A Lelia Walker inherited a fortune built by her mother, Madam C. J. Walker, widely recognized as the first self-made female millionaire in American history. But A’Lelia did not simply guard that wealth.
She spent it on parties, poets, and patronage, and in doing so carved out her own place in the story of the Harlem Renaissance. She was born Lelia McWilliams on June 6, 1885, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Her mother, Sarah Breedlove, had been born into extreme poverty in rural Louisiana in 1867, the first member of her family born free after emancipation. Orphaned by age seven, Sarah worked as a domestic servant and married Moses McWilliams at fourteen.
Their only child, Lelia, arrived three years later. Moses died in 1887, when Lelia was just two, and he remained a shadowy figure in her life. Her mother later remarried twice, first to John Davis in 1894 and then to Charles Joseph Walker in 1906. After Moses’s death, mother and daughter moved to St.
Louis, where Sarah began learning about hair care in the 1890s, partly driven by her own struggles with dandruff and scalp ailments. In 1904, she was hired as a saleswoman by Annie Malone, a Black hair entrepreneur with a stand at the St. Louis World’s Fair. The experience was enough for Sarah to branch out on her own, and after marrying Charles Joseph Walker, she adopted his surname and began calling herself Madam C.
J. Walker. The business grew quickly. Sarah and her husband toured the southern states drumming up trade, while Lelia, who had spent time at Knoxville College in Tennessee, ran a mail-order operation in Denver, strategically located between the East and West coasts.
Around this time, she began calling herself A’Lelia Walker, adding an extra letter to her given name and taking her stepfather’s surname. By the mid-1910s, the company employed thousands of saleswomen across the country, and Sarah had become a self-made millionaire. A’Lelia helped expand the enterprise, moving to Pittsburgh to open an office there and later overseeing sales on the East Coast. In New York, the company purchased two five-story buildings on West 136th Street in Harlem.
The first floor became a hair parlor, the second housed the Lelia College of Beauty Culture for training saleswomen and groomers, and the upper floors became A’Lelia’s home and private entertaining space. Madam C. J. Walker died on May 25, 1919, from kidney failure at age fifty-one.
A’Lelia inherited the company and became a millionaire in her own right, a fortune equivalent to well over twenty million dollars today. But she did not take charge of the day-to-day running of the business. Management was handed to a team operating from the main office in Indianapolis, where the company’s distribution center had been built in 1917. A’Lelia remained president and the face of the brand, but turned her attention elsewhere.
Her most significant work came as a patron of the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem had once been a center of Dutch settlement, named for the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands, but by the early twentieth century it had become a predominantly African-American neighborhood as millions of Black Americans left the rural South during the Great Migration. By the 1920s, buoyed by the economic boom of the Roaring Twenties, Harlem was a flourishing community, and it witnessed an extraordinary revival of Black writing, poetry, music, art, and fashion. A’Lelia was not herself a significant artist, but she used her wealth to support the movement’s leading figures, including composer and singer John Rosamond Johnson, poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and performers Bert Williams and Florence Mills.
She turned part of her large Harlem mansion into a literary salon, hosting meetings and parties where these figures shared ideas and work. The events were glamorous and crowded, and she issued several hundred invitations for each gathering, yet hundreds more arrived anyway. Her apartment filled to the point that it was described as being as crowded as a New York subway during rush hour. Many seemed to enjoy the crush.
Hughes praised her as the joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s, though others, like writer Roy Ortley, described her more critically as a mahogany millionaire who spent money recklessly on outlandish clothes. The parties also drew white writers and performers from Greenwich Village, encouraging interaction across communities. In 1927, she refurbished a floor of her home and named it The Dark Tower, a dedicated space for further events. Her patronage extended beyond her own home.
She joined numerous religious and community groups in Harlem in the 1920s, sat on committees charged with developing the area, and was especially eager to promote women’s organizations. The Harlem Renaissance is generally credited with giving much of the African-American community a new sense of identity and pride, which contributed significantly to the Civil Rights Movement that would eventually end segregation in the 1950s and early 1960s. In helping sustain that cultural movement, A’Lelia made her own mark on American history. She also traveled extensively during the 1920s, seeking international ideas to bring back to Harlem.
In 1921, she spent four months in Europe, visiting Nice, Monte Carlo, Paris, London, Naples, and Rome. The following year, she made a more significant journey to Africa. She passed through Cairo and then traveled to Addis Ababa, the capital of the Empire of Abyssinia, present-day Ethiopia, one of the few African nations not ruled by a European power. There she met Empress Zewditu and the future Emperor Haile Selassie, who was then regent.
Like many visitors before her, A’Lelia was inspired by the independent African state, and the trip influenced her to take a more active role in the Harlem Renaissance upon her return. Her personal life was eventful and often complicated. She married three times. Her first husband was a hotel waiter named John Robinson, whom she wed in the mid-1900s, though the exact date is unclear.
The marriage was troubled, and the couple separated in 1911, though their divorce was not finalized until 1914. Around the time of the separation, A’Lelia adopted a teenager named Fairy Mae Bryant, who took the name Mae Walker. Mae was her only daughter; A’Lelia never had biological children. In 1919, around the time she became president of the Walker company, she married Dr.
Wiley Wilson, a physician, though the marriage ended in divorce after a few years. In November 1923, while going through that divorce, A’Lelia arranged for her daughter to marry Dr. Gordon H. Jackson, grandson of a wealthy Cincinnati coal merchant.
As with many socialites of the time, it was a chance to unite two distinguished families, and A’Lelia was willing to spend heavily on the event, spending forty-two thousand dollars, about six hundred thousand today. The wedding was dubbed Harlem’s social event of the season, with over nine thousand people attending the party at her Irvington mansion, Villa Lewaro. There was one major problem: Mae was in love with someone else. The marriage went ahead and produced a child, but the couple divorced just a year later.
A’Lelia soon remarried as well, wedding Dr. James Arthur Kennedy in 1926, though that union also ended in divorce in early 1931. Questions have often been raised about her sexuality. Her Harlem salon became a welcoming environment for members of the LGBT community during the late 1910s and 1920s, and several prominent figures who attended her parties described the sexual atmosphere as permissive as it could be in that era.
This has led to speculation that she was lesbian or bisexual, speculation that increased after her portrayal in the Netflix series Self Made, which showed her in a romantic relationship with a fictional character. But that storyline was entirely invented, and there is little evidence to support it. Her three marriages, each following quickly after the previous divorce, suggest she was heterosexual, though her views on sexuality were entirely liberal. A’Lelia Walker died suddenly on August 17, 1931, at just forty-six years old.
The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by hypertension, a condition that had also contributed to her mother’s premature death. Her funeral, held several days later on Seventh Avenue, was attended by thousands of Harlem residents and was effectively a large party. She was buried at Woodland Cemetery in the Bronx, next to her mother. Langston Hughes called her death the end of the gay times in Harlem.
After her death, her daughter Mae took over the running of the Madam C. J. Walker Company. It was a difficult period, as the Great Depression continued into the mid-1930s and sales plummeted.
Mae sold off some of her adopted mother’s assets and kept the business afloat, eventually passing it to her own daughter, A’Lelia Mae Perry Bundles, who became the fourth president of the once again profitable company. The company closed its doors in 1981, but the brand was revived in 2020 by Sundial Brands, partly to profit from the release of Self Made, the Netflix series about Madam C. J. Walker in which A’Lelia features as a major figure.
In recent years, her life has become the subject of renewed discussion, a fitting legacy for a woman who made her own mark by spending her mother’s fortune on the culture of her time.