time studying at Knoxville College in Tennessee, was placed in charge of a mail order operation in Denver. It was also around this time that she began referring to herself as A’Lelia Walker. By the early 1910s, the Madame C. J.
Walker Company was booming, and by the mid-1910s, the company employed thousands of salesmen countrywide, and Sarah had become a self-made millionaire. Lelia played a role in her mother’s business throughout these years, establishing the mail order center in Denver, moving to Pittsburgh to oversee the establishment of an office there, and then in the 1910s being placed in charge of the company’s sales on the east coast of America. Two five-story buildings on West 136th Street in Harlem were purchased and converted into the company’s headquarters in the city, with the first floor serving as a hair parlor, the second housing the A’Lelia College of Beauty Culture, and the third through fifth floors becoming their home and private space for entertaining. Her mother died on May 25, 1919, and A’Lelia became president of the company and a millionaire in her own right.
She did not take charge of the day-to-day running of the company, instead handing the management over to a team that ran it from the head office in Indianapolis. It was following her move to New York and her mother’s death that A’Lelia entered into the activity for which she is most acclaimed: her role as a patron of the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem had morphed into a predominantly African-American neighborhood during the Great Migration, and the 1920s witnessed a cultural and social revival of African-American writing, poetry, music, art, and fashion. Lelia used her considerable wealth to provide patronage to numerous figures, including the composer and singer John Rosamond Johnson, the poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and the performers Bert Williams and Florence Mills.
She turned part of her huge mansion in Harlem into a literary salon that hosted meetings and parties at which these figures interacted. Despite the several hundred invitations she issued for each event, hundreds more would arrive, and every corner of her apartment was filled with guests. Langston Hughes called her the joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s. These parties also led to considerable interaction between communities, as white poets and performers from Greenwich Village would attend.
In 1927, she refurbished a floor of her home and christened it the Dark Tower for holding further events. Her patronage extended to the wider community, and she became involved in numerous religious and community groups in Harlem, sitting on several committees charged with developing the area. Lelia traveled extensively during the 1920s. In 1921, she went on a four-month trip to Europe, visiting Nice, Monte Carlo, Paris, London, Naples, and Rome.
In 1922, she traveled to Africa, passing through Cairo before heading to Addis Ababa, the capital of the Empire of Abyssinia, one of the only countries on the continent not ruled by a European power. There she met with Ras Tafari, the ruler of the Empire and the future Emperor Haile Selassie, who in the 1920s was regent of the empress’s government. Leila was inspired by the native African state, and it influenced her to take a more active role in the Harlem Renaissance when she returned to America. Lelia was married three times.
Her first marriage to a hotel waiter named John Robinson was troubled, and the couple separated in 1911, though they did not finalize their divorce until 1914. Shortly after their informal separation, Lelia adopted a girl aged around fifteen named Fairy May Bryant, who took the name Mae Walker. In 1919, around the time she became president of the company, she married Wiley Wilson, a doctor, whom she divorced after a few years. In November 1923, she arranged for her daughter to marry Dr.
Gordon H. Jackson, the grandson of a wealthy Cincinnati coal merchant. She was willing to spend huge amounts on the event, totaling forty-two thousand dollars, and over nine thousand people attended the party at Walker’s Irvington mansion. Yet Mae was in love with someone else, and despite the marriage going ahead and a child being born, they divorced just a year later.
Lelia finalized her divorce with her second husband and married Dr. James Arthur Kennedy in 1926, but this union too ended in divorce early in 1931. Her sexuality has been a subject of discussion. Her salon in Harlem became a welcome environment during the late 1910s and 1920s for members of the LGBT community, and the sexual atmosphere at these events was as permissive as it could be in the 1920s.
This has led to considerable speculation that she herself was lesbian or bisexual, but there is little evidence to support this, and her three marriages suggest she was heterosexual. Lelia died relatively suddenly on August 17, 1931, at just forty-six years of age. The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by hypertension, a condition that had also contributed to her mother’s premature death. When her funeral was held several days later, thousands of Harlem residents attended what was effectively a large party.
She was buried at Woodland Cemetery in the Bronx, next to her mother. The poet Langston Hughes dubbed her death the end of the gay times in Harlem. Following her death, her daughter Mae took over the running of the Madame C. J.
Walker Company. It was a difficult time, as the Great Depression continued and sales plummeted, but Mae sold off some of her adopted mother’s assets and kept it afloat. The company closed its doors in 1981, but in 2020, Sundial Brands revived the brand name, partly in an effort to profit off the release of Self Made, the Netflix series charting the life of Madame C. J.
Walker, in which A’Lelia features as a major figure. In the show, she is in a romantic relationship with a character called Esther, but this was entirely made up by the showrunners. Thus in recent years, there has been much discussion of her life.