Sarah Breedlove, better known as Madam C.J. Walker opened the door for black women to be entrepreneurs. She built self-efficiency creating hair products for African American hair care earning the title of being a self-made millionaire.
Born in 1867, Madam C.J. Walker was the first in her family to be born free. Following the death of her parents, Walker was sent to live with her sister and brother in law in which the family moved to Vicksburg Mississippi. At just fourteen years old to get away from the abuse of her brother in law and her harsh workplace, Madam C.J. Walker would marry a man named Moses McWilliams and later give birth to her daughter, A’Leila Walker.
Moses McWilliams died in 1887, causing Madam C.J. Walker to move with her two brothers in St.Louis who were barbers at the time. While in St. Louis Walker would take night school classes and worked as a washerwoman, earning $1.50 a day, just enough to send her daughter to public school.
In the 1890s, Walker experienced a scalp ailment that caused her to lose the majority of her hair. She went to her brothers for guidance and furthermore explored different avenues regarding numerous at-home remedies and in-store products. In 1905 Walker moved to Denver as a business specialist for Malone, at that point wedded her third spouse, Charles Joseph Walker, subsequent to changing her name to “Madam” C. J. Walker. Walker established her own business and started selling Madam Walker’s ‘Wonderful Hair Grower.’ A formula she created to help condition and heal the scalp.
In 1907 Madam C.J. Walker and her husband went around the South and Southeast advancing her products and giving demonstrations of her “Walker Method.” Walker promoted her own recipe for grease and the utilization of hot combs. As benefits kept on developing, Walker opened a beauty school and factory school in Pittsburgh. By 1910, Walker moved her business to Indianapolis, leaving the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company to become overly successful. Walker totaled profits that equaled up to seven million dollars. A persistent trailblazer, Walker gave the biggest donation of cash by an African American toward the development of an Indianapolis YMCA in 1913.
As her business kept on developing, in 1917, Her Madam C. J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America show in Philadelphia more likely than not been one of the primary national meetings of businesswomen in the country. Walker utilized the social occasion not exclusively to compensate her specialists for their business achievement but to also educate and encourage their involvement in political activism.
When Walker passed in 1919, when she passed, she would be remembered and crowned as a self-made millionaire, a pioneer for African American hair care beauty care products, and one of the hardest working women to touch this Earth.
“I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come, get up and make them.” – Madam C.J. Walker