Madam C. J. Walker Trailblazing Entrepreneur, Philanthropist and Activist

Madam C.J. Walker (born Sarah Breedlove) was an African American Entrepreneur, philanthropist and social activist.  She was a self-made millionaire at a time when this would be unheard of.  She was orphaned at the age of seven and moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, at the age of 10 to live with her sister and her brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. As a child she worked as a domestic servant. “I had little or no opportunity when I started out in life, having been left an orphan and being without mother or father since I was seven years of age,” she often recounted. She had only three months of formal education, which she learned during Sunday school literacy lessons at the church she attended.

In 1882, at the age of 14, Sarah married to escape abuse from her brother-in-law. She and her husband had one daughter.  Her husband passed away in 1897.  In January 1906, Sarah married again to Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper advertising salesman she had known in St. Louis, Missouri. and became known as Madam C. J. Walker.

What didn’t Madam C.J. do?  She always worked to support her family.  She was determined to make enough money to provide her daughter with formal education.  She worked as a laundress and then in 1904, she became a commissioned sales agent selling products for Annie Malone, an African-American hair-care entrepreneur.  While working for Malone, Sarah began to take her new knowledge and develop her own product line. The two women would eventually become fierce competitors. After 1906, Sarah and her husband traveled throughout the southern and eastern United States to expand the business. In 1910, Walker established a new base in Indianapolis—the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company.  Her daughter persuaded her to establish an office and beauty salon in New York City's growing Harlem neighborhood in 1913 and it became a center of African-American culture.

Between 1911 and 1919, during the height of her career, Walker and her company employed several thousand women as sales agents for its products. By 1917, the company claimed to have trained nearly 20,000 women.[

As Walker's wealth and notoriety increased, she became more vocal about her views. In 1912, Walker addressed an annual gathering of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) from the convention floor, where she declared: "I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there, I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground." The following year she addressed convention-goers from the podium as a keynote speaker.

She helped raise funds to establish a branch of YMCA , contributed scholarship funds to the Tuskegee Institute, supported Indianapolis's Flanner House and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church; Mary McLeod Bethune's Daytona Education and Industrial School for Negro Girls (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) in Daytona Beach, Florida; the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina; and the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Georgia. Walker was also a patron of the arts.[

Now a successful businesswoman, in 1917, Walker commissioned Vertner Tandy, the first licensed black architect in New York City and a founding member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, to design her house in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Walker intended for Villa Lewaro, to become a gathering place for community leaders and to inspire other African Americans to pursue their dreams. She moved into the house in May 1918 and hosted an opening event to honor Emmett Jay Scott, at that time the Assistant Secretary for Negro Affairs of the U.S. Department of War.[9]

In 1917, she joined the executive committee of New York chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), from 1917 until her death she was a member of the Committee of Management of the Harlem YWCA, influencing development of training in beauty skills to young women by the organization.

Profits from her business significantly impacted Walker's contributions to her political and philanthropic interests. Before her death in 1919, Walker pledged $5,000 (the equivalent of about $93,000 today) to the NAACP's anti-lynching fund, the largest gift from an individual that the NAACP had ever received up to then. Her will directed two-thirds of future net profits of her estate to charity.

Walker died on May 25, 1919, at the age of 51.  According to Walker's obituary in The New York Times, "she said herself two years ago [in 1917] that she was not yet a millionaire, but hoped to be some time, not that she wanted the money for herself, but for the good she could do with it.”  Imagine what could have been had she lived.  She was an amazing champion.