The Marvels of Madam C.J. Walker

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St.

Louis, Missouri, United States.

The early 1900s.

In front of the mirror, Sarah Breedlove took off her headscarf.

She began to pray.

She told God she was on the verge of becoming entirely bald.

She confessed to feeling ashamed.

She'd tried everything.

At Sarah's time, just having hair that on the weekends or for celebrations, you could comb out, pull out, style into some kind of approximation of fashionable because literally 98 99 percent of black women worked outside the home most of the time this is in the u.s

she looked at her hair so short on the sides only a puff remaining above her forehead she asked god what she should do There was such a small window of celebration of your hair and of beauty for working people that to lose your hair, to not even have that, to not even be able to revel in your ability to style your hair into some kind of something that satisfied your own soul, if nothing else,

to have that too go was a blow to self-esteem.

You would feel more insecure.

Like many black women at the time, Breedlove took on domestic labor as a washerwoman.

She earned about $1.50 a day washing for white families.

She longed for a better life for her little daughter Lelia and for herself.

So Breedlove took action.

She mixed potions and went door to door and tried to sell these products.

She created a business for women just like her.

Its mission was clear.

I can help you working class poor women hold on to your hair.

Soon, Sarah Breedlove's hair grew long past her shoulders, and she would transform herself into Madame C.J.

Walker, one of the wealthiest African-American women of her time.

For BBC Radio 4, this is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

I'm Alex von Tunselmann.

I'm a historian, and I'm inspired by the story of Madam C.J.

Walker, who was born only just after the end of slavery, but who fought her way up to become perhaps the wealthiest self-made businesswoman in the United States.

The 4th of January 1906, Denver, Colorado.

Sarah Breedlove had just married her Prince Charming, a newsman called Charles Joseph Walker, known to his friends as CJ.

It was her third marriage, but this time it felt different.

She and CJ believed they had a bright future together, not just in love, but in business.

She was determined this one would work.

Part of the reason she was interested in him, or the part of the reason they initially began talking to each other, was because he had worked in advertising for one of the black newspapers.

This is Noliwe Rooks, L.

Herbert Ballou University Professor in Africana Studies at Brown University and the chair of Africana Studies.

Professor Rooks researched early 20th century black newspapers.

The same name kept cropping up in all the advertisements.

Madam C.J.

Walker.

This is an early period of time where newspapers are trying to cultivate advertising from different businesses and companies and come up with actually advertising copy.

You know, this is the beginning of kind of modern advertising.

How do you craft an ad that will make people think they want to buy this product?

Sarah Breedlove was born into a family near Delta, Louisiana.

Her parents and her older siblings were enslaved on a plantation.

She was the first in her family to be born free.

As a child born in 1867, just a few years after the end of the Civil War that ended up emancipating enslaved people, she was born into a very hopeful period of American democracy, of American history.

After emancipation, the family continued to live in a cabin on the plantation.

The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution ended slavery, gave former slaves full citizenship, and entitled black men, like her father and brothers, to vote.

And the task for that generation of people was really to figure out what those things mean.

What does it mean that you're free?

What does it mean that you're a citizen?

There's no meaning of it for black people in the United States before this period where Sarah first sort of comes to consciousness.

So she was in Louisiana, a place where all of a sudden black people could own land unmolested.

They could open businesses.

Black people could have access to things like loans and credit, something they'd never had before.

So it's a period of great hope and expectation.

There's an exhale.

But young Sarah had a tough start.

By the age of just seven, she'd become an orphan.

She never disclosed the cause of her parents' deaths, though some historians suspect her mother may have died during a cholera epidemic in 1873.

So, with her parents dead, she goes to live with her sister, who never wanted her.

I mean, it was just simply an obligation.

Her older sister, Louvinia, had married a man widely said to be cruel.

Sarah was just old enough to be put to work in the cotton fields and as a laundress.

For black women at this period, the only access you you really had

to help was your own body.

And the parts of your body could vary that you were reliant on.

It could be your hands for you to wash some clothes, your back as you're picking cotton,

your genitals as you bring pleasure.

Aged just 14, Sarah Breedlove married for the first time.

She later said, this was in order to get a home of my own.

Moses Moses McWilliams offered her a way out.

In the 19th century, where all of this is happening, it is hardly uncommon for 14-year-olds to be getting married.

But how much of it was in this romantic sense of love and how much was just a practicality?

