But by 7, she was an orphan toiling in those same cotton fields. Now that Reconstruction, too, was dead in the South, Sarah moved north to St.
In , Sarah tried marrying again, but her second husband, John Davis, was less than reliable, and he was unfaithful. At 35, her life remained anything but certain. Who is going to take care of your little girl? As a result, Sarah and many other women were going bald because they washed their hair so infrequently, leaving it vulnerable to environmental hazards such as pollution, bacteria and lice.
Louis Clarion. A little context and review: Along the indelible color line that court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson drew, blacks in turn-of-the-century America were excluded from most trade unions and denied bank capital, resulting in trapped lives as sharecroppers or menial, low-wage earners.
One of the only ways out, as my colleague Nancy Koehn and others reveal in their study of Walker, was to start a business in a market segmented by Jim Crow. Hair care and cosmetics fit the bill. She created a union for her workers "The Madam C.
Walker Hair Culturist Union of America. During World War I, Walker traveled around the country delivering motivational speeches to African-American troops about the importance they played in the defense of the nation. Booker T. Washington was so impressed with this gift from a black woman , that he attended the dedication of this building. She also led a campaign to save the home of Frederick Douglass.
She worked for women's clubs around the nation. Madam C. Walker served as a role model. Living by the motto of hard work and self-help, she achieved greatness. Walker once said, "If I have accomplished anything in life it is because I have been willing to work hard. As a successful businesswoman, she felt it her duty to give back to the community.
From washerwoman to millionaire, Walker set an example for future generations of women to pursue their dreams and to improve their situations for themselves and for their people. Lelia College, Madam C. Mary McLeod Bethune, W. Ransom, Booker T. Bernikow, Louise. New York: Berkley Books, Brooklyn: Carlson, Orange, NJ: Just Books, Gaymon, Gloria Leaks. Philadelphia: Nationwide Publishers, Indianapolis: Purdue Research Foundation, Hine, Darlene Clark and Kathleen Thompson.
New York: Broadway Books, Jessie Carney Smith, ed. Notable Black Women. Detroit: Gale Research, Plowden, Martha Ward. Walker, who worked in advertising and would later help promote her hair care business. During the s, Sarah developed a scalp disorder that caused her to lose much of her hair, and she began to experiment with both home remedies and store-bought hair care treatments in an attempt to improve her condition.
In , she was hired as a commission agent by Annie Turnbo Malone — a successful, Black, hair-care product entrepreneur — and she moved to Denver, Colorado. While there, Sarah's husband, Charles, helped her create advertisements for a hair care treatment for African Americans that she was perfecting. Her husband also encouraged her to use the more recognizable name "Madam C. Walker," by which she was thereafter known. In Walker and her husband traveled around the South and Southeast promoting her products and giving lecture demonstrations of her "Walker Method" — involving her own formula for pomade, brushing and the use of heated combs.
As profits continued to grow, in Walker opened a factory and a beauty school in Pittsburgh, and by , when Walker transferred her business operations to Indianapolis, the Madam C. Walker Manufacturing Company had become wildly successful, with profits that were the modern-day equivalent of several million dollars.
In Indianapolis, the company not only manufactured cosmetics but also trained sales beauticians. In turn, they promoted Walker's philosophy of "cleanliness and loveliness" as a means of advancing the status of African Americans. A relentless innovator, Walker organized clubs and conventions for her representatives, which recognized not only successful sales, but also philanthropic and educational efforts among African Americans. In , Walker and Charles divorced, and she traveled throughout Latin America and the Caribbean promoting her business and recruiting others to teach her hair care methods.
While her mother traveled, A'Lelia helped facilitate the purchase of property in Harlem, New York, recognizing that the area would be an important base for future business operations.
Her neighbors were such noteworthy tycoons as J. Rockefeller and Jay Gould. She was quick to help the poor and to position herself as an activist, championing black rights. And she was quite formidable. Once, she even faced off against a stubborn Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, not backing down after he blocked her from speaking at the National Negro Business League. Three other male cosmetics entrepreneurs had opportunities to speak, but Walker did not. I feel that I am in business that is a credit to the womanhood of our race.
Washington showed no reaction to her speech, but the following year, she was a scheduled speaker at the annual meeting. By now, she was a force to be reckoned with in early 20th-century America.
As a business person, with resources she was setting an example for other businesses and people with resources to be that engaged. I know that she encouraged her agents at [sales] conventions to be engaged as well. As her business grew, her philanthropic and political activism also surged. Uneducated herself, Madam Walker made the support of African-American secondary schools and colleges, a prominent part of her generous donations, particularly in the South.
She also became active in social service organizations, and to promote equal rights, she worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Conference on Lynching.
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