Before Mary Kay, There Was Madam C.J. Walker—The First Self-Made Female Millionaire

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See app for details. And we continue with our American Stories. Up next, we have the story of Madam C.J. Walker. Many believe that she was the first female self-made millionaire, and she just happens to be African-American. She was also the first person to bring hair care products to the masses. Here to tell her story is her great-great-granddaughter, an author of the book On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker.

Here's A'Lelia Bundles. She started life as Sarah Breedlove on the same plantation in Delta, Louisiana, where her parents had been enslaved. And she was the first child in her family born free in December of 1867. They lived in an area that had been devastated by the Civil War. Everything, the plantations had been burned down, and now the formerly enslaved people were struggling to just live a life.

And they had very little money at the end of every season. They owed money to the plantation owners who had been their former slave owners. And Sarah Breedlove, as the young child in her family, she had had very little formal education. There were schools for black children in Louisiana.

Even though her family minister, Curtis Pollard, had been a black state senator during Reconstruction when African-Americans had gained a great deal of political power, that power was taken away from them by the Ku Klux Klan, so that by the time Sarah was old enough to go to school, there were no schools for black children. She knows how to pick cotton. She knows how to wash clothes.

She knows how to do domestic work. And then when she was seven years old, both of her parents died. She had to move in with her older sister, Lavenia. And Lavenia was married to a man who was so cruel, as Sarah later said, that she got married at 14 to get a home of her own. She married a man named Moses McWilliams. They had one daughter named A'Lelia when Sarah was 17. And when Sarah was 20, Moses died.

So now Sarah Breedlove McWilliams was a widow. She knew she wasn't going to move back in with her sister, so she moved up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, where her older brothers had moved about a decade earlier as part of an exodus. In the 1870s and 1880s, African-Americans, formerly enslaved people, just left Louisiana and Mississippi because the conditions were so horrible.

There was so much racial violence. Her brothers had moved to St. Louis to escape that treatment. So she joined her brothers in St. Louis.

They had become barbers, and they were doing relatively well. They had a barbershop very near St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church. She doesn't really have enough money to make ends meet, but the women of the church really encourage her to make sure that her daughter is educated. So during the week, she is having to work away from home, having to live in as a domestic. She leaves her daughter at what was called the Colored Orphans Home. There were a number of Black women who had organized because they knew there were families who were struggling.

There was no daycare in the way that we think about it now. So her daughter, Lilia, spent part of the week at the Colored Orphans Home. She went to kindergarten with the other children from the school. And then on the weekends or whenever Sarah could be with her, she helped to raise her daughter.

They went to church every Sunday at St. Paul AME Church. And even though Sarah was struggling, she had a good enough voice that she was in the choir. Being in the choir allowed her to meet some of the more middle-class women, to travel around the city when the choir performed. And so she was being exposed to a way of life that made her aspire to something better.

So time went on. And in 1894, a couple of her brothers had died. And so now her support system, her emotional and financial support system was really crumbling. And she met a man named John Davis. She married John Davis.

She thought that that would be helpful to her, that she would be helpful in raising her daughter. And that turned out to be a disaster. John Davis was a heavy drinker and he had a lot of girlfriends.

And even though it's, you know, thinking about him, it's hard to believe that anybody would be interested in John Davis. But, you know, she was, you know, her life was hard and sometimes people make really unwise decisions. So she married John Davis, and they fought a lot and he was arrested for, you know, public drunkenness. And he really just was, you know, not a good partner.

So they ended up splitting up. But around this time, she was under so much stress and she was having so many problems that her hair began to fall out. And I think one thing that is really important for us to understand in this era, in the 21st century, is that in 1906, most Americans didn't have indoor plumbing. That meant people didn't bathe very often, which we don't like to think about. But, you know, people would have to go outside and pump water at the well by hand, put it in a bucket, heat it on the wood stove or on an open fire, get the water hot enough to fill a big large tin tub and take a bath.

