Madame C.J. Walker

In 1905 Sarah Breedlove developed a conditioning treatment for straightening hair. Starting with door-to-door sales of her cosmetics, Madame C.J. Walker amassed a fortune. In 1910 she built a factory in Indianapolis to manufacture her line of cosmetics. Before her death in 1919 she was a millionaire, one of the most successful business executives in the early half of the twentieth century.

One of the first American women of any race or rank to become a millionaire through her own efforts was Sarah Breedlove Walker. Sarah Breedlove was born in 1867 to Minerva and Owen Breedlove on the shores of the Mississippi River in northeast Louisiana. Sarah's parents, both ex-slaves, were sharecroppers who lived on the Burney plantation in Delta, Louisiana. "Madam Walker always said in her public speeches that she was 'orphaned at seven.' Her mother died first. Her father remarried and apparently died before she turn eight in December, 1875. Source: Bundles" Because of her impoverished background she had only a limited formal education. She was married to a Mr. McWilliams at fourteen, "to get a home" (as described by Walker herself), and had a daughter, A'Lelia, in 1885. Widowed at twenty in 1887, Sarah and her daughter moved from Vicksburg to St. Louis, Missouri. For eighteen years, from 1887-1905, she supported herself and her daughter by work as a washerwoman.

While in St. Louis in 1905, Walker said she had an idea to begin a cosmetics business. "Madam Walker's treatment did not straighten hair. Her treatment was designed to heal scalp disease through more frequent shampooing. massage and the application of an ointment consisting of petrolatum and a medicinal sulfur. Madam Walker did use a hot comb--which she did NOT invent--in her system, but she was by no means the first person to employ such methods. In fact, Marcel Grateau, a Parisian, was using heated metal hair care implements as early as 1872, and hot combs were available in Sears and Bloomingdale's catalogues in the 1890s, presumably designed for white women."
Source: Bundles


Before this time, African American women who wanted to de-kink their hair had to place it on a flat surface and press it with a flat iron. She invented her hair softener for use with a straightening comb. Mixing her soaps and ointments in washtubs and kitchen utensils, while adapting the existing hairdressing techniques and modifying curling tools. She added the prefix Madame to her name and took to the road, soon demonstrated her excellent marketing skills to sell her hair products door-to-door.

About The Walker System
The elements of the System were a shampoo, a pomade "hair-grower", vigorous brushing, and the application of heated iron combs to the hair. The "method" transformed stubborn, lusterless hair into shining smoothness. The Madame C. J. Walker manufacturing Company employed principally women who, before the years that preceded the national growth of beauty shops in the United States, carried their treatments to the home. Known as "Walker Agents," they became familiar figures throughout the United States and Caribbean where they made their "house calls", always dressed in the characteristic white shirtwaists tucked into long black skirts and carrying the black satchels, containing preparations and combing apparatus necessary for dressing hair. The most important of the preparations demonstrated was Madame C.J. Walker's Hair Grower. Sales of the Pomade and a collection of sixteen other beauty products, many packaged decoratively in tin containers who carried the portrait of Madame Walker, accompanied by heavy advertising in mainly Negro newspapers and magazines and her own frequent instructional tours, made Madame Walker one of the best known African American women in the country by the 1920's. Her fame spread to Europe, where the Walker System coiffure of dancer Josephine Baker so fascinated Parisians in the 1920's that a French company produced a comparable pomade, calling it Baker-Fix. In the United States, the business activity of Madame Walker was emulated by other Negro women, with successful women including Mrs. Annie M. Turnbo Malone (with her "Poro System" and the "Poro Colleges" in St. Louis and Chicago) and Madame Sarah Spencer Washington (with her Apex System headquartered in Atlantic City.)

