MADAME C. J. WALKER (1867 – 1919)

“I want to say to every Negro woman present, don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them!”

America’s first female self-made millionaire

By age seven, Sarah was an orphan with no formal education. By the time Sarah was 20 she was on her own again. Her husband disappeared suddenly without warning and without a trace.

Sarah and her small daughter escaped Mississippi in 1889. They fled to St Louis, New Orleans, where she toiled for eight years as a washerwoman. As far as she was concerned she was not just a washerwoman, she was a good washerwoman.

New husband John Davis caused her so much unhapiness her hair beganto fall out before she left him. Sarah smartened up and started courting a gentleman called Charles Joseph Walker (C. J. Walker) who lived close by. He was a journalist with a talent for writing advertising copy. C. J. Walker was a smooth and dapper gentleman who could sell ice to Eskimos.

 

Extracting opportunity from disaster

Sarah’s hair loss was becoming an increasing problem. After using every snake oil concoction she could find to restore her hair, without success, she contacted a hair treatment specialist called Annie Pope-Turnbo, who fixed Sarah’s hair problem. Sarah was so impressed she teamed up with Turnbo to sell the product.

This newly self-assured woman grasped the reins, renting an attic whilst working as a cook. Sarah set up a ‘laboratory’ in which she concocted her own hair-care formulas.

A booming business

By 1910 operations had to be moved from the Denver and Pittsburgh offices to new headquarters in Indianapolis. During September 1911, Madam C. J. Walker incorporated the Walker Manufacturing Company, with herself as the sole stockholder. Walker College of Hair Culture was also founded and she splashed out on investment property.

Confident of the continued success of her business, Sarah built a mansion (Villa Lewaro) in 1918, designed by Vertner Woodson Tandy (the first registered black architect in the great metropolis of New York). The property was in one the county’s most prestigious areas, very close to the world’s richest entrepreneur John D. Rockefeller. By 1920 Sarah owned one of America’s largest hair-care companies, employing over 3000 people, in addition to 20,000 agents up and down the country. The Guinness Book of Records records Madame C. J. Walker as the first self-made female American millionaire (though many might argue the true title belongs to Mary Ellen Pleasant).

 

Workaholic

On top of her other commitments, Sarah was also heavily involved in developing and financing facilities for black people suffering under the US-supported South African apartheid regime. The doctors warned the relentless entrepreneurial soldier that if she didn’t slow down she’d be in grave danger. She ignored the advice and continued her public speaking, campaigning and driving her business forward. Madam C. J. Walker died of chronic interstitial nephritis, kidney failure and hypertension on May 25th 1919, leaving an estate worth $600,000 ($13 million). Her choice of weapon in the fight for freedom for herself and her race was entrepreneurship. She had used her own ability to free herself, and then to free others, as far and wide as Africa and the Caribbean.

By Ron Shabazz Shillingford

Author of : The History of the World’s Greatest Entrepreneurs

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