And that might happen once a week. And everybody in the family might use the same bathwater. So it's really gross. But as you can see, this would not, you know, bathing was not the sort of luxury thing that we think about now. So most people didn't have indoor plumbing. They didn't bathe very often. They washed their hair even less often, sometimes once a month, sometimes not at all during the winter because you think about what that would take if it's snowing outside.

How are you going to pump the water? And Sarah was one of those women. And there were many women like her because they weren't washing their hair very often. They had really horrible scalp infections. And as a result, they were going bald. So that was really Sarah's real problem, is that she was going bald and she wanted to figure out a way to have healthier hair.

She said, I was so ashamed of my frightful appearance that I prayed to the Lord for a solution. And one night in a dream, a big African man appeared and he told me what to mix up for my formula. And some of the ingredients came from Africa. I sent for them. I mixed them together.

I applied them to Africa. And I applied them to my scalp and my hair began to grow back faster than it had ever fallen out. That is part of the truth. It's also true that that she sold products for a while for a woman who became her competitor, a woman named Annie Malone. It's also true that she worked for a while as a cook for after she moved to Denver for a man named E.L. Schultz, who owned the largest pharmacy west of the Mississippi River. And he was well aware of products that were already on the market like Cuticura and formulas that pharmacists had been using and the medical profession had been using really for hundreds of years, a basic formula that was cleaning your hair more often with a shampoo and then an ointment that contained sulfur.

And sulfur is a centuries-old remedy for healing dandruff and scalp infections. She moved to Denver in 1905 and her good friend, Charles Joseph Walker, whom she had met in St. Louis, who was a newspaper man, moved to Denver and they got married. And she began to take out ads in the newspaper. All of a sudden, instead of being Sarah McWilliams in her ads in the black newspaper in Denver, now she was Mrs. C.J. Walker. And then in April of 1906, she began to call herself Madam C.J.

Walker. And you can think, well, that's a bit of an affectation, but it was really a nod to the fact that Paris, where people were called madam rather than Mrs., Paris was the center of fashion and beauty culture. And she, like women who were her contemporaries, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, they all called themselves madam. And that gave them a bit of respect, you know, made them sort of stand out. And then if you looked at old newspapers of the time, you'd see that women who owned boarding houses or who were seamstresses or who were caterers called themselves madam. So it was really kind of a business honorific as well as a way to have some respect and some dignity. And what a story you're hearing from A'Lelia Bundles, who happens to be the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J.

Walker. And what a life. I mean, more sad stories, more tragic stories than anything you'd read in the Old Testament. Loses her parents young, lives in a home that's so brutal with her sister that she has to get out and get married. Her husband dies. She moves to St. Louis. Her brothers die. And my goodness, somehow she just manages to keep going.

The stress in her life is so terrible that her hair keeps falling off. And then we learn about this partnership with this newspaper man. The ads start and up comes the new and improved Madam C.J. Walker. When we come back, more of the life of Madam C.J.

Walker, here on Our American Stories. We're interrupting your favorite tunes. Bad news. This is a commercial. You might think we want to sell you things.

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Avocados from Mexico. And we continue with Our American Stories and our story on the first female millionaire, Madam C.J. Walker, telling the story who's her great, great granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles.

Let's get back to the story. Here again is A'Lelia Bundles. She really was. She really was a marketing and distribution genius. She begins to sell her products. You know, her hair is now growing longer and other women who had scalp infections like she did are wondering, Sarah, what have you done?

How come your hair is growing? And she and her new husband traveled around Colorado to the various mining towns, to Trinidad, to Pueblo, to Colorado Springs. And it really became clear to her that she could only grow her market so much in a state where there were very few black residents. So she and Charles Joseph Walker began to travel around the southwestern part of the United States in the south.

