November 17, 2023 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, born on land of the former plantation where her parents were enslaved, Madam C.J. Walker married young, had a child young, became a widow young, and got a divorce young. She also created, out of necessity, a revolutionary hair care product that changed the world—and her life—forever. Here's her great great great granddaughter with the story.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Up next, we
have the story of Madame C. J.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Many believe that she was the first female self made millionaire,
and she just happens to be African American. She was
also the first person to bring haircare products to the masses.
Here to tell her story is her great great granddaughter,
an author of the book on her own ground, The
Life and Times of Madame CJ.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Here's Alilia Bundles.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
She started life as Sarah Breedlove on the same plantation
in Delta, Louisiana, where her parents had been enslaved, and
she was the first child and her family born free
in December of eighteen sixty seven. They lived in an
area that had been devastated by the Civil War. Everything
(01:03):
the plantations had been burned down, and now the formerly
enslaved people were struggling to just live a life and
they had very little money. At the end of every season,
they owed money to the plantation owners who had been
their former slave owners. And Sarah Breedlove as the young
child in her family, she had had very little formal education.
(01:26):
There weren't schools for black children in Louisiana. Even though
her family Minister Curtis Pollard had been a Black state
senator during Reconstruction, when African Americans had gained a great
deal of political power. That power was taken away from
them by the ku Klux Klan, so that by the
time Sarah was old enough to go to school, there
(01:46):
were no schools for black children. She knows how to
pick cotton, she knows how to wash clothes, she knows
how to do domestic work. And then when she was
seven years old, both of her parents died. She had
to move in with her older sister, Luvigna, and Lavigna
(02:07):
was married to a man who was so cruel, as
Sarah later said that, she got married at fourteen to
get a home of her own. She married a man
named Moses McWilliams. They had one daughter named Alilia, when
Sarah was seventeen, and when Sarah was twenty, Moses died,
so now Sarah Breedlove McWilliams was a widow. She knew
(02:30):
she wasn't going to move back in with her sister,
so she moved up the Mississippi River to Saint Louis,
where her older brothers had moved about a decade earlier
as part of an exodus. In the eighteen seventies and
eighteen eighties, African Americans, formerly enslaved people just left Louisiana
(02:53):
and Mississippi because the conditions were so horrible. There was
so much racial violence. Her brothers had moved to Saint
Lewis to escape that treatment. So she joined her brothers
in Saint Louis. They had become barber's and they were
doing relatively well. They had a barbershop very near Saint
Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church. She doesn't really have enough
(03:21):
money to make ends meet, but the women of the
church really encourage her to make sure that her daughter
is educated. So during the week she is having to
work away from home, having to live in as a domestic,
she leaves her daughter at what was called the Colored
Orphans Home. There were a number of black women who
had organized because they knew there were families who were struggling.
(03:43):
There was no daycare in the way that we think
about it now, so her daughter, Lelia spent part of
the week at the Colored Orphans Home. She went to
kindergarten with the other children from the school, and then
on the weekends or whenever Sarah could be with her.
She helped to raise her daughter. They went to church
every Sunday at Saint paul Amy Church and even though
Sarah was struggling, she had a good enough voice that
(04:07):
she was in the choir. Being in the choir allowed
her to meet some of the more middle class women
to travel around the city when the choir performed, and
so she was being exposed to a way of life
that made her aspire to something better. So time went on,
and in eighteen ninety four, a couple of her brothers
(04:30):
had died, and so now her support system, her emotional
and financial support system, was really crumbling, and she met
a man named John Davis. She married John Davis. She
thought that that would be helpful to her, that she
would be helpful in raising her daughter, and that turned
out to be a disaster. John Davis was a heavy
drinker and he had a lot of girlfriends. And even
(04:52):
though it's you know, thinking about him, it's hard to
believe that anybody would be interested in John Davis, but
you know, she was. You know, her life was hard,
and sometimes people make really unwise decisions. So she married
John Davis and they fought a lot and he was
arrested for you know, public drunkenness, and he really just was,
you know, not a good partner, so they ended up
(05:14):
splitting up. But around this time, she was under so
much stress and she was having so many problems that
her hair began to fall out. And I think one
thing that is really important for us to understand in
this era, in the twenty first century is that in
nineteen oh six, most Americans didn't have indoor plumbing. That
(05:34):
mean people didn't bathe very often, which we don't like
to think about. But you know, people would have to
go outside and pump water at the well by hand,
put it in a bucket, heat it on a wood
stoveboard and open fire, get the water hot enough to
fill a big, large tin tub, and take a bath.
