Short Stuff: Madam C.J. Walker

Join us today as we dive into the story of the first female self-made millionaire, Madam C.J. Walker.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck,
Dave's here in spirit, Jerry's here in spirit. Um who
else is here in spirit? We can't say because we
can't see spirits, because we're among the living. This is
short stuff. Let's go. This is the story of Madam C. J. Walker,
who Guinness Book of World's Record says is the first

(00:26):
self made, the female millionaire in the world. Yeah, not
African American female or woman millionaire. Um, straight up, first
woman in America to be a millionaire. It's through through
her own work and hard, hard labor. That's right. She

(00:48):
has a very cool, more assistinct. Put she's a very
cool story. She was a daughter of sharecroppers and uh
ended up building this huge brand which employed and empowered
many hundreds of women. UM. Oxtavia Spencer I think played
her in Self Made. It was a mini series on
Netflix recently. And she was born Sarah Breedlove on a

(01:10):
cotton plantation in eighteen sixty seven, one of five kids.
It's a great name too. I love that name, breed Love.
Sarah breed Love in particular has a nice rain, doesn't it.
If you're wondering why she c. J. Walker will get
to that. But in Louisiana, she was you know, she
struggled in life. She was an orphan by the age

(01:31):
of seven and then went to live with her older sister, Louvinia,
another very nice name, and they settled in Mississippi and Vicksburg, Mississippi,
where she did domestic work and worked in the cotton fields. Yeah.
And I mean like, she was born so close to
slavery that she was the first child in her family,

(01:51):
UM who was born free. Like that's how that's how
recent slavery UM was was a thing. So her lot
in life wasn't particularly much better because it was just
so close to the slave era. UM And when she
was fourteen, as a matter of fact, she got married
to a man named Moses McWilliams um at least in

(02:13):
part to escape her home life. Basically, Yeah, her brother
in law apparently was not a very nice guy and
mistreated her, So she got out of there with Moses
and had a daughter name I guess Lelia or Lilia,
very pretty name, l E. L I A. I think
she later changed her name to put an A on

(02:36):
the front of it and was a Lilia and her
husband sadly died in seven. So she moved to St. Louis,
where her brothers lived. They were barber's there and started
earning a money doing laundry, making about a buck fifty
a day. So You're like, Okay, where where are we
going to get to the fact that she's a self
made person? Like she's you know, starting to get up

(02:57):
there in years she's all she's like in her and
he's now she's making a dollar fifty a day, which
is enough to put her kids through school. But I
looked and as far as the West Saga inflation calculator says,
that's still only forty three dollars a day in today's money.
And I feel like we're missing something, Chuck. I think
that that's not a full picture of of, you know,

(03:22):
what money was worth. I think things were just cheaper.
I think life was just less expensive at other times
in American and probably world history than it is today.
I think you're right. You want to take a break, regroup,
and then talk about the real beginning of Madam C. J. Walker. Okay, alright, Chuck.

(04:08):
So we said that Madam C. J. Walker was the
first self made woman millionaire in the United States, She's
an African American woman who was born almost into slavery
uh in the South Um. But she became self made
because she ran into a problem in the eight nineties.
Her hair started falling out, and I could not find

(04:29):
what the cause of her hair loss, um was. I
saw a scalp condition almost everywhere. That made me suspect
that as somebody said scalp condition, and everybody else found
that same source, but I couldn't find an actual like um,
you know, diagnosed medical condition. But she started losing her hair,
and she found out in pretty quick order that there

(04:52):
was not a lot of help out there for her
to stop her hair loss or possibly regrow hair, so
she tried to figure it out herself. Yeah, I mean,
I think the reason her hair was falling out was
because there were not products designed specifically for women's hair
or hair of anyone with from African descent. So it
was a market catered to Caucasian styled hair and so

(05:18):
their their hair would suffer as a result. So she
there were a few products out there. She went to
one line um POORO Hair p O r O, which
was created by Annie turnbou Malone, another Black entrepreneur and
it helped some. But and she even sold this stuff
for about a year and a half. But the whole
time she was like, I need to come up with

(05:38):
my own formula here to help myself and to help others. Yeah. So, Um,
about a decade or so later, she got married a
second time to a man named Charles Joseph Walker, UM,
hence the C. J. Walker, And he was in sales.
He was a kind of a marketing whiz, and two

(06:00):
of them together became what you would probably refer to
as an early power couple. Basically, they really complimented and
rounded out one another's um strengths, and they they formed
basically this this hair care empire. At the very beginning
of this hair care empire, um, and Sarah adopted the

(06:21):
name Madam C. J. Walker And that's where that the
whole thing began. Yeah, and it was called Madam C. J.
Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower. Right, I mean, talk about marketing
with let's just call it what it is and what
it does right out of the gate, it makes me
want to throw my money at her, take my money.
So she founded this company in nineteen o six, and