They went to Texas, to Kansas, to Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana. She'd take out a little ad in whatever black newspaper for the town where she was going the next week so that she would have a crowd. And every town she would go to, she would demonstrate the products. She would find a woman in town who seemed to have a scalp infection and that she would hire a room in a church and get the water heated and wash the woman's hair and then show just what her products could do. And you know, you figure at this point in time, there's no radio, there's no television.

There are very few places that actually have movie houses. So when somebody comes to do a lecture and they have a little few bells and whistles and they've gotten the local minister to pay attention, she's the entertainment perhaps for the month. She knew how to develop a crowd and how to create buzz. And then she was always very good about picking out the women who seemed to have the most personality, who might be leaders in their church, who might be with their missionary society or with their choir. She had a really great knack for finding women who were leaders. And she would pick that woman to be her sales agent so that when she left the town, she would leave a supply of products with that person and then she would stay in touch. And then as the woman began to develop a customer base, she would order more products from Sarah. By training thousands of women to be her sales agents, she developed a workforce, an army of women who were selling her products. One story I remember from her secretary, she had a secretary who came to work for her in 1914 when she was still a teenager.

And when I was growing up and really starting to do my research, Violet Reynolds was still working for the Walker Company. When she talked about Madame Walker, she had a certain reverence for her, of course, but she said when Madame Walker, as she traveled, she would go to large towns, but sometimes she would go through on the train through a town that was really too small for the train to stop. And people may remember those old cowboy movies where a train would sort of slow down as it went through a town and there was a big hook and that was the hook that the mail bag went on. And so the train would slow down and they would take the mail off the hook that was going away from the town and then they would put a bag onto the hook for the mail that was to be delivered to the town.

Well, Madame Walker, when she was going through a town that was too small for the train to stop, knew the train would slow down. She would make advance arrangements with her local sales agent to say, I'm coming through this town at 328 on Thursday, please be there. And she would throw off a little bundle of her flyers and her order forms and some products for the agent. And then the agent would be able to distribute that material to her customers. So Madame Walker used every available avenue to promote her products, to distribute her products, to sell her products. But she also understood the power of image. If she had Instagram, I know she would be all over Instagram.

She needed to find a new base. And in 1909, she visited Indianapolis and she was very impressed with Indianapolis. There was a very thriving black business community. There were three black newspapers, including one that was a nationally distributed newspaper called the Indianapolis Freeman. So just imagine a black USA Today in 1910. It had a very robust current events front section, an excellent sports section that told you what was happening with black baseball teams and a very interesting entertainment section like the life section in USA Today. And it was writing about the Lafayette players in Harlem and Bert Williams and the different singers and actors who were traveling all over the United States.

So this Indianapolis Freeman was something Madame Walker immediately recognized as a great place to advertise. She took out an ad and she used before and after photographs. The before picture she put in the center and her hair was very short. This was when her hair had been falling out. And then on either side in a sort of trio of pictures, she had a front view and a side view.

And her hair was long and her hair was down to the middle of her back and very healthy. It was kind of like a Jenny Craig commercial. I think you could really see the you know, the impact that her products really worked. And in that ad, she took a third of the page from top to bottom, place the pictures at the top. And then the ad included letters that were testimonials from women who both were her customers and women who were her sales agents. One woman wrote her letter and she said, before I started using Madame Walker's wonderful hair grower, my hair was an eighth of an inch long. And now my hair is down my back.

And I have been able to throw my wig away. So this was real, you know, real endorsement. But there were also letters from women who had become her sales agents. And one woman said, you have made it possible for a black woman to make more money in a day selling your products than she could in a month working in somebody's kitchen. This was huge because there was so much discrimination against, you know, women in general working outside the home, but especially women of color. The only jobs that they could be hired for were maids and cooks and laundresses and sharecroppers. So for a woman to be able to make her own money, her own independent money meant she didn't have to go work in somebody else's house, live in somebody else's house and leave her children at home.

She could have her own business in her house, doing hair. So Madame Walker always was pushing not just the products and you can feel beautiful at a time when very few people were telling black women they were beautiful. She always pushed financial and economic independence and empowerment.

