Annie Malone was one of the first American women to build a fortune entirely on her own, and some accounts say she was the first of any background to do so. Yet today her name is largely forgotten, overshadowed by one of her former employees, a woman whose name became legendary: Madam C. J. Walker.
Born Annie Minerva Turnbo in the small town of Metropolis, Illinois, on August 9, 1877, she came into the world as the tenth of eleven children. Some records incorrectly list her birth year as 1869. Her parents, Robert Turnbo and Isabella Cook, had been enslaved in Kentucky. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, they fled north to Illinois, and Robert eventually joined the Union Army as part of the First Kentucky Cavalry.
Annie was orphaned while still young, and although she received some formal education and showed a strong interest in science, particularly chemistry, her schooling was cut short by her circumstances and frequent illness. In the early 1890s, still a teenager, she moved to Peoria, Illinois, where her older sister Laura Roberts lived. There she first worked as a hairdresser and became interested in beauty products and hairstyling at a moment when new chemicals and products were transforming how people cared for their hair. By the early 1900s, in her mid-twenties, she had gained enough knowledge to establish her own small business in Lovejoy, Illinois, where she moved in the late 1890s.
She began selling hair oils, straightening preparations, and a wide range of products that she claimed stimulated hair growth or treated alopecia. Her small enterprise succeeded because of changing social conditions. The turn of the century saw the growth of an African American middle class, particularly in northern states like Illinois, where Jim Crow segregation laws did not apply. Many African American women wanted to care for their hair in ways that affirmed their social aspirations and standing.
That created room for entrepreneurs like Turnbo to earn a respectable living selling hair care and beauty products aimed specifically at Black women. Her move to St. Louis in 1902 was the real launch of her success. The city had grown from about 100,000 people in the mid-nineteenth century to nearly 700,000 by 1910, many of them African Americans heading north from the segregated South as part of the Great Migration.
The market was enormous. She opened a shop on Market Street and advertised her products and services in Black neighborhoods and newspapers. She even expanded into white neighborhoods by hiring white salespeople. Her business thrived because of one specific product she developed herself: an effective straightener for the tightly curled hair of African Americans.
Unlike other products of the time, it did not damage the hair or scalp, and it became very popular with her customers. She did not rely on selling through barbershops alone. She went door to door through African American neighborhoods, selling directly to women. The success was enough that she hired others to help as part of a growing sales team.
By the 1910s, she had become one of the most successful businesswomen in the American Midwest. In 1917, she founded Poro College in St. Louis, a beauty school that served as both a branch of her beauty business and a way to empower African American women. The Poro College complex was enormous, containing her business offices, product manufacturing operations, classrooms, training centers for employees, laboratories, a conference hall, dormitories, guest rooms, and a warehouse and shipping center.
It became the headquarters for producing and shipping her hair care and beauty products, and it trained women in her cosmetics and hair treatments. The operation worked as a franchise system: women came to Poro College to train, then went to other parts of the country to start their own Poro branches. Malone was ahead of her time in making Poro College a place where workers received the best services available. Beyond being a community service center, the college included a smoking room, a cafeteria, dining rooms, a bakery, a medical center, laundry services, tailoring, an ice cream parlor, a gymnasium, and a rooftop garden.
It was a prototype for the kind of campuses that companies like Apple and Google would create decades later in California. Poro College was a tremendous success as a franchise. During the 1920s, it trained tens of thousands of young women in the basics of beauty and hair care. They returned to their cities and towns as brand ambassadors, often stocking Malone’s beauty and hair care products in their salons for years.
In total, Poro College is estimated to have trained more than 70,000 women between the late 1910s and early 1940s. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the St. Louis location employed about 170 people. Eventually, Poro branches spread across North America and reached as far as the Caribbean, South America, the Philippines, and parts of Africa.
By that time, Malone was a self-made millionaire. In 1926 alone, she paid $40,000 in taxes, equivalent to about three-quarters of a million dollars today. Although she lived frugally overall, she spent lavishly on one status symbol: she was said to be the first woman in Missouri to own a Rolls-Royce. She also used her wealth in ways that motivated her workforce, such as giving expensive service rings to women who worked as agents for the company for five years.
