Madam C.J. Walker
Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 on a Delta, Louisiana plantation, this daughter of former slaves transformed herself from an uneducated farm laborer and laundress into one of the twentieth century’s most successful, self-made women entrepreneurs. Her life as a businesswoman and philanthropist is documented in a Harvard Business School case study. Madam Walker is one of the few women in the National Business Hall of Fame at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.
Orphaned at age seven, she often said, "I got my start by giving myself a start." After the death of her first husband, she and her daughter Lelia (later know as A’Lelia Walker, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance), moved to St. Louis where she worked as a laundress for as little as $1.50 a day and began experimenting with the hair care products formulas that eventually would launch her business.
In 1910, she and her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, moved to Indianapolis, where she established her company headquarters. During most of the next decade she traveled throughout the U.S., the Caribbean and Central America developing a network of sales agents. Just before she died at her Irvington-on-Hudson, New York mansion in May 1919, she pledged $5,000 to the NAACP’s anti-lynching fund.
