Self-made Millionaire: The Meteoric Rise of Madam C.J. Walker

For Black History Month, we're celebrating the contributions of Black Americans in the financial space. And we're empowering others in the Black Community to pursue avenues of financial independence and security.

Let's take a close look at the historical icon Madam C.J. Walker—an African American entrepreneur, philanthropist and social justice champion. The first female self-made millionaire in America, she's the inspiration behind the Self-Made Netflix series, starring Octavia Spencer.

Learn how Walker went from earning only $1.50 a day to building a hair empire that made her a millionaire.

Hair. How could growth from human skin mean so many different things to people? Together it is a crown, a political statement, an indicia of religious modesty, a communication tool and liberation. For African American entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker—the first woman of any race to become a self-made millionaire—hair was a source of conflict, wealth building and a path towards financial freedom.

Who is Madam C.J. Walker?

Born as Sarah Breedlove to sharecropper parents Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove in 1867 (two years after the end of the Civil War), she grew up on the same Delta, Louisiana plantation on which her parents were enslaved. Though she was the first of the Breedloves' five children to be born into freedom, Walker's life was far from easy. 

She was orphaned at seven and was flung into working the cotton fields of Vicksburg, Mississippi to support herself. Soon after turning 14, she married Moses McWilliams to escape her abusive brother-in-law Jesse Powell. And by the time she was 20, she was a widowed single mother. She moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1887 with her two-year-old daughter A'Lelia to join her four brothers, who had successful barbering businesses.

For the next 20 years, Walker worked as a cook and washerwoman, earning $1.50 daily. Though barely enough to live decently, Walker managed to send her daughter to school and enroll herself in evening classes on her salary. 

But one morning, while bent over her wash, Walker suddenly realized that her meager wage would leave nothing to provide for her old age someday. She carried around that stress like the bundles of clothes she delivered across St. Louis to the homes of the people who hired her.

Within a few years, that would all change for Walker.

From Washerwoman to Building a Hair Empire

Walker started losing her hair before turning 30. For Black people living through Jim Crow, their image was tied to dignity. And for poor folks, like Walker then, that was the ultimate currency.

In Black communities, a woman's "hair journey" is emotional. For many Black women, whose cultures see their hair as a crown and one way for them to articulate their femininity and womanhood, hair loss can be devastating.

However, Walker's hair loss would eventually become a positive turning point in her life and the lodestar on the map to financial freedom. With a $1.25 capital investment and her brothers' assistance, Walker experimented with different homemade and store-bought elixirs and ointments to treat her hair loss. She found some success with a formula developed by another Black entrepreneur, Annie Malone.

In 1905, she moved to Denver, Colorado to be a sales agent for Malone. Though she was a dedicated employee, Walker knew that Malone's formula could be improved. She tinkered in her kitchen with different recipes, testing them on herself and close friends. She soon hit pay dirt.

With the help of her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper sales agent and natural marketeer, Walker began selling Madame C.J. Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower—a hair product that promised to give Black hair a "beautiful silky sheen." 

Wonder why that brand name? It wasn't unusual for businesswomen of that era to adopt "Madam" as part of their work-life persona.

By 1907, the Walkers were traveling across the American South promoting the products, giving talks and demonstrating "the Walker Method"—a process of using one of the brand's hair waxes while using a heated comb and brushing. A year later, she opened a factory and beauty school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 

By 1910, she relocated and built a factory, hair and manicure salon and training school in Indianapolis—a city that, at that time, was the nation's largest inland manufacturing center.

Within a decade, Walker had ten products and a salesforce of 20,000 women. Though that number is staggering, it wasn't difficult for Walker to encourage women to join her business and promote her philosophy of "cleanliness and loveliness." 

"At a time when unskilled white workers earned about $11 a week, Walker's agents were making $5 to $15 a day, pioneering a system of multilevel marketing that Walker and her associates perfected for the Black market," wrote Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in a 1998 issue of TIME Magazine. “More than any other single businessperson, Walker unveiled the vast economic potential of an African-American economy, even one stifled and suffocating under Jim Crow segregation."

An Influential Philanthropist and Activist

In 1913, after her divorce, Walker traveled throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, promoting her products and method and showing Black women that they could find immense freedom in entrepreneurship. 

But Walker was more than an entrepreneur: She also used her wealth and influence to change the lives of African Americans. She helped build a Black YMCA in Indianapolis, donated to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), supported the National Conference on Lynching and contributed scholarship funds for the Tuskegee Institute. She was a patron of the arts and a benefactor of African American artists, musicians and actors. She even restored Frederick Douglass's home in Washington.

As a dedicated social justice activist, Walker and other Black leaders visited President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 to convince him that the federal government should guarantee support for equal rights based on African-American service in World War I. In particular, the group advocated having lynchings and white mob violence classified as federal crimes.

"My object in life is not simply to make money for myself or to spend it on myself in dressing or running around in an automobile, but I love to use a part of what I make in trying to help others," Walker reportedly said.

That same year, Walker completed building a mansion in Irvington, New York, touted in her New York Times obituary as "one of the show places in the vicinity." Business magnates John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould had homes in the neighborhood. 

When she died in 1919, her real estate investments and holdings—including that of her factory, business acumen, and MBA-worthy marketing genius—made her personal wealth exceed a million dollars. According to an inflation calculator, that has the equivalent buying power of $18 million today.

Walker's Legacy Today

Walker's work continues to influence. Her great-granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles, is her official biographer. One of her books, entitled initially On Her Own Ground, inspired the Netflix miniseries "Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker," starring Octavia Spencer as Walker. 

Today, you can purchase MADAM By Madam C.J. Walker products—a contemporary reimagining of her original hair care line—at Walmart stores across the United States and online. Sundial Brands created the line, and fun fact: its founder Richelieu Dennis spearheaded the purchase of Walker's Irvington mansion Villa Lewaro for the company's New Voices Foundation. Created in 2018, the foundation helps "women of color business owners build, grow and scale their businesses and create a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem." 

On the restoration and use of Villa Lewaro, Dennis commented, "The idea is we would create a think tank where we would have some of the some of the best minds in the country thinking about entrepreneurs and the challenges of entrepreneurship for women and women of color."

Since its founding, New Voices has, among other things, invested over $2 million in 190 businesses headed by women of color and offered close to $27 million in grants, equity and debt capital. Over a century after Madam Walker's death, her legacy lives on.

 

 

"Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them."

- Madam C.J. Walker

 

Vaughn Stafford Gray is a journalist, formerly syndicated columnist and editor, with over 20 years of experience writing about culture, the business of fashion, entrepreneurship, retail, food, music, arts, and travel. His byline has appeared in numerous publications, including Smithsonian and Atlantic magazines, on sites including Canada.com, Yahoo Lifestyle and MSN, and daily publications such as the Edmonton Journal and the Jamaica Observer.

 

Mary Delaney is a digital artist, who for the past 7 years has been conjuring up illustrations and animations that blur the lines between the digital and the fantastical. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Traditional Fine Arts which she had used as a stepping stone to digital and experimental forms of art. She was born in the United States but currently resides in Berlin.

LEARN MORE: The Good News About Women and Money