Breedlove was 17 when their beloved daughter, Lelia, was born.

Around three years later, though, she was widowed.

It's not known exactly how or when her husband died but now she had to face life as a single mother she moved to st louis there again she worked as a laundress a few years later when lilia was nine years old she moved in with john davis who became her second husband almost immediately she realized this was a mistake she's walking her feet bloody uh she's you know still

washing clothes for $1.50.

She's working hard, but there's some money here.

and he gets in with her right around then and money starts to disappear he's stepping out flaunting the fact of him having other kinds of relationships breed love was still only in her 20s yet already she was losing her hair this was a common problem for poor women of the time and there were many causes Often they didn't have enough protein in their diets.

Poor and rural homes rarely had indoor plumbing, making it difficult to wash hair regularly.

Many suffered conditions such as scalp disease.

Women sometimes tried to mitigate the problem with hair treatments and styling, which did more damage.

I would also just say though, I think part of it is she had stress and alopecia.

I just think she had stress alopecia.

Being with an abusive man, I think, could do it, personally.

Outside her marriage, Breedlove began quietly to see another man, Charles Joseph Walker.

He is working as an advertising executive, which is a high-falutin kind of term for somebody that's trying to get ad sales for black newspapers.

He's somebody who is at the very beginning of understanding commerce, branding, image, and celebrity, and how you turn that into revenue.

Breedlove managed to enroll Lelia in a college.

She herself was in night school.

She left left her husband.

She was trying to build a better life, but she felt socially embarrassed by her thinning hair.

The story that she told in the press and as she would go around in different speaking engagements was that she had been asleep one night and a big black man appeared to her in a dream.

And when he appeared to her in this dream, he gave her the ingredients for her hair product, the one that was going to cure baldness.

Around this time, Breedlove met another black woman specializing in hair care, Annie Turnbow.

Turnbow had developed what she called her wonderful hair grower in Illinois.

Now she was in St.

Louis selling the product door to door.

Breedlove became one of her sales agents.

Turnbow was married to Nelson Pope at the time, but she's often remembered by the surname of her second husband, Aaron Malone.

What Malone is able to do and recruits Sarah and others to do is to figure out how do you start going around in rural areas, more towns, including black people.

So the door-to-door aspect is really Malone's and Sarah just excels at it.

She had to figure out what do I say to these people to make them buy these products when they, like me, don't have any money.

Breedlove turned out to be an exceptional saleswoman.

On the strength of her sales, on the strength of the numbers of agents she was bringing in, Malone started to hear about her, but initially she was just one of the hundred.

She was not favored.

She was not,

she worked her way into a kind of prominence.

She packed up tubs of the wonderful hair grower and went to Denver, Colorado.

There she began to experiment by making her own products as well.

And that's when she starts going a little rogue.

That's when she starts thinking that she knows more.

she and C.J.

Walker.

Now, she never always gave him all the credit for, he apparently was pretty good at marketing, for some of the things that he came up with.

So the tension that starts growing between them, while it's often Madam C.J.

Walker stole her products or stole her way of thinking, they were close in a teacher-student kind of way.

In 1906, Breedlove stopped selling Annie Turnbow's products and distanced herself from her former employer.

Breedlove had her own ideas and her own experience.

Her brothers were barbers, her partner CJ Walker understood marketing and she believed she could run a business herself.

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That year, she married Walker and soon relaunched herself with a new name and a new enterprise.

Sarah Breedlove was now Madame C.J.

Walker, and she began to sell her own wonderful hair grower.

And she starts kind of going, we got the Walker method, you know, but this is when the falling out comes and this is where the ideas of thieving.

But by that point, she had a pretty clear vision of her own company by that point.

Madam C.J.

Walker's great-great-granddaughter, Aalelia Bundles, has spent years researching Walker's life.

She wrote Self-Made, a biography of her ancestor.

When I was growing up, the silverware that we used every day had belonged to Madame Walker.

One could say, you know, I can't say she didn't have a dream, that she didn't have a revelation.

Even Einstein said that part of the theory of relativity came to him in a dream.

Walker mixed formulas in a washtub in the little attic room she rented.

Madame Walker starts putting her face out there, putting her name out there, not being in the service of Annie Malone, but

actually going door to door and selling her products.

That one-to-one kind of touching becomes huge as she begins to make money as a sales force of one.

