Sarah Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867, on a cotton plantation near Delta, Louisiana. Her parents, Owen and Minerva Breedlove, along with her five older siblings, had been born into slavery and worked on Robert W. Bernie’s Madison Parish plantation. By the time Sarah arrived, the family had gained their freedom and were working as sharecroppers.
Thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Sarah was born free, unlike the rest of her family. Her early life was marked by hardship. In 1872, her mother died, most likely from cholera, though the cause was never confirmed. Her father passed away just a year later.
At six years old, Sarah was an orphan. She went to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to live with her older sister Lavinia and her brother-in-law Jess Powell. By the age of ten, she was working as a domestic servant. Formal education was out of reach; the most she received was literacy lessons on Sundays at her local church.
She later reflected that they had little or no opportunity when she started out in life. Her brother-in-law treated her badly, and to escape the abuse, Sarah married at just fourteen. Three years later, in June 1885, she gave birth to a daughter, Allie Leah. By the time Sarah was twenty, she was a widow; her first husband, Moses McWilliams, died two years after their daughter’s birth.
Sarah took her daughter to St. Louis, where her brothers had established themselves as barbers. She found work as a laundress, earning just over a dollar a day. When she was not working, she sang in the choir of the St.
Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was determined to give her daughter a formal education and to become an educated woman herself, so she began attending night school. Around that time, Sarah started experiencing hair loss. The causes were varied: skin disorders, harsh products, a poor diet, and a lack of regular hair washing.
To improve her condition, she began experimenting with hair care treatments and home remedies. In 1894, she married a man named John Davies, but the marriage ended in divorce about nine years later. In 1904, she was hired by Annie Turnbo Malone as a commission agent, selling products aimed at the African American hair care market. While working for Malone, Sarah began developing her own hair treatment products.
Malone later accused her of stealing the formula, though the mixture had been in use for hundreds of years. In July 1905, at the age of thirty-seven, Sarah moved to Denver, Colorado. She continued working as a commission agent for a while, then quit when she established herself as a hairdresser and retailer of cosmetic creams. In January 1906, she married Charles Joseph Walker, a salesman she had known from her time in St.
Louis. From then on, she was known as Madam C. J. Walker.
The couple promoted the business together, with Charles taking charge of advertising. One of her key strategies was door-to-door selling, and she slowly taught other African American women how to properly care for their hair. In 1906, her daughter Alieia, now twenty-one, was put in charge of the mail order operation in Denver. Meanwhile, Madam Walker and her husband traveled through the South and Southeast, giving demonstrations of the Walker Method to expand the business.
The method involved preparing the scalp with special lotions, including shampoo and a custom-made pomade, and brushing the hair with iron combs. It promoted hair growth, improved the condition of the scalp, and made weak hair soft and strong. Though she faced competition, her personal approach to sales won her loyal customers. Her saleswomen, called Beauty Culturists or Walker Agents, were successful by emphasizing health, cleanliness, and loveliness, and they became known in African American communities across the country.
In 1908, Madam Walker and her husband moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There she established Lelia College to train hair culturists and opened a beauty parlor. She trained licensed sales agents in the Walker system, and her employees earned commissions that allowed them to become economically independent. Her daughter Alieia ran the day-to-day operations in Pittsburgh.
Two years later, Walker set up a new base of operations in Indianapolis, purchasing a factory and building more hair salons and beauty schools. By then, her company, the Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, was turning profits equivalent to several million dollars in today’s money.
Around this time, Alieia came up with the idea of establishing an office and beauty salon in New York City, recognizing the growth of the Harlem neighborhood. Within three years, Harlem became a thriving center of African American culture. As the company expanded, Walker increased her staff, placing many women in key management positions, something that was uncommon at the time. She also began to voice her opinions publicly, becoming a major philanthropist and activist working to improve the lives of women and African Americans.
In 1912, she spoke at an annual gathering of the National Business League, telling the audience: “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. 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.
I have built my own factory on my own ground. ”
A year later, she donated a large amount of money to help fund the construction of a YMCA building in Indianapolis. She also created educational scholarships, donated to elderly homes, and supported organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Conference on Lynching. From 1911 to 1919, the business boomed.
The company employed thousands of people, many of them women. In 1913, Madam Walker and Charles divorced. Around that time, she traveled to the Caribbean and parts of Latin America to promote her business, recruiting new beauty culturists and teaching them the Walker Method. In 1916, she returned from her promotional campaign and relocated once again, leaving the Indianapolis operations in the hands of her forewomen and moving into a new townhouse in Harlem.
From there, she oversaw the business. By 1917, her company had trained nearly twenty thousand women. Her employees wore a recognizable uniform of white shirts and black skirts. Her commission agents visited homes across the country offering her products, and heavy advertising in African American newspapers and magazines drove mass sales.
Yet Walker was not solely focused on making money. She taught other African Americans essential skills such as budgeting and how to start a business, encouraging them to become financially independent. In 1917, she established the National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association of Madame C. J.
Walker Agents. That year, the association held a conference where the women discussed business and commerce, with prizes awarded for the best sales figures and for those who had made large contributions to local charities. In May 1918, Walker moved into Villa Lewaro, her Italianate-style mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. The house cost $250,000 to build and was designed by Vertner Tandy, an accomplished African American architect.
While in New York, she gave lectures on the political, economic, and social issues facing the country. Throughout her life, she fought for the rights of African Americans. During World War I, 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, which drew around ten thousand African Americans to protest lynchings and violence.
She also donated $5,000, roughly seventy-five thousand dollars in today’s money, to the NAACP’s anti-lynching fund. Sarah Walker died at her mansion on May 25, 1919, from kidney failure and hypertension. She was fifty-one years old. A funeral service was held in her home, and she was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.
At the time of her death, she was the wealthiest African American woman in the United States. She had only recently become a millionaire; just two years earlier, she had said she was not yet one but hoped to become one soon in order to use that money for the good of others. Her net worth was estimated at between half a million and a million dollars. In her will, she left one-third of her estate to her daughter and donated the rest to various charities and institutions.
Her daughter Alieia Walker became president of the Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company and played an important part in the Harlem Renaissance. The Madame Walker Theatre Center in Indianapolis, which had begun construction before Walker’s death, finally opened in 1927 and served as an important cultural center for African Americans for decades.
The theater and her mansion, Villa Lewaro, were later listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1981, the Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company ceased operations.
In 1998, the U. S. Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor as part of its Black Heritage series, and later, Sundial Brands and Sephora launched a cosmetic line under the name Madam C. J.
Walker Beauty Culture, carrying her legacy forward.