January 17, 2025 3:03 am
On this episode of Our American Stories, born on the land of the former plantation where her parents were enslaved, Madam C.J. Walker married young, had a child young, became a widow young, and got a divorce young. She also created, out of necessity, a revolutionary hair care product that changed the world, and her life. Here's her great-great-great-granddaughter, A'lelia Bundles, with the story.
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Sponsored by chumba casino no purchase necessary vgw group void where prohibited by law 18 plus terms and we continue with our american stories up next we have the story of madam cj 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 cj walker here's allelia 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 weren't 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 louvenia and louvenia 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 mack williams they had one daughter named allelia when sarah was 17 and when sarah was 20 moses died so now sarah breedlove mack williams 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 saint 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 she 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 a wood stove or 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 bath water 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 uh formula and some of the ingredients came from africa i sent for them i mixed them together 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 uh that she sold products for a while for a woman who became her competitor 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 cj walker and then in april of 1906 she began to call herself madam cj 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 missus 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 to have some respect and some dignity and what a story you're hearing from allelia bundles who happens to be the great-great-granddaughter of madam cj 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 cj walker when we come back more of the life of madam cj walker here on our american stories oh it's such a clutch off-season pickup dave i was worried we'd bring back the same team i met those blackout motorized shades lines.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds hard to install no it's easy i installed these and then 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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 in 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 seem 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 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 burt williams and the different singers and actors who were traveling all over the united states so this indianapolis freeman was something mountain 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 placed 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 poneman 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 didn't have instagram but she had the indianapolis freeman that was how people began to know about her products and you've been listening to allelia bundles madame cj walker's great great granddaughter tell one heck of a story about the marketing and distribution genius of madame cj walker before there was mary k there was madame cj when we come back more of the remarkable story of madame cj walker here on our american stories this new year i want to spend more time with my family get healthier and make sure my finances are in order that includes finally securing life insurance my friend recommended select quote they've helped more than 2 million people find coverage in the last 40 years in 15 minutes a licensed insurance agent found me a 500,000 policy for only 16 a month and my husband got a 500,000 policy for only 18 a month plus we qualified for same-day life insurance no medical exam required and we recovered by the time we hung up with select quote even if you have a health concern be it high blood pressure diabetes even heart disease their experienced agents can find you the right life insurance policy at the lowest price make life insurance the first resolution you check off your list this year go to selectquote.com for your free quote that's selectquote.com selectquote.com details on example rate at selectquote.com what are you looking for in a new smart tv 4k picture quality high quality and immersive sound a sleek design all of those are givens but only the new roku pro series has all of those and the roku streaming experience an award-winning os get fast easy access to all your apps like iheart where you can stream all your favorite music radio and podcasts all day and regular all-inclusive trips to roku city the 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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 morrill and 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 robuck to pledge twenty five thousand dollars to any city in america where the black and white communities will work together to raise the balance of seventy five thousand dollars to build a hundred thousand dollar building now a hundred thousand dollars may not go very far now but then it would build you a quite nice building so jesse morrill 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 a thousand dollars five thousand dollars ten thousand dollars and to everyone's astonishment madam cj walker stood up and said i pledge a thousand dollars 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 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 tusky 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 nox the publisher of the indianapolis freeman stood up and said we should hear from madam cj 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 nox was a long time member of the national negro business league and a good friend of booker t washington's he dismissed george nox 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 hl 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 he 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 cj 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 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 washed up 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 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 a 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 washer woman to a millionaire she was one of the wealthiest american business women 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 alelia 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 madam cj walker here on our american stories have you ever wondered what it would be like to have supervision enhanced hearing extraordinary reflexes to be dare we say superhuman well roku's new pro series tv can't do any of that for you but with a with a 4k screen side firing speakers and a blazing fast refresh rate it'll sure feel like it elevate your entertainment using all your favorite apps like i heart and play all your music radio and podcasts with the new roku pro series your senses aren't better your tv is do you own a business that's ready to thrive it's time to let 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