Walker left Lelia, now a young woman, in charge of her Denver sales while she traveled around the United States, establishing a mail-order business.

Annie Turnbow-Malone was furious.

She denounced Walker publicly in a newspaper, writing, The proof of the value of our work is that we are being imitated and largely by persons whose own hair we have actually grown.

Both products were based on a formula of petroleum, jelly, and sulfur, but neither woman had invented that.

Similar products had been in use for more than a century.

She was definitely building a business while in the employ of Malone and she didn't let Malone know that.

You know, that's not the most ethical of ways of going about, which was the basis of Malone's problems.

You know, like, where did your company,

were you using the resources of my company to build your company?

Walker's great skill was networking through the black community.

In each state she visited, she introduced herself to church leaders and to the officers of local black fraternal organizations.

She arranged demonstrations of her products at churches and lodges.

She trained agents to sell her wonderful hair grower.

Within two years, she established a college for agents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Beauty is beauty.

And for Black women who were at the time coming to understand themselves and their own beauty in a cultural mirror, a cultural mirror that was always reflecting back distortions about who they were relative to the mainstream.

Too loud, too dark,

their hair wasn't right, too nappy as the term was at the time.

Anything that would allow you to feel good about who you were as a black woman was highly valued.

Walker continued to expand her business.

She builds one of the first factories, she calls it My Own Factory on My Own Ground.

In Indianapolis, she incorporated the Madam C.J.

Walker Manufacturing Company of Indiana.

Madam C.J.

Walker and her husband offered their workers a deal.

to the burgeoning group of black women they're trying to recruit to work for her, to claim her method, to give dues to the company, to get training from, to buy their products from, to have exclusivity.

For them what CJ Walker and Madam Walker come up with is a different kind of strategy which is just how we can make you feel and the opportunity to get off your knees to work standing straight up with the people that you want to work with

when Walker entered the market there were already plenty of similar hair care products available But the Walker Company's sales strategy, targeting a growing market of black consumers, opened the door for it to dominate national and international distribution.

Many hair care products advertised in the black press were manufactured by white-owned companies, and some were damaging and highly toxic.

There were other products that were made of lye and runoff and chemicals that were marketed in the black press.

This is where hair loss was huge because these were not meant for black hair.

These companies understood though that black people, black women,

would buy something if it would perhaps address these issues with how they showed up in public, how they looked, what their hair texture looked like.

Aalelia Bundles explains how white-owned companies would market their products.

The advertisements by white companies that were creating before and after pictures, but they weren't photographs, they were pen and ink drawings.

And the before picture was a drawing of a black woman with splotchy skin and hair that was sticking out from her scalp, uncombed.

And the after picture was a European woman, what was then called the Gibson girl of the 1890s, the sort of upswept hair.

Rather than using aspirational images based on white women, many of Walker's adverts used images of herself.

And for me, what that was, was to counter the advertisements by white companies.

One of her adverts is characteristic of her brand.

She has this fancy shawl on.

Her hair is, you know, straight, nicely styled, and she's got some expensive earrings on.

And the title at the top is Learn to Grow Hair and Make Money.

And then it introduces her as the president of the Walker Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis.

And she's just really sort of saying, if your hair is all of these things, is it short?

Is it breaking off?

Is it falling out?

Do you have these diseases?

Write for my booklet, and I will cure it all.

As her business evolved and she became wealthy, Walker realized that she herself made for a great story, and that brought more publicity.

A headline from the St.

Louis Post-Dispatch in 1918 sums it up.

Negro woman, rich hair tonic maker in city.

Mrs.

Sarah J.

Walker, former laundress here, said to be worth million or more, tells of her success.

She's the first black woman business person that I've found that has had the self-regard to turn advertising, the language, the focus of why you should be interested in her company from just my product is better to

my story is better.

She leaned into that sense of celebrity and away from this idea of just kind of I'm a solid businesswoman.

It was what she could buy, how she moved through the world that became part of the marketing for her product.

The Walker System, a regimen of hair care designed to promote scalp health and hair growth, included a vegetable-based shampoo, hair gloss, and salves.

Madam C.J.

Walker also popularized the use of hot straightening combs.

When I was growing up, and for many generations, many people associated Madame Walker with the hot comb, the straightening comb.

Many people incorrectly believed that she had invented the hot comb.

Madame C.J.

Walker adapted the design of her straightening combs slightly, making the teeth wider.

