The First Self-Made Millionaire

In July 1912, a meeting of Black business leaders was held in Chicago. For two days, a woman in the audience waited to be invited to speak. She was never called.

On the last day, she stood up anyway. She told the hall that she had started out picking cotton in the fields of the South, that she had washed other people's laundry and cooked in their kitchens, and that she had built her own business, and her own factory, with her own hands.

Her name was Madam C. J. Walker. A few years earlier, she had been a washerwoman earning very little. Now she was one of the most successful businesswomen in America.

Born free, in a cotton field

She was born Sarah Breedlove on 23 December 1867, near Delta, Louisiana, on the same cotton plantation where her parents, Owen and Minerva, had been enslaved. Slavery had ended only two years before. Sarah was the first child in her family born into freedom.

But freedom did not mean safety or comfort. Her mother died when Sarah was very young, and her father soon after. By the age of seven she was an orphan.

She went to live with her older sister and her sister's husband across the river, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. She worked as a maid and had almost no schooling. At fourteen, partly to escape a cruel home, she married a man named Moses McWilliams. At seventeen she had a daughter, Lelia. When Sarah was about twenty, her husband died.

The washerwoman of St Louis

Sarah moved with her little girl to St Louis, where her brothers worked as barbers. She took in laundry, scrubbing other people's clothes over a hot tub of water all day, for very little pay.

She was determined that Lelia would have the education she never had, and she saved what she could to send her daughter to school. She joined a church, where she met women who showed her a life beyond survival.

Around this time, Sarah began to lose her hair. Many Black women at the time suffered the same problem. Few homes had indoor plumbing, harsh soaps were common, and illness and poor diet took their toll. Sarah tried remedies, and began working as a sales agent for another Black businesswoman, Annie Turnbo Malone, who made hair-care products.

Madam C. J. Walker

In 1905 Sarah moved to Denver, Colorado. There she began making her own scalp treatment, experimenting until she had something that worked for her. The next year she married Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper salesman, and began calling herself Madam C. J. Walker.

She did not have money for advertising or shops. So she went door to door, and from town to town, showing women how to use her products. She travelled through the South and the East for months at a time, speaking in churches and meeting halls.

As the business grew, she began training other women as "Walker agents". She taught them how to care for hair and how to sell, and they earned their own commissions. For thousands of Black women who would otherwise have worked as maids and laundresses, this was a way to earn a good, independent living.

In 1910 she moved her headquarters to Indianapolis, where she built a factory, a laboratory and a training school. Her daughter, now known as A'Lelia, helped run the business, and to train new agents.

Speaking up

Madam Walker believed her money should help others. She gave generously to schools, to the YMCA in Indianapolis, and to organisations fighting for equal rights. She spoke out against lynching, the terrible mob killings of Black Americans, and joined campaigns calling on the government to stop it.

That day in Chicago in 1912, when she stood up uninvited, the leaders in the hall listened. The next year, she was invited to speak.

She organised her agents into clubs and held conventions where they were honoured not only for their sales but for their work in their communities.

What she left behind

Madam C. J. Walker died on 25 May 1919, at the age of fifty-one, at her home in Irvington, New York.

She is often described as the first American woman to become a self-made millionaire, and the Guinness Book of World Records once listed her that way. Her great-great-granddaughter and biographer, A'Lelia Bundles, notes that the exact size of her fortune is hard to measure, and that her wealth may have been somewhat less than a million dollars at her death. But the title points to something true: a woman who began with nothing, in the hardest of times, built one of the most successful Black-owned businesses in America, and opened the way for thousands of other women to follow.

Want to read more?

A'Lelia Bundles's On Her Own Ground is the definitive biography, written by Madam Walker's own descendant from family papers and records. Beverly Lowry's Her Dream of Dreams is another thoughtful account of her life.