One editorialist commented in 1919 that it was a "noteworthy fact that the largest and most lucrative business enterprises conducted by colored people in America have been launched by women -- namely Madame Walker and Mrs. Malone." (Stussy) Annie Malone preceded Madam Walker in business. In fact, Madam Walker worked for a short time in 1905 as a Malone sales agent before she started her own business. Bundles

Encouraged by success in St. Louis selling her cosmetic products and method, she moved to Denver, Colorado in July, 1905. Her brother had been dead for some time. She joined her widowed sister-in-law and nieces, who had been in Denver prior to 1900. Bundles Six months later she married a newspaperman, Charles J. Walker. She kept the name even after business differences ended the marriage. Proceeding door-to-door, she demonstrated her method to the women of Denver. Sarah developed what was to become known as The Walker Method or The Walker System She attracted not only clients for her products but agent-operators; she called then "hair culturists," "scalp specialists," and "beauty culturists" rather than "hair straighteners" (a term used by others). With the agent-operators conducting sales, Sarah concentrated her efforts on the instruction of her methods and on the manufacture of the products.

"Madam Walker established her business in Denver in July, 1905. By September 1906 she had left Denver in care of her daughter, Lelia, and begun to travel throughout the South promoting her products" Bundles, giving lectures and demonstrations of her products to homes, clubs, and churches. Her success in the increasing business saw her organize a second office in Pittsburgh in 1908, which her daughter A'Lelia managed.

In 1910 transferred operations from the Denver and Pittsburgh offices to a new headquarters in Indianapolis, where a plant was constructed to serve as center of the Walker enterprises. The company was the Walker College of Hair Culture and Walker Manufacturing Company (note: "The original Mme. C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company was sold by the trustees of the Walker estate in 1985 and is no longer in business. The purchasers of the company name were based at one time in Tuskegee, Alabama. They have since moved their company back to Indianapolis and apparently are a small concern with limited distribution of hair care products." Bundles). In 1906 Walker turned the mail order business to her daughter who used Pittsburgh as headquarters for Walker College, for training "hair culturists".

The Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, of which Madame Walker was president and sole owner, provided employment for some three thousand persons. ["The estimates of the number of people employed by Madam Walker varies widely. In her factory and office there were usually somewhere between fifteen and thirty employees. Her sales force, a multi-level sales operation, had, by her claim, in 1919, more than 20,000 agents." Bundles] Overnight she found herself in business, with assistants, agents, schools, and a manufacturing company. Madame Walker's daughter purchased a townhouse in Harlem in 1913 and Madame Waker moved to New York in 1916.

A generous donor to black charities, Walker encouraged her agents to support black philanthropic work. She made the single largest donation to the successful 1918 effort by the National Association of Colored Women to purchase the home of Frederick Douglass so it could be preserved as a museum. She contributed generously to the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), to homes for the aged in St. Louis and Indianapolis, to needy in Indianapolis (especially during Christmas time), and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) of Indianapolis. She funded scholarships for young women and men [Bundles] at Tuskegee Institute and contributed to Palmer Memorial Institute, a private secondary school for blacks in Sedalia, North Caroline, founded by her close friend Charlotte Hawkins Brown. Walker organized her agents into "Walker Clubs" in 1916, in preparation for her 1917 convention, and gave cash prizes to the clubs that did the largest amount of community philanthropic work. At the annual convention of Walker agents she always gave prizes most to the most generous local affiliate [Bundles].

Walker required her agents to sign contracts specifying not only the exclusive use of her company's products and methods, but binding them also to a hygienic regimen which anticipated the practices into state cosmetology laws. In frequent visits and communications to her agents she preached "cleanliness and loveliness" as assets and aids to self-respect and racial advance. An editorial of 1919 in Crisis (the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) judged that Madame Walker had influenced in her lifetime a revolution of "personal habits and appearance of millions of human beings."

