Sarah Breedlove Walker

Sarah Breedlove Walker was born on December 23, 1867 in Louisiana, the daughter of Owen and Minerva  Breedlove,  recently freed slaves.  Sarah, who was their fifth child, was the first in her family to be born free.  She became an orphan at the age of seven and went to live with her sister in Mississippi.  Presumably she picked cotton and did household work to earn her keep. 

At age 14, to escape both her oppressive working environment and frequent mistreatment by her brother in law, she married Moses McWilliams.  In 1885 she gave birth to a beautiful daughter, A’Lelia. Two years later Moses was murdered by a white lynch mob and Sara and her daughter moved to St.Louis.  She found work as a washerwoman earning $1.50 a day, which was enough to send A’Lelia to public school.  Sara herself attended night school when she could. While in St. Louis Sarah met her second husband, Charles J. Walker, who was in advertising and later assisted her in promoting her business.

In 1905 she had dream that revealed to her a formula of pomade to straighten Negro hair. The idea was first conceived in Cherry Creek, a prosperous mining town in Denver CO.  Sarah traveled from Pueblo, to Trinidad, to Colorado Springs and back to Denver selling her product. She mixed the ingredients herself in washtubs and sold it door to door.  She was very successful and “The Walker Method” and “Madam C.J Walker”were born.  She built a factory, recruited sales agents who dressed in starched white shirts and long black skirts taking the Walker products to homes all over the U.S. and the Caribbean. 

Sarah organized her 3,000 employees into social and philanthropic clubs, held national conventions that were attended by delegates from these clubs.  She rewarded her employees for high sales and those who did the most charity work.

By 1910 Sarah was a millionaire and one of the best known black women in America.  She made large donations to Black and Christian charities and endowed scholarships for women at Tuskegee Institute, She founded philanthropies that included educational scholarships and donations to homes for the elderly, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Conference on Lynching, among other organizations focused on improving the lives of African-Americans. She also donated the largest amount of money by an African-American toward the construction of an Indianapolis YMCA in 1913.