And that might happen once a week, and everybody in
(05:56):
the family might use the same bathwater. So it's really gross.
But as you can see, this would not you know,
bathing was not the sort of luxury thing that we
think about now. So most people didn't have indoor plumbing,
they didn't bathe very often, they washed their hair even
less often, sometimes once a month, sometimes not at all
during the winter. Because you think about what that would
(06:17):
take if it's snowing outside, how were you going to
pump the water? And Sarah was one of those women,
and there were many women like her. Because they weren't
washing their hair very often, they had really horrible scalp
infections and as a result, they were going bald. So
that was really Sarah's real problem is that she was
going bald and she wanted to figure out a way
(06:39):
to have healthier hair. She said, I was so ashamed
of my frightful appearance that I prayed to the Lord
for a solution. And one night, in a dream, a
big African man appeared and he told me what to
mix up for my formula. And some of the ingredients
came from Africa. I sent for them, I mixed them together,
(06:59):
I applied them to my scalp, and my hair began
to grow back faster than it had ever fallen out.
That is part of the truth. It's also true that
she sold products for a while for women who became
her competitor, women named Annie Malone. It's also true that
she worked for a while as a cook for after
(07:21):
she moved to Denver, for a man named el Schaltz,
who owned the largest pharmacy west of the Mississippi River,
and he was well aware of products that were already
on the market, like Quticura and formulas that pharmacists had
been using and the medical profession had been using, really
for hundreds of years. A basic formula that was cleaning
(07:43):
your hair more often with a shampoo and an ointment
that contained sulfur, and sulfur is a century's old remedy
for healing Dandriffin scalp infections. She moved to Denver in
nineteen oh five, and her good friend Charles Joseph Walker,
(08:07):
whom she had met in Saint Louis, who was a
newspaper man, moved to Denver and they got married, and
she began to take out ads in the newspaper. All
of a sudden, instead of being Sarah McWilliams and her
ads in the black newspaper in Denver, now she was
Missus C. J. Walker. And then in April of nineteen
(08:27):
oh six she began to call herself Madam CJ. Walker.
And you can think, well, that's a bit of an affectation,
but it was really a nod to the fact that Paris,
where people were called madam rather than missus. Paris was
the center of fashion and beauty culture. And she, like
(08:47):
women who were her contemporaries, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, they
all called themselves madam, and that gave them a bit
of respect, you know, made them sort of stand out.
And then if you looked at the old newspapers of
the time, you see that women who own boarding houses,
or who were seamstresses, or who were caters called themselves madam.
So it was really kind of a business honorific as
(09:08):
well as a way to have some respect and some dignity.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
And what a story you're hearing from a Lelia Bundles,
who happens to be the great great granddaughter of Madame CJ.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
And what a life, I mean, Moore said, stories, more
tragic stories than anything you'd read in the Old Testament.
Loses her parents young, lives in a home that's so
brutal with her sister that she has to get out
and get married. Her husband dies, she moves to Saint Louis,
her brothers die, and my goodness, somehow she just manages
to keep going. The stress in her life is so
terrible that her hair keeps falling off. And then we
(09:44):
learned about this partnership with this newspaper man the ed
start and up comes the new and improved Madam CJ.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
When we come back more of the life of Madame CJ.
Walker here on our American stories, and we continue with
our American stories and our story on the first female millionaire,
(10:14):
Madam C. J.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Telling this story is her great great granddaughter, Alilia Bundles.
Let's get back to the story here again. Is Alilia Bundles?
Speaker 2 (10:25):
She really was, She really was a marketing and distribution genius.
She begins to sell her products. You know, her hair
is now growing longer, and other women who had scalp
infections like she did are wondering, Sarah, what have you done?
