MADAM C. J. WALKER

1867–1919

African American businesswoman, activist, and philanthropist Madam C. J. Walker built an empire selling her hair products to black women against a backdrop of early 20th-century racial inequality. She also provided work opportunities for thousands of women of color while supporting many African American causes.

Sarah Breedlove (she later took the name Walker after marrying her second husband) was born in Louisiana in 1867, but she moved to Missouri in 1889 following the death of her first husband. A single parent, she found work in a laundry. In the late 1890s, she began to suffer hair loss and sought products to help the condition. One such treatment was made by entrepreneur Annie Turnbo Malone. Seeing an opportunity, Breedlove began selling Malone’s products door-to-door and then created her own formula using petroleum jelly and sulfur.

Breedlove moved to Colorado in 1905 with her daughter and married Charles Joseph Walker a year later. Restyling herself as Madam C. J. Walker, she established a successful line of hair-care products designed for black women and developed methods of application and grooming. Recruiting black women through connections with local churches (where she would personally demonstrate her products), she built a network of door-to-door sales agents and set up a mail-order service. Walker gradually expanded her business into the Caribbean and Central America, and her business model gave thousands of black women the opportunity to work for themselves. Among Walker’s philanthropic activities was a donation of $1,000 toward the building of a YMCA in Indianapolis and in 1919, the year she died, a gift of $5,000 to an anti-lynching fund set up by the Advancement of Colored People.

Madam C. J. Walker’s face appeared on the lid of her bestselling product, Wonderful Hair Grower.