Self-Made Catalyst

C.A. Asbrey

Very few people from a disadvantaged background become self made-millionaires, and even fewer are women, but it’s generally accepted that Madam C. J. Walker, née Breedlove, born in 1867, was the first. Mary Ellen Pleasant, is also a candidate, and worthy of a post of her own, but as she died in poverty, I’m not going to include her in that category, although her remarkable life merits attention too. I will address that in another page. Money in not the only measure of success.

Sarah Breedlove was born in Louisiana on December 23rd 1967. She was one of six children and the first one born into freedom, her family having been enslaved by Robert W. Burney. Her mother died, probably of cholera in 1872 and her father died a year later, leaving her an orphan at the age of seven. Her older sister, Louvenia, and her husband, took her in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and she started working as a domestic servant at the age of ten. Sarah had only three months of formal education from her early years, consisting of peripatetic literacy classes at Sunday school.

Her brother-in-law was abusive, leading her to marry Moses McWilliams at the age of fourteen, but her husband died in 1887, leaving her a young, single parent of two-year old daughter Lelia (later known as A’Lelia). She then moved to St Louis where her brothers were barbers, and she had some support whilst working as a laundress and cook for as little as $1.50 a day. She married again in 1894, but that marriage was doomed to fail. He was abusive and a heavy drinker, and they divorced in 1903.

Sarah saw education as vital, and made sure that her daughter attended school, but it was the connections she made at St. Paul A.M.E. Church and the National Association of Colored Women that changed how she saw the world. Albert Einstein said, “Most people see what is, and never see what can be” and that is why the people she met that that association were pivotal to her who vision of what was possible. She was a poor woman, and saw success, collective organisation, and structure, not to mention genuinely successful black people. The model of what success looked like for someone who looked like her just hadn’t been shown to her before, and it inspired her.

During the 1890s, Sarah began suffering from a scalp problem that resulted in hair loss. In the absence of any real help with her condition and an ignorance of how to deal with black hair in the world of hair treatments, she consulted her barber brothers. She began to experiment with some of their suggestions and hair products, including including those made by Annie Malone, another black woman entrepreneur.

Years of physical labour were taking their toll, so she took to selling Annie Malone’s ‘The Great Wonderful Hair Grower’, as well as using it to treat her own condition. She also married ad man Charles Joseph Walker in 1905 and moved to Denver. It was there that she started producing and marketing her own product, ‘selling Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower’, a scalp conditioning and healing formula, which she claimed had been revealed to her in a dream. In reality, it was almost identical to Annie Malone’s product, but in fairness, Annie Malone never invented it either. Neither woman did. Both products used a thick, ointment-like base (petrolatum, coconut oil, and beeswax) combined with medicinal sulphur to heal severe scalp infections, dandruff, and hair loss. Variations of the core sulphur-and-grease remedy had been used for centuries, though Malone refined them to be safer and less damaging than the harsh lye soaps and goose grease commonly used at the time. While both used sulphur as the active medicinal agent, Walker’s formulation famously incorporated violet extract perfume (and sometimes other variations like carbolic acid and copper sulphate) to help mask the strong, medicinal smell of the sulphur. That did not stop Annie Malone from publicly accusing Sarah of stealing her formula. She stopped short at legal action though, no doubt because she was advised that she had no proof that it was her invention. Malone’s company grew, as did the rivalry between the two women. At its peak her company, Poro, employed thousands of agents and generated significant revenue, much of which she poured back into her community; to schools, orphanages, and black colleges, often without recognition. But success didn’t last. A costly divorce and years of tax disputes took their toll by the early 1950s, Annie Malone had lost control of the company.

And neither woman invented the direct sales agent model either. The credit for that goes to David H. McConnell who founded the California Perfume Company(later renamed Avon in 1928). He hired Persis Foster Eames Albee as his very first representative in 1887. What Sarah did was take existing models and products and hone them to her own particular market. And it was a market she knew well, having been at the suffering end of it, and having a deep understanding of how important healthy hair is to women. And she knew what it was like to work as an agent too. She became known for treating those who worked for her as partners in their own economic empowerment, providing them with high-earning commissions, professional training, and financial independence. The women who worked for her were not only trained in selling and hair care. They were taught them how to budget, manage money, and run their own local enterprises in their thousands, and established formal training schools and beauty culturist programs so her workers mastered professional hygiene and hair care standard, and organised her sales force into state and local clubs, eventually founding the Madam C.J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America.

Sarah never forgot her background and upbringing, and rewarded employees who did philanthropic work. In 1910 she settled in Indianapolis and built a factory, hair and manicure salon, another training school. Less than a year after her arrival. The press report that she contributed $1,000 ($352,610.53 in today’s money) to the building fund of the “colored” YMCA in Indianapolis. Sadly, her third marriage failed due to Charles’ attempts to control her business decisions and diminish her independent achievements. Recognising the toxic and unsupportive dynamic, Walker divorced him in 1912 to fully protect her company and personal autonomy, though she famously kept the professional name “C.J. Walker” for herself and her brand. She especially wanted to protect her legacy for her daughter. She made A’Lelia her second in command, and she expanded the business even further.

Sarah favoured people from disadvantaged communities in her work. A black architect, Vertner Tandy, designed her townhouse in Harlem, of which she declared, “There is nothing to equal it,” she wrote to her attorney, F.B. Ransom. “Not even on Fifth Avenue.”

She never lost her interest in civil rights, even visiting the White House when when a white mob murdered more than three dozen black people in East St. Louis, Illinois in 1917. And as her business grew, she encouraged political activism. In 1917, she said, “This is the greatest country under the sun,” she told them. “But we must not let our love of country, our patriotic loyalty cause us to abate one whit in our protest against wrong and injustice. We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible.”

She died at her estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, in 1919 of kidney failure related to high blood pressure. Doctors at that time couldn’t effectively treat the condition. When she passed, her estate was worth over a million dollars. Sarah took established models for business and improved on them. This self-made American businesswoman wasn’t ground-breaking in her products and methodology, but her own force of will and skill with people took those basic skills and enhanced them beyond anything even she could have imagined when she started out. Truly self-made, she established herself as a pioneer of the modern black hair-care and cosmetics industry; and set standards that business people of all backgrounds admire and respect. She had tenacity, courage and perseverance. Truly a woman to admire, and it’s very sad that she didn’t get more time to enjoy the well-earned fruits of her labour.