Madam C. J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove to formerly enslaved parents two years after the Civil War, went from washing clothes for a living to heading one of the most successful Black-owned businesses in the United States. Her company sold hair-care products through thousands of trained Black women agents, giving them an independent income outside domestic service, and she used her fortune and fame to fund Black institutions and the campaign against lynching.
At a Glance
- Born
- 23 December 1867, near Delta, Louisiana
- Died
- 25 May 1919, Irvington, New York
- Birth name
- Sarah Breedlove
- Known for
- Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company; a national network of trained Black women sales agents; Lelia College; philanthropy for the NAACP, the YMCA, and Black schools
- Fields
- Enterprise · Organizing
- Era
- Turn of the Century
Early Life
Sarah Breedlove was born on 23 December 1867 on a cotton plantation near Delta, in Madison Parish, Louisiana, across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg. Her parents, Owen and Minerva Breedlove, had been enslaved on the same plantation; Sarah was the first of their children born after emancipation. Both parents died by the time she was about seven, and she moved with her older sister, Louvenia, to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where she worked as a domestic servant.
She married Moses McWilliams at about 14, by her biographer’s account to escape an abusive household, and gave birth to a daughter, Lelia, in 1885. Moses McWilliams died around 1887, and the young widow moved to St. Louis, where her brothers worked as barbers. There she worked as a laundress for low daily wages, sent Lelia to public school, and became active in St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church and in the city’s Black women’s clubs, where she saw educated, prosperous Black women she resolved to emulate. A second marriage, to John Davis, ended in separation.
Life and Work
Like many women of the time who lacked indoor plumbing and washed infrequently, Breedlove suffered from scalp ailments and hair loss. Around 1904 she began using products made by Annie Turnbo (later Annie Turnbo Malone), a Black entrepreneur whose Poro company was growing in St. Louis, and became one of Turnbo’s sales agents. In 1905 she moved to Denver, Colorado, where she worked as a cook and developed her own scalp treatment. In January 1906 she married Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper sales agent, and began marketing her product as Madam C. J. Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower. The rivalry with Turnbo, who accused her of copying the Poro formula, lasted for years.
Walker and her husband traveled across the South and East demonstrating the “Walker System” of scalp preparations, shampoo, and heated metal combs, and selling by mail order. In 1908 she and Lelia opened a base in Pittsburgh, where they established Lelia College to train “hair culturists.” In 1910 Walker moved her headquarters to Indianapolis, a railroad hub, and built a factory, laboratory, and beauty school there. Her marriage to C. J. Walker ended in divorce a few years later, but she kept his name as her brand.
The company’s central innovation was its sales force. Walker recruited and trained thousands of Black women as agents who sold products door to door and ran salons, earning far more than they could as domestic workers or farm laborers. She organized them into local clubs and a national association, held annual conventions beginning in 1917, and rewarded agents for charitable work in their communities as well as for sales. In 1912 she attended the National Negro Business League convention in Chicago; when Booker T. Washington declined to recognize her from the floor, she rose and spoke anyway, describing her rise from the cotton fields to the washtub to manufacturing.
Walker gave generously and publicly. In 1911 she pledged $1,000 toward a YMCA for Black men in Indianapolis, and she funded scholarships for students at Tuskegee Institute and supported other Black schools and charities. After the East St. Louis massacre of 1917 she joined a Harlem delegation that went to the White House to urge President Woodrow Wilson to support anti-lynching legislation; the president declined to see them. In 1919 she pledged $5,000 to the NAACP’s anti-lynching fund. In 1916 she moved to Harlem, and in Irvington, New York, she built Villa Lewaro, a Hudson River mansion designed by the Black architect Vertner Woodson Tandy and completed in 1918, intended to show what a Black woman could achieve.
Legacy
Walker died of kidney failure brought on by hypertension at Villa Lewaro on 25 May 1919, at 51. Her daughter, who had taken the name A’Lelia Walker, succeeded her as head of the company and became a patron of the Harlem Renaissance. The Madam Walker Theatre building in Indianapolis, completed in 1927 as the company’s headquarters, and Villa Lewaro are both National Historic Landmarks. The U.S. Postal Service honored her with a Black Heritage series stamp in 1998.
Walker is widely described as the first self-made female millionaire in the United States, but the claim is disputed. Her great-great-granddaughter and biographer, A’Lelia Bundles, estimates the value of her personal estate at death at between $600,000 and $700,000, though the business itself was worth more; Walker herself did not claim to be a millionaire, and other women of the era, including her rival Annie Turnbo Malone, built fortunes of comparable size. What is not in dispute is the scale of what she built: a national enterprise owned by a Black woman, staffed by Black women, and used to finance Black political and civic life. Historians have also examined the tension in her legacy between self-help and the beauty standards her products served, while noting that she presented her system as scalp care and hair growth rather than as hair straightening.
Walker built a national business owned and staffed by Black women and used its profits and networks to fund Black civic and political life. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 23 December 1867 Born Sarah Breedlove near Delta, Louisiana.
- 1885 Daughter Lelia (later A’Lelia Walker) is born.
- c. 1888 Moves to St. Louis and works as a laundress.
- 1905 Moves to Denver and develops her own scalp treatment.
- January 1906 Marries Charles Joseph Walker; launches Madam C. J. Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.
- 1908 Opens Lelia College in Pittsburgh to train hair culturists.
- 1910 Moves the company’s headquarters and factory to Indianapolis.
- 1912 Addresses the National Negro Business League convention in Chicago.
- 1919 Pledges $5,000 to the NAACP’s anti-lynching fund.
- 25 May 1919 Dies at Villa Lewaro in Irvington, New York.
Sources and Further Reading
- A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (New York: Scribner, 2001).
- Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
- Library of Congress, “From Rags to Riches,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin (May 2001). Link
- Indiana Historical Society, Madam C. J. Walker Papers, collection guide. Link
- National Women’s History Museum, “Madam C. J. Walker.” Link
Related on Black-History.com
Cite this page
- MLA
- “Madam C. J. Walker.” Black-History.com, 30 Sept. 2026, https://black-history.com/people/madam-cj-walker/.
- APA
- Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). Madam C. J. Walker. Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/people/madam-cj-walker/
- Chicago
- Black-History.com Editors. “Madam C. J. Walker.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/people/madam-cj-walker/.
By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.