(10:45):
How come your hair is growing? And she and her
new husband traveled around Colorado to the various mining towns,
to Trinidad, to Pueblo, to Colorado Springs, and it really
became clear to her that she could only grow her
market so much in a state where there were very
few black residents. So she and Charles Joseph Walker began
(11:08):
to travel around the southwestern part of the United States.
In the South, they went to Texas, to Kansas, to Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana.
She'd take out a little ad in whatever black newspaper
for the town where she was going the next week,
so that she would have a crowd, and every town
she would go to she would demonstrate the products. She
(11:29):
would find a woman in the town who seemed to
have a scalp infection. In that she would hire a
room in a church and get the water heated and
wash the woman's hair and then show just what her
products could do. And you know, you figure, at this
point in time, there's no radio, there's no television. There
are very few places that actually have movie houses. So
(11:51):
when somebody comes to do a lecture and they have
a little few bells and whistles and they've gotten the
local minister to pay attention, she's the entertainment perhaps for
the month. She knew how to develop a crowd and
how to create buzz. And then she was always very
good about picking out the women who seemed to have
(12:13):
the most personality, who might be leaders in their church,
who might be with their missionary society or with their choir.
She had a really great knack for finding women who
were leaders, and she would pick that woman to be
her sales agent. So that when she left the town,
she would leave a supply of products with that person
(12:33):
and then she would stay in touch. And then as
the woman began to develop a customer base, she would
order more products from Sarah. By training thousands of women
to be her sales agents, she developed a workforce, an
army of women who were selling her products. One story
(12:53):
I remember from her secretary. She had a secretary who
came to work for her in nineteen fourteen when she
was still a teenager and when I was growing up
and really starting to do my research, Violet Reynolds was
still working for the Walker Company. When she talked about
Madam Walker. She had a certain reverence for her, of course,
but she said when Madam Walker, as she traveled, she
would go to large towns, but sometimes she would go
(13:17):
through on the train through a town that was really
too small for the train to stop. And people may
remember those old cowboy movies where a train would sort
of slow down as it went through a town, and
there was a big hook, and that was the hook
that the mail bag went on, and so the train
would slow down and they would take the mail off
the hook that was going away from the town, and
(13:38):
then they would put a bag onto the hook for
the mail that was to be delivered to the town. Well,
Madam Walker, when she was going through a town that
was too small for the train to stop, knew the
train would slow down. She would make advance arrangements with
her local sales agent to say, I'm coming through this
town at three twenty eight on Thursday, please be there,
(14:00):
and she would throw off a little bundle of her
flyers and her order forms and some products for the agent,
and then the agent would be able to distribute that
material to her customers. So Matta Walker used every available
avenue to promote her products, to distribute her products, to
sell her products. But she also understood the power of image.
(14:24):
If she had Instagram, I know she would be all
over Instagram. She needed to find a new base, and
in nineteen oh nine she visited Indianapolis and she was
very impressed with Indianapolis. There was a very thriving black
business community. There were three black newspapers, including one that
(14:47):
was a nationally distributed newspaper called the Indianapolis Freeman. So
just imagine a black USA today in nineteen ten. It
had a very robust current events front st action, an
excellent sports section that told you what was happening with
black baseball teams, and a very interesting entertainment section like
(15:09):
the Life section in USA Today, and it was writing
about the Lafayette players in Harlem and Bert Williams and
the different singers and actors who were traveling all over
the United States. So this Indianapolis Freeman was something mount
Walker immediately recognized as a great place to advertise. She
took out an ad and she used before and after photographs.
(15:31):
The before picture she put in the center and her
hair was very short. This was when her hair been
falling out. And then on either side, in a sort
of trio of pictures, she had a front view and
a side view and her hair was long, and her
hair was down to the middle of her back and
very healthy. It was kind of like a Jenny Craig commercial.
I think you could really see the impact that her
(15:52):
products really worked. And in that ad, she took a
third of the page from top to bottom, placed the
pictures at the top, and then the ad included letters
that were testimonials from women who both were her customers
and women who were her sales agents. One woman wrote
her letter and she said, before I started using Madam
(16:13):
Walker's wonderful hair grewer. My hair was an eighth of
an inch long, and now my hair is down my
back and I have been able to throw my wig away.