So these ads were very powerful. Added to that, one of the reasons she had picked Indianapolis is because it was a transportation hub. It was called the Crossroads of America. And that was because of all of the trains that went through Indianapolis every day. At that point in 1910, it was near the center of population in America. The western United States was still pretty sparsely populated.

California was not the powerhouse that we think of it now with a large population. So Indiana really had quite a bit of train traffic. And because the trains were going through town, that meant that it was a great place for her to do business with her mail order business. It also meant that the black men who worked on the trains, the Pullman Porters, who were traveling from coast to coast could take papers, copies of the Indianapolis Freeman and sell those papers as they traveled around. So Madame Walker placed her ad in the Indianapolis Freeman, knowing that these black Pullman Porters would pick up stacks of those papers as they came through town. And if they were going to San Francisco or Boston or Detroit or Atlanta or New York or Chicago, her ads were going to be seen by people.

So she did not have Instagram, but she had the Indianapolis Freeman. That was how people began to know about her products. And you have been listening to Allelia Bundles, Madame C.J. Walker's great-great-granddaughter, tell one heck of a story about the marketing and distribution genius of Madame C.J. Walker. Before there was Mary Kay, there was Madame C.J. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Madame C.J.

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Visit eBay.com for terms. And we continue with our American stories and the final portion of our story on the first female millionaire, Madam C.J. Walker. Telling the story is a great, great granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles. Let's continue with a story.

Here again is A'Lelia. So I'm going to tell you a story about her first convention, but I'm going to lead up to it just to sort of set the stage. So 1910, when Madam Walker moves to Indianapolis, she's just really just on the cusp of breaking out. She's still, you know, making a few thousand dollars a year, which is more money than most, you know, even white businessmen in America are making at the time.

But she's just really poised to become nationally known. And shortly after she moves to Indianapolis, there is a big push to build a new YMCA in the black community. And Madam Walker becomes friends with George Knox, the publisher of the Indianapolis Freeman, the paper that has done so much to improve her advertisements and to raise her profile. And George Knox is the chairman of the board of the black YMCA.

This big push to build a YMCA is led by George Knox. He invites Jesse Moreland, one of the first black secretaries of the YMCA to come to Indianapolis to do what he has done in many other cities, which is to hold a big rally to raise money. And he has persuaded Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears Roebuck, to pledge $25,000 to any city in America where the black and white communities will work together to raise the balance of $75,000 to build a $100,000 building.

Now $100,000 may not go very far now, but then it would build you a quite nice building. So Jesse Moreland comes to Indianapolis and holds a rally, brings together the leadership of the black YMCA and the leadership of the white YMCA and some of the wealthy white businessmen, stand up during the rally and they pledge $1,000, $5,000, $10,000. And to everyone's astonishment, Madam C.J. Walker stood up and said, I pledge $1,000 and I'm doing this because I believe if I help our boys, it will help our girls.

And that is what I am interested in. People were stunned more stunned. No black woman had ever contributed that amount of money to that kind of secular cause. And she began to be written about in newspapers, not just black newspapers, but white newspapers. And they were writing about not just her business, but they were writing about her philanthropy. And eventually the YMCA was built, but Madam Walker in the meantime realized that people wanted to hear her story. And so her crowds began to get larger.

She traveled from town to town to sell her products. And she decided during the summer of 1912 that she wanted to attend the National Negro Business League Convention. That organization had been founded by Booker T. Washington, who was the most powerful black man in America.

He had had dinner at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt. That was quite controversial because segregation was still very much a part of the ethos of America. And even though Booker T. Washington had founded Tuskegee Institute and had founded the National Negro Business League and was very influential, he was not welcome in many places in America. Madam Walker arrived at the 1912 National Negro Business League Convention and sent word to Booker T. Washington that she wished to tell her story.

