Black History: Madam C.J. Walker, America's First Female Millionaire. What is Black Beauty?

Madame C.J. Walker (1867-1919) is cited as America's first female millionaire. The daughter of slaves and former washerwoman is the American Dream. Indeed, this is a Horatio Alger rags to riches story of fierce determination, struggle, goal setting, and perfect execution that surpassed all imagination. Still, the Legacy of Madame C.J. Walker will always telegraph heated debate - challenging the State of Black Beauty.

Sarah Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867 at Delta, Louisiana to former slaves, Owen and Minerva Breedlove. The young girl was orphaned at age 7, due to a raging yellow-fever epidemic in the Deep South that claimed her parent's lives. In order to escape the carnage, Sarah and her sister, Louvenia migrated across the Mississippi River to Vicksburg, MS, alternating blazing cotton fieldwork with tedious laundering employment.

Sadly, the heartache that the duo dreamed to leave behind in Louisiana transformed into another form of brutality. Louvenia's husband, William Powell lashed, whipped, and throttled Sarah Breedlove at every opportunity. The youngster particularly incensed this raging terror with any reference to schooling. Education was trivial for a poor Black Southern family with another baby on the way:

"College? What the hell a li'l n---- gal gon' do in college? One o' them yallow n--- from up north fillin' you up with nonsense, wastin' yo time. You think you read 'nuff, you won't be a n--- no mo? N--- can't hardly feed themselves, but they talkin' 'bout college an' walkin 'round dressed like they got a hunnert dollers in they pocket, thinkin' they's white folks." (Due, 63)

The young woman was thoroughly beaten following this fierce rant. The tirade eerily paralleled the ironies of Black Beauty, C.J. Walker's eventual Legacy, and the machinations of Black America at-large.

Sarah noted that her sister's cryptic allegiance stood firmly behind her abusive husband. The young woman met and married the modest fish fry hawking Moses McWilliams. The arrangement has been referenced more so as a means to escape Powell's home and abuse - rather than that of True Love.

Sarah Breedlove McWilliams was 14.

At the very moment that Mrs. McWilliams began to warm to her new husband and birth their daughter, Leila - he was dead. Moses McWilliams was brutally murdered and tossed from the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River in cold blood by a white mob - incensed over the man's strong lobbying efforts for equal wages.

Sarah was on the move - yet again. Mrs. McWilliams and Leila migrated upriver to St. Louis, Missouri in order to ease the pain and start anew at the Big City. Sarah worked tirelessly as a single mother washerwoman to feed her family, save, and educate her daughter upon a meager $1.50 in daily earnings. She began to supplement these wages as a sales agent for Annie Malone's beauty products in the Greater St. Louis area.

McWilliams was also to remarry and divorce John Davis from 1894-1903.

The stress and limited sanitary conditions of the 1890's tormented McWilliams' scalp with severe damage - causing hair loss. Our budding entrepreneur began to experiment with various store brands, everyday home products, and the minimal knowledge she had acquired of Malone's beauty production to remedy the situation. The nascent Pillar of Industry alludes to a dream sequence where the sulfur element is depicted as the primary secret ingredient critical to her dogged pursuit of healthy hair.

Sarah McWilliams began to peddle her Hair Grower from door-to-door with limited success. Her marketing and interpersonal salesmanship skills were indeed, weak. The sales arrived courtesy of her straightened, luscious hair that captivated household, rather than her stammering sales pitch.

In 1905, McWilliams met a suave, debonair newspaperman named Charles Joseph Walker. The silver-tongued ladies man had a penchant for slick marketing and re calibrated the Beauty organization with passionate seminars, palatable glassware presentation, and glossy circulars.

Charles Walker was the straw that stirred the drink and Walker's sizzle, combined with McWilliams' fine, substantive product emerged as the perfectly legal Bonnie and Clyde.

The couple married, moved to Denver, and rocked the core of the caricatured white-male, penguin Top-Hat business society. Sarah McWilliams rechristened herself as the elegant Madam C.J. Walker and the Barnstorming for Beauty Tour led her throughout the Deep South, East Coast, Midwest, and Caribbean islands. The Hair Grower exploded into an uber efficient, vertically integrated operation of beauty parlors, cosmetology schools, and legions of sales agents.

The C.J. Walker brand was to ultimately rest at its Indianapolis headquarters, with Leila College in Pittsburgh - arranged to educate "hair culturists." The spectacular ascension of this iron-willed businesswoman ruined her third marriage.

The Walkers separated in 1910. The icon was to then relocate to New York City in 1916 - delegating Madame C.J. Walker operational control in Indianapolis to her attorney, F.B. Ransom and factory forelady, Alice Kelly. The millionaire quickly emerged as a hallmark upon Harlem's social circuit and befriended Vertner Woodson Tandy, the first Black registered architect of New York State and a Founding Jewel of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated.

Tandy designed her sweeping Villa Lewaro estate in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York - a wealthy area populated by the dynastic Rockefeller and Gould families. The grandiose, manicured quarters paralleled her unmatched philanthropy to the NAACP, anti-lynching movements, and various civil rights issues.

The poor, Southern washerwoman transformed herself into the acclaimed Madam C.J. Walker - sophisticated diva and benefactor. Our self-made millionaire justified the extravagance and pomp as a means to showcase the possibilities afforded multitudes of downtrodden African American woman through sheer determination and Faith. Still, the fancy clothes, precise Standard English diction, and straightened permanent hair remain a curious harbinger of Black Scholar Debate:

What is Black Beauty? What is Acting White?

We will allow the reader to formulate his very own thesis concerning these pertinent issues.

Madam C.J. Walker died on May 25, 1919 at her estate, as a result of hypertension complications. The driven businesswoman exhausted herself until the very end, and is acknowledged as America's first self-made, female millionaire.

Sources:
Tananarive Due, The Black Rose, www.tananarivedue.com
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Seven Jewels, http://www.alpha-phi-alpha.com
Black Inventor Online Museum, Madam C.J. Walker, www.blackinventor.com