20/10/2020
Today we would like to pay tribute to the late Madame CJ Walker. The first female self-made millionaire in the 20th century and an avid black business woman.
Madam C.J. Walker created specialized hair products for African American hair care and was one of the first American women to become a self-made millionaire.
Madam C.J. Walker invented a line of African American hair products after suffering from a scalp ailment that resulted in her own hair loss. She promoted her products by traveling around the country giving lecture-demonstrations and eventually established Madame C.J. Walker Laboratories to manufacture cosmetics and train sales beauticians.
Walker was born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867, on a cotton plantation near Delta, Louisiana. Her parents, Owen and Minerva, were recently freed slaves, and Sarah, who was their fifth child, was the first in her family to be free-born.
In 1887, after the death of her first husband, Sarah and her daughter A'Lelia moved to St. Louis, where her brothers had established themselves as barbers. There, she worked as washerwoman, earning $1.50 a day.
After experiencing hair loss and experimenting with successful treatments, her second husband, Charles, helped her create advertisements for a hair care treatment for African Americans that she was perfecting and encouraged her to use the more recognizable name "Madam C.J. Walker," by which she was thereafter known.
In 1907 Walker and her husband traveled around the South and Southeast promoting her products and giving lecture demonstrations of her "Walker Method" — involving her own formula for pomade, brushing and the use of heated combs.
As profits continued to grow, in 1908 Walker opened a factory and a beauty school in Pittsburgh with profits that were the modern-day equivalent of several million dollars. In 1913, Walker and Charles divorced, and she traveled throughout Latin America and the Caribbean promoting her business and recruiting others to teach her hair care methods. A drama starring about the life of the Madame called is streaming on Netflix now!