She wanted to be included on the program. And she had met Booker T. Washington before, but he had been relatively dismissive of her. He had pretty much ignored her. But she was not a woman who wanted to be ignored. So on the first day of the convention, she asked politely about speaking, and he overlooked her. And on the second day of the convention, her good friend George Knox, the publisher of the Indianapolis Freeman, stood up and said, we should hear from Madam C.J. Walker. She is the woman who gave a thousand dollars to the building fund of the YMCA in my hometown of Indianapolis.

She has an incredible story to tell. And even though Knox was a longtime member of the National Negro Business League and a good friend of Booker T. Washington's, he dismissed George Knox. And Booker T. Washington said, you know, we're discussing lifetime membership. But rather than call on somebody to discuss lifetime membership, he called upon one of Madam Walker's neighbors from Indianapolis, a man named H.L.

Saunders. And Mr. Saunders proceeded to talk about his business. Now, he was very successful. He manufactured uniforms for people who worked in hotels and who worked in service industries. And his business was now a regional business with customers in Indiana and the four surrounding states. At this point, Madam Walker, just six years after she had started the Madam C.J.

Walker manufacturing company, had customers all over the United States, the Caribbean and Central America. As it turns out, Mr. Saunders had been the treasurer for the fundraising campaign for the YMCA and he had given the very generous sum of 250 dollars. But Madam Walker, of course, had given four times as much, a thousand dollars. Now, I know she was a good church going woman and she knew that you weren't supposed to compare what you put into the collection basket to what others put in.

However, I can't help but imagine that she felt at least a twinge of resentment. And on the third and final day of the conference, as the last banker was completing his report, she stood at her seat, looked toward Booker T. Washington at the podium and said, surely you are not going to shut the door in my face. I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the south. From there, I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself. I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.

And I have built my own factory on my own ground. The next year, he invited her back as a keynote speaker. And then when he came to the dedication of the YMCA in Indianapolis in 1913, Madam Walker sent her chauffeur to pick him up at the train station and he was a guest in her home.

At the dedication of the Y, he praised Madam Walker and all of the things that she was doing. So, she really believed that you had to speak up for yourself. She believed that you first had to have an excellent product, that you had to make people aware of your product, that you had to surround yourself with highly competent people, and that you had to deliver on what you were promising.

And so, she continued to develop this army, this workforce of sales agents, of employees who were with her at her headquarters. She became very wealthy and it was really an American rags to riches story. She had been born on a plantation in Delta, Louisiana, one of the poorest areas in America, an area that had been devastated during the Civil War. And she was on a cotton plantation making no money. So, an orphan at a very early age, very little education. And yet, by the time she died in May of 1919, she was living in a mansion in one of the wealthiest communities in America, just a few miles away from John D. Rockefeller. Well, when people would ask her the secret to her success, she would say to them, there is no royal, flower-strewn path to success.

And if there is, I have not found it. For whatever success I have attained has been the result of much hard work and many sleepless nights. I got my start by giving myself a start. So, don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come.

You have to get up and make them for yourself. She had, during those 51 years, gone from an uneducated washerwoman to a millionaire. She was one of the wealthiest American businesswomen of her time. Many people believe that she was the first self-made American woman millionaire to make her own money in business, not to inherit it or to marry someone who was a millionaire. She was making this money a thousand dollars a month, then ten thousand dollars a month, then twenty thousand dollars a month, and on and on, at a time when white men who were managers in corporate America were only making twelve hundred dollars a month. And she was also making it possible for other African-American women to create their own financial independence, to create their own wealth. I still hear from people when I'm making speeches who will say, my grandmother, my aunt, my great-grandmother was a Walker agent, and she was able to buy real estate, and then she became a realtor. She was able to start another business.

And so, this wealth was created in Black families by women who were independent entrepreneurs. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to A'Lelia Bundles. My success was the result of much hard work and many sleepless nights. I got my start because I gave myself a start. A terrific message for her times and for ours. The story of Adam C.J.

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