MADAM CJ

WALKER
 Madam CJ Walker is
recorded as the first
female self-made
millionaire in America in
the Guinness Book of
World Records.
 Entrepreneur, philanthropist, and activist, Madam
CJ Walker rose from poverty in the south to become one
of the wealthiest African-Americans of her time.
 Sarah Breedlove was born on December
23, 1867, near Delta, Louisiana, U.S. Her
parents were Owen and Minerva
(Anderson) Breedlove. She had five
siblings, who included an older sister,
Louvenia, and four brothers: Alexander,
James, Solomon, and Owen Jr. She was
orphaned at the age of seven.
 She married Moses McWilliams
at 14, she said, to escape the
abuse of a “cruel” brother-in-
law. A widow at 20 with a young
daughter, she moved to St. Louis,
Missouri, where her elder
brothers were barbers.
 She worked as a poorly paid
washerwoman for more than a
decade. During that time she tried
various commercial hairdressings
that caused baldness.
 Struggling financially, facing hair loss, and
feeling the strain of years of physical labor,
Walker's life took a dramatic turn in 1904.
That year, she not only began using African
American businesswomen Annie Turbo
Malone's "The Great Wonderful Hair
Grower.",
A year later, Walker moved to Denver,
Colorado, where she married ad-man
Charles Joseph Walker, renamed
herself "Madam CJ Walker," and with
$1.25, launched her own line of hair
products and straighteners for African
American women, "Madam Walker's
Wonderful Hair Grower."
 In 1906 she married Charles Joseph Walker and
began achieving local success. Thenceforward, she was
known as Madam C.J. Walker.
 In 1908, Walker and her husband
settled in Pittsburgh, where she
opened the Lelia College of Beauty
Culture, a school named for her
daughter. Drawn to the prosperous
Black business community in
Indianapolis, she relocated the
headquarters of the Madam C.J.
Walker Manufacturing Company
there in 1910.
 She continued to develop her business by
traveling across the United States and providing
career opportunities and economic
independence for thousands of African
American women who otherwise would have
been consigned to jobs as maids, cooks,
laundresses, and farmhands. In 1913 she
expanded internationally when she visited the
Caribbean and Central America. By 1919 she
had claimed 25,000 active Walker sales agents.
 Walker simultaneously made her mark as a
philanthropist, most notably with her $1,000 gift to the
African American Young Men’s Christian Association
(YMCA) building fund in Indianapolis in 1911 and her
$5,000 contribution to the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP’s) anti-
lynching fund in 1919.
 She provided scholarships for
students at several Black colleges
and boarding schools and
financial support for orphanages,
retirement homes, and the fund
to preserve Frederick Douglass’s
home in the Anacostia
neighbourhood of Washington,
D.C.
She also became politically active,
speaking out against lynching at the
Negro Silent Protest Parade and
during a visit to the White House in
1917 and advocating for the rights of
African American soldiers who served
in France during World War I.