So this was real, you know, real endorsement. But there
were also letters from women who had become her sales agents,
and one woman said, you have made it possible for
(16:34):
black women to make more money in a day selling
your products than she could in a month working in
somebody's kitchen. This was huge because there was so much
discrimination against, you know, women in general working outside the home,
but especially women of color. The only jobs that they
(16:54):
could be hired for were maids and cooks and laundresses
and sharecroppers. For a woman to be able to make
her own money, her own independent money meant she didn't
have to go work in somebody else's house, live in
somebody else's house, and leave her children at home. She
could have her own business in her house doing hair.
(17:14):
So Madam Walker always was pushing not just the products
and you can feel beautiful at a time when very
few people were telling black women they were beautiful. She
always pushed financial and economic independence and empowerment. So these
ads were very powerful. Added to that, one of the
reasons she had picked Indianapolis is because it was a
(17:38):
transportation hub. It was called the Crossroads of America, and
that was because of all of the trains that went
through Indianapolis every day. At that point in nineteen ten,
it was near the center of population in America. The
Western United States was still pretty sparsely populated. California was
not the powerhouse that we think of it now with
(17:59):
a large pop so Indiana really had quite a bit
of train traffic. And because the trains were going through town,
that meant that it was a great place for her
to do business with her mail order business. It also
meant that the black men who worked on the trains,
the pullman porters, who were traveling from coast to coast,
(18:20):
could take papers, copies of the Indianapolis Freeman and sell
those papers as they traveled around. So Mada Walker placed
her ad in the Indianapolis Freeman, knowing that these black
pullman porters would pick up stacks of those papers as
they came through town, and if they were going to
San Francisco or Boston or Detroit or Atlanta or New
(18:42):
York or Chicago, her ads were going to be seen
by people. So she didn't have Instagram, but she had
the Indianapolis Freeman. That was how people began to know
about her products.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
And you've been listening to Aleilia Bundles, Madam CJ. Walker's
great great granddaughter, to one heck of a story about
the marketing and distribution genius of Madam CJ.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Before there was Mary Kay, there was Madam CJ. When
we come back more of the remarkable story of Madame CJ.
Walker here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(19:39):
our American stories, and the final portion of our story
on the first female millionaire, Madam CJ. Walker telling the
story is a great great granddaughter, Alilia Bundles. Let's continue
with the story. Here again is Alilia.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
So I'm going to tell you a story about her
first convention, but I'm going to lead up to it
just to sort of sort of set the state. So
nineteen ten, when Madame Walker moves to Indianapolis, she's just
really just on the cusp of breaking out. She's still
you know, making a few thousand dollars a year, which
(20:16):
is more money than most you know, even you white
businessmen in America are making at the time, but she's
just really poised to become nationally known. And shortly after
she moves to Indianapolis, there is a big push to
build a new YMCA in the black community, and Madam
Walker becomes friends with George Knox, the publisher of the
(20:39):
Indianapolis Freeman, the paper that has done so much to
improve her advertisements and to raise her profile. And George
Knox is the chairman of the board of the Black YMCA.
This big push to build a YMCA is led by
George Knox. He invites Jesse Morland, one of the first
Black secretaries of the YMCA, to come to Indianapolis to
(21:03):
do what he has done in many other cities, which
is to hold a big rally to raise money. And
he has persuaded Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears Roebuck,
to pledge twenty five thousand dollars to any city in
America where the black and white communities will work together
to raise the balance of seventy five thousand dollars to
(21:25):
build a hundred thousand dollars building. Now, one hundred thousand
dollars may not go very far now, but then it
would build you a quite nice building. So Jesse Morland
comes to Indianapolis and holds a rally, brings together the
leadership of the Black YMCA and the leadership of the
white YMCA, and some of the wealthy white business men
(21:46):
stand up during the rally and they pledge one thousand dollars,
five thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, and everyone's astonishment, Madam C. J.