Madame Walker constantly made headlines, both with her business and her social activities. Her personal possessions amounted to a value of a million dollars and included extensive real estate holdings. In 1914 she moved to New York and built a $90,000 Indiana limestone townhouse at 108-110 West 136th Street . In its sitting rooms and dining halls, in the years following Sarah Walker's death, her daughter, now Mrs. A'Lelia Walker Robinson Wilson Kennedy, presided over a salon known as "The Dark Tower", where talented Negro authors, musicians, and artists met influential white intellectuals. [The "Dark Tower" was located on one floor of the 136th Street townhouse for about one year from October, 1927 to October, 1928....] Bundles

A "Who's Who" of African American history entered her doors. In attendance were publishers, critics, and potential patrons, who helped to stimulate the "Harlem Renaissance" in the arts during the 1920's. A'Lelia's crowning social event was the glamorous "Million Dollar Wedding" (actually $40,000) of adopted daughter Mae Walker Perry at St. Phillips in New York City. In 1917 Madame Walker built an Italianate neo-Palladian-style country home designed by the first registered black architect in New York Vertner Woodson Tandy at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. The villa, a $250,000 mansion, was named by noted tenor Enrico Caruso, who combined the initial syllables of A'Lelia Walker Robinson's name. The twenty room mansion was furnished at a price of nearly $100,000 . Walker furnished it with a 24-carat gold-plated piano and phonograph, a $15,000 pipe organ that gently awoke house guests, Hepplewhite furniture, Persian rugs, many huge oil paintings, and two Japanese prayer trees imported at a cost of over $10,000.

Warned by physicians at the Kellogg Clinic at Battle Creek, Michigan, that her hypertension required a reduction of her activities, Madame Walker nevertheless continued her busy schedule. She became ill while in St. Louis and was moved back to New York, where she died on May 25, 1919 of chronic interstitial nephritis, kidney failure and hypertension at the Villa Lewaro estate. Despite her impoverished beginnings, Madame Walker achieved notable business success. Funeral services were conducted at the villa by the pastor of her church, the Mother Zion African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church of New York, and she was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The estate went to A'Lelia Walker Robinson Wilson. A'Lelia Walker closed "Dark Tower", a cafe/salon at her 136th Street townhouse, in 1928. In 1930 she was forced to auction off some of the contents of Villa Lewaro because of the Depression's impact on company sales, the cost of taxes and upkeep, and because she rarely spent time there [Bundles]. Shortly before she died in 1919, Madam Walker pledged $5,000 to the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign. At the time, it was the largest gift the ten year old organization had ever received. Madam Walker's will stipulated that Villa Lewaro should be donated to the NAACP after her daughter's death. But when A'Lelia Walker died in 1931 in the midst of the Depression, the NAACP declined the house because of the upkeep and taxes. Instead, the small proceeds from the sale to Annie Poth were donated to the NAACP. Several generations of the Walker family continue the business she established.

  "To make certain the gifts continue, two-thirds of the company stock is owned by five Negro trustees named by Madame Walker for the benefit of certain charities enunciated in the will." The trustees of the estate were (all now deceased): Robert Lee Brokenburr, Willard B. Ransom, Violet D. Reynolds, Faburn E. DeFrantz, and Marion R. Perry (who is also the treasurer of the company). As provided by A'Lelia's will, the remaining third is divided equally between A'Lelia E. Ransom and A'Lelia Mae Perry (the great granddaughter of Madam Walker). "A'Lelia Mae Perry (Bundles), who is now deceased, and A'Lelia E. Ransom did receive shares of stock. That stock was eliminated at the time of the sale of the company in 1985" [Bundles].


To raise money for the organization during the Depression period in the 1930's, the NAACP sold the Villa Lewaro in 1932 to a fraternal organization, the Companions of the Forest in America. In 1950 the building housed the Annie Poth Home for the Aged. In 1976, Villa Lewaro was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Among the other properties left by the manufacturess is a five-story million dollar plant in Indianapolis, The Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company Building. The block-square building also houses a Greek-style theater, lunchroom, drugstore, beauty parlor, and private offices.

Works about Madame C.J. Walker


MADAM C. J. WALKER (1867-1919)
Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, Social Activist

"Welcome to the Madam C.J. Walker homepage, the best source on the Internet for accurate information about this entrepreneur, hair care industry pioneer, philanthropist and social activist. This site is owned and maintained by A'Lelia P. Bundles the great-great-granddaughter and biographer of Madam C.J. Walker. " Source: http://www.madamecjwalker.com/

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