Life Story: Sarah “Madam C.J.” Breedlove Walker (1867-1919)

Sarah Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867 in Delta, Louisiana. Her parents and four older siblings had been enslaved on a cotton plantation until the end of the Civil War. Like many formerly enslaved people, they lived and worked together as sharecroppers to make ends meet. Sarah was the first member of her family to be born into freedom.

Sarah lost both of her parents by the time she was seven years old. She went to live with her older sister, but her sister’s husband was a cruel man who forced her to make money picking cotton and doing laundry. He may also have physically abused Sarah. At the age of fourteen, Sarah ran away from home and married a man named Moses McWilliams. Before her seventeenth birthday, she gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Lelia. Moses died in 1887, leaving Sarah a young, widowed mother.

In 1888 Sarah and Lelia moved to St. Louis to be closer to Sarah’s three older brothers. Her brothers had moved to the North at a young age to escape racial violence and find jobs. Sarah worked as a laundress for $1.50 a day and went to night school when she was able. She briefly married a man named John Davis, but the marriage was over by 1903.

Sarah was determined to build a better life than the one she could afford working as a laundress. In 1904 she took a job selling haircare products for a Black woman-owned business. Throughout her life, Sarah had struggled with hair loss that was likely caused by poor nutrition and stress. Like most Black women of the time, she used harsh soap, heavy oil, and grease to manage her curls, which would have only made her condition worse. Although new technology had led to the expansion of the beauty industry in the late 1800s, most products were designed for and sold to white women. Seeing an opportunity, Sarah started to experiment with creating her own line of products that softened her hair and eased her irritated scalp.

Sarah and Lelia moved to Denver, Colorado in 1905, where Sarah continued to sell hair care products and develop her line. Her experimentation paid off. Little by little, Sarah’s hair began to grow. As her confidence in her products grew, Sarah started to sell them. 

In 1906 Sarah married Charles Joseph “C. J.” Walker, and he became a partner in her new beauty business. She renamed herself Madam C. J. Walker and began to advertise her products in Black publications. She also sold them through a mail order system. She was so happy with how her hair had grown that she put pictures of herself on the packaging. She held lectures and demonstrations of what she called the “Walker Method”: washing hair with gentle shampoo, brushing hair, massaging the scalp, and then treating hair with a healing pomade. By 1910 business was booming. She moved to Indianapolis to build a factory and establish a permanent company headquarters.

At the time Madam Walker was expanding her company, hair was a controversial issue in the Black community. White racists pointed to Black hair texture as evidence that Black people were inferior. They claimed that Black women who could not or would not smooth out their kinky hair were unclean and messy. For many Black women, using beauty products to smooth out their hair was a way of demonstrating their equality to white women. Some women were less concerned about issues of race and merely wanted the opportunity to adopt the most popular styles of the time. Some Black advocates believed that, regardless of their motivation, Black women who changed their hair were catering to racism by adhering to white beauty standards. Madam Walker took criticism because she sold products that helped straighten and smooth hair. But she argued that her products were about keeping hair healthy. Because she had personally struggled with hair and scalp issues, she promoted healthy hair over any particular style.

Madam Walker used her business to empower Black women. She founded several beauty training schools and employed hundreds of women across the country to serve as Walker Agents, saleswomen trained in the Walker Method who served as the face of the Walker brand. Madam Walker organized national conventions for her agents, where they could share selling strategies, learn about new products, and receive rewards for outstanding sales. For many women, being a Walker Agent and working for a Black woman-owned business was a welcome alternative to low-paying domestic work.

In 1913 Madam Walker and Charles Walker divorced. She focused her energy on extending her company’s reach to the Caribbean and Latin America. In 1916 she followed her daughter to New York City and moved into a grand townhouse in Harlem. Although she continued to run her beauty business, she allowed employees to handle the day-to-day operations. She became involved in the social and political life of Harlem, particularly the anti-lynching movement, donating $5,000.

As Madam Walker’s business grew, so did her wealth. In addition to her Harlem townhouse, she owned a Model T Ford and made plans to build a mansion in upstate New York called Villa Lewaro, a name she created using letters from her beloved daughter’s married name: Lelia Walker Robinson. But Madam Walker did not spend all of her money on herself. She was committed to helping Black men and women escape poverty just like she had. She donated money to scholarships, homes for the elderly, anti-lynching efforts, and other important Black causes on the local and national stage. She became as famous for her philanthropy as she was for her beauty business.

Madam Walker died from complications of high blood pressure on May 25, 1919, at the age of fifty-one. At the time of her death, it was estimated that her estate was worth one to two million dollars (the equivalent of eighteen to thirty-six million dollars today). She was the first self-made woman millionaire in America. Her daughter, Lelia, continued in her mother’s footsteps. She took over the still-growing company and used her mother’s fortune to support artists, writers, and other leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.

• enslaved: To be held as a slave.
• lynching: The extralegal execution of a person by a mob.
• philanthropy: The practice of donating large sums of money to charity.
• pomade: Hair product.
• sharecropper: A farmer who lives and works on land owned by someone else in exchange for a share of the harvest.