(06:41):
there was no national distribution chain, so they hit the road.
They traveled all around the South for about a year
and a half. As Mark Cuban would say, just hustling,
selling door to door, doing it the hard way, doing
demos and demons and uh, in front of people so
they knew what it did. A lot of times, We'll
go to churches to do this. And she had these
before and after photos. Again great marketing and these and

(07:05):
these women started buying it up. It was fifty cents
and ten, and they said, uh, we love this stuff,
We love that there's a product for us. UM And
she used to say, there would be no hair growing
industry if I hadn't invented it. Right. The thing is, though,
is like she wasn't selling, she wasn't a huckster. She
actually had um a recipe that was lost in its

(07:29):
exactness to time. But this stuff actually did apparently regrow
hair or at least all hair loss. So I'm not
sure where they found it, but they somebody documented that
the ingredients included UM, coconut oil, beeswax, patrol adam, which
I guess is like UM petroleum jelly today, copper sulfate,

(07:51):
and precipitated sulfur. And it had a nice violet scent,
which I like. I don't think it's used quite as
as often as it should be. Um. But the the
key ingredient, the active ingredient, and this thing was sulfur.
That that was probably what was working and causing women
to say, this stuff actually works, I want some more. Yeah.

(08:11):
And she had a whole system. She had a vegetable
based shampoo. Um. She had something called Glossy in which
smoothed out hair uh that was pressed with a hot comb.
And so she had a little you know, a hair
care beauty line basically going in the early nineteen hundreds
to the tune of about a hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a year in today dollars by nineteen o eight,

(08:32):
which is some pretty good money. Yeah. And we should
say there's one thing that I think this um this
house stuff works article just kind of walks right past,
and that is that when you used her Walker system,
you were you were an African American or Black woman
who was making your hair a kin to a white

(08:52):
woman's hair do. And there was a period in time
in black history, especially in like the nineteen sixties and seventies,
where Madam Walker was not particularly thought of that highly
because she had made an empire built on um emulating
Caucasian beauty. And it wasn't until you know, years later

(09:14):
that Um she finally was seen for for what what
she was, which was a downright radical feminist and civil
rights activists who who couldn't read or write from what
I saw her entire life. And yet Um made a
really amazing living for herself but also empowered other Black
women to be more than just you know, domestic help

(09:38):
or laborers. You know, yeah, it's a great story. Um.
She divorced Walker in nineteen twelve, moved to Indianapolis, and
then in the position she was in with that kind
of money and that kind of sort of growing fame,
started kind of buddying up with some of the more
well healed activists in the country like Mary McLoud, Betune

(09:58):
and book or T. Washington. Um moved to Harlem, which
was where you wanted to be if you wanted to
be at the center of black culture in the early
nineteen hundreds, and she had her daughter opened up a salon.
It was a very nice salon, parquet floors and velvet
seats and grand piano in the lobby. It was really
really kind of a fine place. Yeah. Apparently in um

(10:22):
the teens the nineteen she had something like twenty thousand
to forty thousand women beauty culturists working for her, tens
of thousands of women, and she held a convention um,
the first convention of her beauty culturists, her agents UM
running around selling her stuff UM in Philadelphia, I believe.

(10:44):
And one of the things that she was noted for
was when she gave speeches. It was a lot more
or about a lot more than just you know, pumping
them up to go seller product. It was about them
demanding you know, better treatment, to be treated like like
human beings, UM, to demand a better, more socially just
world like. Her speeches were peppered with that that kind

(11:05):
of empowerment, telling women, black women no less at you know,
in the early twentieth century, that that they should expect
to be treated better than they were by by men
of all races and and by the white race in particular,
which is again it's just radical, there's no other way
to put it. At the time. In nineteen eighteen, she
moved to Villa Lawairo, a mansion in Irvington on the

(11:29):
Hudson about forty five minutes north of Manhattan. And this
place was a legit mansion like thirty four rooms. It
was huge and an amazing place. It was designed by
an African American architect name uh Vertner Woodson Tandy, great name.
What sad is UM? You know she was able to
enjoy your wealth for a while, but she died the

(11:51):
next year after she moved into this incredible twenty square
foot mansion with her daughter. UM. But she left a
really great legacy. Apparently she left two thirds of her
state to UM historically black universities UM to UH the
N double a C p UM Like she she really

(12:12):
put her money where her mouth was. She was a
really benevolent benefactor to a lot of great civil rights
causes and UM basically laid the foundation for black women
entrepreneurs UM still to this day as a matter of fact.
Great story, wonderful story. So hats off to Madam C. J.

(12:34):
Walker a k A. Sarah Breed Love a k. A
genuinely admirable person. Uh And that means everybody that short
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