The full-page advertisement on page 98 of our class reading of The Crisis (Volume 16 Number 2) can seem easy to overlook as merely an advertisement for beauty products. However, the woman behind this ad was a major player in American civil rights history.
Madame C. J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, was America's first female self-made millionaire (her 1919 obituary in The New York Times called her "New York's wealthiest Negress") and a major contributor to numerous charities focused on supporting African Americans.
Walker was born on December 23,1867, to recently-freed slaves working as sharecroppers in Delta, Louisiana. Orphaned at age 7, she worked with her sister to pick cotten in both Delta and Vicksburg, Mississippi.
After her husband, Moses McWilliams, died in 1887, Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia, moved to St. Louis, where her brothers ran a barber shop. Working as a washer woman for $1.50 a day (about $37.90 today), Walker paid her daughter's way in local public schools.
However, during the 1890s Walker developed a scalp disease. Exacerbated by lack of indoor plumbing and contemporary irregular bathing practices, she like many women started to go bald. After conferring with her brothers and experimenting with home remedies, Walker created her own formula to fight her condition.
Around this time, Walker was commissioned as a sales representative for Annie Turnbo Malone, a black businesswoman who sold shampoos and hair irons. After spending some time working for Malone in Denver, she recruited the help of her new husband, ad man Charles J. Walker, to help advertise her salves under the name "Madame C. J. Walker." This enterprise became very successful; in fact, her business is still operating today.
After settling her headquarters and factory in Indianapolis, she and her daughter moved to Harlem to run the New York branch. It is at this time that Walker became much more active in the Civil Rights movement. In addition to donating a hefty $1,000 to the creation of a YMCA in the black community within Indianapolis, she supported the Tuskeegee Institute as well as smaller colleges, businesses, and orphanes serving African Americans; before her death in 1919, she donated $5,000 (about a million dollars today) to the NAACP.
Walker also took a very active role in the WWI-era Civil Rights movment. After being consistently ignored by Booker T. Washington during 1912's conference of the National Negro Business League (NNBL), Walker stood in her seat and vocally called him out for ignoring her rags-to-riches story, which greatly aligned with his message of African Americans working for respect and wealth. In 1913, she was the keynote speaker for the conference. When a white mob in Indianapolis murdered three dozen black citizens in St. Louis in 1917, Walker joined several Harlem leaders at a White House to present a petition for anti-lynching legislation.
In 1917, Walker retired to the home she built at Irving-on-the-Hudson, close to those of John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould. There, on May 25, 1919, Walker died of hypertension at age 51. She left about a third of her wealth to her daughter, and donated the rest to charities.