Walker stood up and said, I pledge one thousand dollars
doing this because I believe if I help our boys,
it will help our girls, and that is what I
(22:06):
am interested in. People were stunned. No black woman had
ever contributed that amount of money to that kind of
secular cause. And she began to be written about in newspapers,
not just black newspapers, but white newspapers, and they were
writing about not just her business, but they were writing
about her philanthropy. And eventually the YMCA was built. But
(22:30):
Madam Walker in the meantime, realized that people wanted to
hear her story, and so her crowds began to get larger.
She traveled from town to town to sell her products,
and she decided during the summer of nineteen twelve that
she wanted to attend the National Negro Business League Convention.
(22:50):
That organization had been sounded by Booker T. Washington. It
was the most powerful black man in America. He had
had dinner at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt. That
was quite controversial because segregation was still very much a
part of the ethos of America. And even though Booker T.
Washington had founded Tusky Institute and had founded the National
(23:11):
Negro Business League and was very influential, he was not
welcome in many places in America. Madam Walker arrived at
the nineteen twelve National Negro Business League Convention and sent
word to Booker T. Washington that she wished to tell
her story. She wanted to be included on the program,
and she had met Booker T. Washington before, but he
(23:32):
had been relatively dismissive of her. He had pretty much
ignored her. But she was not a woman who wanted
to be ignored. So on the first day of the
convention she asked politely about speaking, and he overlooked her.
And on the second day of the convention, her good
friend George Knox, the publisher of the Indianapolis Freeman, stood
(23:56):
up and said we should hear from Madam C. J. Walker.
She is the woman who gave one thousand dollars to
the building fund of the YMCA in my hometown of Indianapolis.
She has an incredible story to tell. And even though
Knox was a longtime member of the National Negro Business
League and a good friend of Booker T. Washington's, he
(24:17):
dismissed George Knox, and Booker T. Washington said, you know,
we're discussing lifetime membership. But rather than call on somebody
to discuss lifetime membership, he called upon one of Madam
Walker's neighbors from Indianapolis, a man named H. L. Saunders,
and mister Saunders proceeded to talk about his business. Now,
(24:37):
he was very successful. He manufactured uniforms for people who
worked in hotels and who worked in service industries, and
his business was now a regional business with customers in
Indiana and the four surrounding states. At this point, Madam Walker,
just six years after she had started the Madams DJ.
(25:00):
Walker Manufacturing Company, had customers all over the United States,
the Caribbean, and Central America. As it turns out, mister
Saunders had been the treasurer for the fundraising campaign for
the YMCA, and he had given the very generous sum
of two hundred and fifty dollars, but Madam Walker, of course,
(25:22):
had given four times as much, one thousand dollars. Now,
I know she was a good church going woman, and
she knew that you weren't supposed to compare what you
put into the collection basket to what others put in. However,
I can't help but imagine that she felt at least
a twinge of presentiment. And on the third and final
(25:43):
day of the conference, as the last banker was completing
his report, she stood at her seat, looked toward Booker T.
Washington at the podium, and said, surely you are not
going to shut the door in my face. I am
a woman from the cotton fields of the South. From
there I was promoted to the washed up. From there,
(26:06):
I was promoted to the kitchen, and from there I
promoted myself. I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing
hair goods and preparations, and I have built my own
factory on my own ground. The next year he invited
her back as a keynote speaker, and then when he
(26:29):
came to the dedication of the YNCA in Indianapolis, in
nineteen thirteen, Madam Walker sent her chauffeur to pick him
up at the train station, and he was a guest
in her home. At the dedication of the y, he
praised Madam Walker and all the things that she was doing.
So she really believed that you had to speak up
(26:51):
for yourself. She believed that you first had to have
an excellent product, that you had to make people aware
of your pride, that you had to surround yourself with
highly competent people, and that you had to deliver on
what you were promising. And so she continued to develop
(27:13):
this army, this workforce of sales agents, of employees who
were with her at her headquarters. She became very wealthy,
and it was really an American rags to riches story.
She had been born on a plantation in Delta, Louisiana,
one of the poorest areas, an American area that had
(27:34):
been devastated during the Civil War, and she was on
a cotton plantation making no money, so an orphan at
a very early age, very little education. And yet by
the time she died in May of nineteen nineteen, she
was living in a mansion in one of the wealthiest
communities in America, just a few miles away from John D. Rockefeller. Well.