Some called her the D-Kink Queen.

At the time, the idea of well-groomed also often skewed toward closer to white.

All the people of a certain class in black communities, people that you're watching on the stage as actors and in the very early years of film, are fair-skinned biracial.

Walker herself said, I dare say that in the next 10 years, it will be a rare thing to see a kinky head of hair, and it will not be straight either.

Skewing straighter hair.

The straightening comb gets you much further down the road.

Kinky was, I think, the context for understanding it would have to do with the color politics in black communities.

It's a controversial part of Walker's legacy.

Some black people today feel strongly about embracing their hair's natural texture and see artificial straightening as damaging both to the hair and to the culture, perpetuating ideas that straight hair is more elegant and professional.

But the thing is, I've never seen her in her training materials, in her advertisements, talk about her company is a hair straightening company.

There's a whole majority of the career that takes place before the straightening comb even hits the U.S.

in any way.

What you hear her talk about is the ability for black women to make money and the health, get rid of eczema, get rid of these diseases.

And so that's why to reduce her to someone who straightens hair is just inaccurate.

The straightening comb was introduced, but you wouldn't know it.

That was not what she stood on.

I don't know who started that.

It's just simply not true.

This isn't just a modern concern.

Walker addressed it herself, telling a newspaper, let me correct the erroneous impression held by some that I claim to straighten hair.

I deplore such impressions because I have always held myself out as a hair culturalist.

I grow hair.

The Madam C.J.

Walker Manufacturing Company trained and paid black women as agents at a time when many of the other jobs opened to them were physically exhausting and dangerous.

Between agriculture and domestic work, till the 1940s, this is the employment that most black women following the end of the Civil War were engaged in, agriculture and domestic work.

Working as a sales agent for cosmetics offered these women a measure of independence.

The intervention is they make it possible for black women to have a career of dignity on their own terms.

It is safe to say that she and others at the Walker Company trained thousands of African-American women.

And we, you know, I can see it even now when I'm making speeches and someone will come up to me and say, my grandmother was a Walker agent and I have the diploma.

And then she bought real estate and that allowed us to be educated.

Walker rewarded agents who sold well and also those who worked for their communities.

In 1917 when she had this convention, first convention of her national sales agents, she gave prizes not just to the women who sold the most products, but to the women who had contributed the most to charity.

in their community.

So she was saying, you are leaders, you need to use this prosperity that you have to help others.

She told them during her keynote speech, I want you as Walker agents to let others know that we care not just about ourselves, but about others.

And at the end of the convention, they sent a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson urging him to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime.

Walker made a lot of money and lived a lavish lifestyle, building herself a 34-room mansion just outside New York.

Some of her friends estimated her assets were a cool million, or nearly that.

Walker said, I'm not a millionaire, but I hope to be someday, not because of the money, but because I could do so much more to help my race.

She helped fund the Black YMCA building in Indianapolis.

She provided funding for students at several black universities, as well as helping to fund orphanages, schools, and retirement homes.

And a long line of a few people who for me start with Harriet Tubman and go through some other folks centered the care,

support, and safety of black women and

children.

That was what was most central to their political and economic views and values.

Walker was now a celebrity.

She continued to tour the United States, speaking, recruiting, and teaching hair care, though her doctors advised her to take it easy.

It is so quintessentially black women and so, so much a part of our undoing in history and in the present to not find,

believe, insist that when you need to rest and take care of yourself, that that's what you're going to prioritize.

She died at home near New York at the age of just 51.

From being the first person in her family born free from slavery, she'd worked her way up to high society and left over a million dollars in assets.

Madam C.J.

Walker is an amazing American figure and also a complicated one.

There's so few, you could not even fill a full class with people who start out from the lower socioeconomic levels and make such a huge impact on who black women can believe themselves to be, to dream themselves to be.

And better or worse, Walker is one of those folks.

I'm Rory Stewart and I want to talk about heroes.

When I was a child, I imagined a heroic future for myself in which I would achieve great things and die sacrificing my life for a noble cause before I was 30.

But my experiences in the Middle East and in politics showed me that there was something deeply wrong with my idea of heroism.

From BBC Radio 4, my podcast, The Long History of Heroism, explores ideas of what it meant to be a hero through time.

How have these ideas changed?

Who are the heroes we need today?

Listen to Rory Stewart, The Long History of Heroism, first on BBC Sounds.

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