Today Malone is recognized as one of two African American women who became self-made millionaires in the interwar period by selling hair care and beauty products. The other was Madam C. J. Walker, and their stories were deeply intertwined.
Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana in 1867. Like Malone, she was born to freed enslaved parents and was orphaned young. As a young woman, she too moved to St. Louis, and in 1904 she began working for Malone.
She stayed in that position for more than a year before leaving for Denver, Colorado, with her daughter and new husband, Charles Walker. In Colorado, Walker established her own hair care business using a product very similar to what Malone sold in St. Louis, a mixture of petroleum jelly, sulfur, and other ingredients to straighten very curly hair. The Madam C.
J. Walker Company became extremely successful, and much of its business model mirrored Malone’s in St. Louis. Unsurprisingly, Malone accused her former employee of stealing her ideas and intellectual property.
The accusation was never proven, and Walker’s business continued to flourish. During the 1910s and 1920s, both companies became multimillion-dollar enterprises, but Walker’s was more successful and remains far better remembered today. Walker refused to acknowledge Malone’s influence on her work and life, even though Malone was the one who trained her and laid the foundations of the industry. Malone’s relative obscurity can be traced to her marital affairs.
She first married Nelson Pope on June 25, 1902, shortly after moving to St. Louis. Little is known about the marriage except that it was not successful, and the couple divorced in 1907. She then lived with her brother William for several years on Pine Street in St.
Louis. She gained the name Malone in 1914 when she married Aaron E. Malone, a former schoolteacher who had changed careers to become a traveling salesman of religious books. This second marriage was happy at first, and in the following years Aaron became involved in her business, manufacturing her hair tonic until the late 1910s.
But things soured in the 1920s, perhaps because Annie spent long periods traveling as her business empire grew. In 1927, Aaron filed for divorce, demanding half her business in the settlement and claiming he had helped build it. The case attracted significant media attention in St. Louis.
Malone eventually settled by paying him $200,000, a large sum in the mid-1920s, but the payment allowed her to keep sole control of her company. Despite her troubled marital life, she compensated by investing her wealth in many charitable efforts during the 1920s and 1930s. She made significant donations to the Howard University Medical School, a historically Black research institution in Washington, D. C.
Years later, the school repaid the favor by granting her an honorary degree. But her most extensive charity, close to her heart because of her own orphaned childhood, was her support for an African American orphanage in St. Louis. She donated millions of dollars in today’s terms during the 1920s and 1930s and served on its board for nearly that entire period.
After her divorce in 1927, she began moving her business to Chicago, and she eventually moved there herself in the 1930s. Her wealth at that point was such that she was able to buy an entire apartment complex in the city. But darker times followed. Although Poro College survived the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, her business shrank considerably during most of the 1930s.
Combined with multiple lawsuits from individuals trying to claim part of her fortune, she suffered from liquidity problems by the mid-1930s. She sold some of her properties in St. Louis to offset losses and stay afloat. In 1939, the original Poro College building on Fern Avenue in St.
Louis became the home of the first African American law school in Missouri. By then, Malone had greatly reduced her involvement in the business, which had always operated as a franchise, and she began a new life outside her company in the late 1930s and beyond. She spent her final days in Chicago on South Parkway. She suffered a stroke there in late spring 1957 and died shortly afterward at the city’s Provident Hospital at the age of 79.
Today, her role as one of the first self-made female millionaires and one of the most significant African American philanthropists is commemorated in books, television programs, and an annual march in St. Louis honoring her charitable work for orphanages and children’s institutions in the city. In 2020, she was featured in the Netflix series Self Made, which is based on the life of Madam C. J.
Walker. The portrayal sparked backlash because Malone, described as a friend to all humanity, was depicted as a villain in the production. The historical record tells a different story, one of a pioneering businesswoman whose legacy was largely eclipsed by the very person she once trained.