Category: Articles

The following is a brief story of a great transformation, by a woman who started to question her reality at a very young age.

(Photo Credit: James F. Gibson. Library of Congress) As a tiny child Sarah Breedlove worked alongside her people from dawn to dust, experiencing the blistered feet and bloody hands of slave life in Mississippi cotton fields.

Before she was six, both her parents had died. Sarah’s older sister cared for her, and although slavery had been outlawed, the fears and hatred of whites against blacks became more brutal. Sarah herself watched as a school for black children was burned to the ground by hateful white men.
Her fearsome environment included poor shelter, very little food, unpredictable ambushes and the torture and lynching of black men asking for justice.

Before she was ten, she was working for whites in a beautiful mansion, spending twelve-hour days scrubbing sheets, towels, tablecloths and clothing in tubs filled with lye and boiling water. Hard labor didn't drag her down; she was spirited and filled with imagination. As she looked upon the prosperity and beauty of the home she served, she found herself dreaming of a better life.

Sarah married at the age of fourteen. Her husband died before she was twenty, leaving her with baby Lelia, whom she called her great wealth.

Early in 1889, with her three-year-old, Sarah moved from Mississippi to St. Louis. She found a room in the only place black people were allowed, a tenement neighborhood rich with ragtime music but otherwise impoverished and known for stabbings and murders. To support herself and her little girl, she worked as a laundress. At her church she learned rudimentary reading and writing and was able to find loving care for Lelia, enrolling her in school and putting aside money for her future college education.

“I was at my washtubs one morning with a heavy wash before me,” Sarah is quoted as saying. “As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself, ‘What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?’ With all my thinking I couldn’t see how I was going to better my condition.”

Moving often in a neighborhood filled with tragedies and abuse, she made a decision to reinvent herself, first by erasing the memories and experiences of painful relationships. Her well-loved daughter had reached sixteen – tall, beautiful, and friendly. But Sarah’s hair started falling out. Growing nearly bald, as did most black women in similar circumstances, she searched relentlessly for a remedy.

One night Sarah had a dream. A tall black man appeared and gave her a formula that would re-grow her hair. She mixed the formulation as she had been told. Her hair re-grew faster than she had lost it, and as she shared her remedy with neighbors, she decided to sell it.

This spirited ebony being who had lived and labored in harsh situations all her life sold her products with passion and gusto. She appealed to the hearts and souls of oppressed people who were pleased with genuine good results and delighted to see one of their own take on the world. She faced the ridicule of whites and the doubts and prejudices of black men, eventually hiring and training more than 25,000 people, mostly black women. She taught them to groom themselves, to help people by nourishing and treating their scalps, to speak and sell effectively, and to become inventors and business people themselves. Carefully surrounding herself with loyal workers, well-trained in hair and beauty care and capable in business, she opened her business and factories – "on her own ground", as she liked to say - in several states, traveling frequently for public speaking.

Sarah Breedlove preferred to be known as Madam C.J. Walker. By 1910 she had founded two beauty schools, one in Pittsburgh and the second in Indianapolis, which she named the Lelia College of Beauty. She became the first black woman millionaire in the United States, complete with elegant clothing, a gorgeous twenty-room mansion in upstate New York, and her own cars.

From the beginning of her successes, Madam Walker made off-the-charts donations to charities for black orphans, the NAACP, the YMCA, schools, and the Tuskegee Institute. No other business person, black or white, was so bent on helping others, by donating money and through education.

In 1912 she spoke passionately before the National Negro Business League (a men’s organization, at that time leery of a powerful woman). Against their wishes, she stood up and spoke: “I feel that I am in a business that is a credit to the womanhood of our race . . . . I am not ashamed of my past. I am not ashamed of my humble beginning. Don’t think because you have to bend down in the wash tub that you are any less a lady! Everybody told me I was making a mistake by going into this business, but I know how to grow hair as well as I know how to grow cotton!

“Now my object in life is not simply to make money for myself or to spend it on myself in dressing or running around in an automobile. I love to use a part of what I make in trying to help others. . . . The real ambition of my life, the all-absorbing idea which I hope to accomplish is to build an industrial school in Africa. By the help of God and the cooperation of my people in this country, I am going to build a Tuskegee Institute in Africa!”

As always, Madam Walker did just what she intended. When she passed in 1919, she had willed $100,000 to build a school for girls in Africa.

She left her amazing empire to her daughter, and help and inspiration to endless numbers of people.

© Jean Isaacs 2009

References:
On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker by A’Lelia Bundles
Her Dream of Dreams, The Rise and Triumph of Madam C.J. Walker by Beverly Lowry