(28:01):
When people would ask her the secret to her success,
she would say to them, there is no royal flower
strewing path to success, and if there is, I have
not found it. For whatever success I have attained has
been the result of much hard work and many sleepless nights.
I got my start by giving myself a start. So
(28:24):
don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come.
You have to get up and make them for yourself.
She had, during those fifty one years, gone from an
uneducated washerwoman to a millionaire. She was one of the
wealthiest American businesswomen of her time. Many people believe that
(28:49):
she was the first self made American woman millionaire to
make her own money in business, not to inherit it
or to marry someone who was a millionaire. She was
making this money one thousand dollars a month, then ten
thousand dollars a month, then twenty thousand dollars a month,
and on and on at a time when white men
(29:10):
who were managers in corporate America were only making twelve
hundred dollars a month. And she was also making it
possible for other African American women to create their own
financial independence, to create their own wealth. I still hear
from people when I'm making speeches, who will say, my grandmother,
(29:32):
my aunt, my great grandmother was a Walker agent, and
she was able to buy real estate, and then she
became a realtor. She was able to start another business.
And so this wealth was created in black families by
women who were independent entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own monty Montcomery and a special thanks to
Baleleia Bundles. My success was the result of much hard
work and many sleepless nights. I got my start because
I gave myself a start a terrific message for her
times and for ours. The story of Adam C. J.
(30:12):
Walker here on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. Up next, we
have the story of Madame C. J.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Many believe that she was the first female self made millionaire,
and she just happens to be African American. She was
also the first person to bring haircare products to the masses.
Here to tell her story is her great great granddaughter,
an author of the book on her own ground, The
Life and Times of Madame CJ.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Here's Alilia Bundles.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
She started life as Sarah Breedlove on the same plantation
in Delta, Louisiana, where her parents had been enslaved, and
she was the first child and her family born free
in December of eighteen sixty seven. They lived in an
area that had been devastated by the Civil War. Everything
(01:03):
the plantations had been burned down, and now the formerly
enslaved people were struggling to just live a life and
they had very little money. At the end of every season,
they owed money to the plantation owners who had been
their former slave owners. And Sarah Breedlove as the young
child in her family, she had had very little formal education.
(01:26):
There weren't schools for black children in Louisiana. Even though
her family Minister Curtis Pollard had been a Black state
senator during Reconstruction, when African Americans had gained a great
deal of political power. That power was taken away from
them by the ku Klux Klan, so that by the
time Sarah was old enough to go to school, there
(01:46):
were no schools for black children. She knows how to
pick cotton, she knows how to wash clothes, she knows
how to do domestic work. And then when she was
seven years old, both of her parents died. She had
to move in with her older sister, Luvigna, and Lavigna
(02:07):
was married to a man who was so cruel, as
Sarah later said that, she got married at fourteen to
get a home of her own. She married a man
named Moses McWilliams. They had one daughter named Alilia, when
Sarah was seventeen, and when Sarah was twenty, Moses died,
so now Sarah Breedlove McWilliams was a widow. She knew
(02:30):
she wasn't going to move back in with her sister,
so she moved up the Mississippi River to Saint Louis,
where her older brothers had moved about a decade earlier
as part of an exodus. In the eighteen seventies and
eighteen eighties, African Americans, formerly enslaved people just left Louisiana
(02:53):
and Mississippi because the conditions were so horrible. There was
so much racial violence. Her brothers had moved to Saint
Lewis to escape that treatment. So she joined her brothers
in Saint Louis. They had become barber's and they were
doing relatively well. They had a barbershop very near Saint
Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church. She doesn't really have enough
(03:21):
money to make ends meet, but the women of the
church really encourage her to make sure that her daughter
is educated. So during the week she is having to
work away from home, having to live in as a domestic,
she leaves her daughter at what was called the Colored
Orphans Home. There were a number of black women who
had organized because they knew there were families who were struggling.
(03:43):
There was no daycare in the way that we think
about it now, so her daughter, Lelia spent part of
the week at the Colored Orphans Home. She went to
kindergarten with the other children from the school, and then
on the weekends or whenever Sarah could be with her.
She helped to raise her daughter. They went to church
every Sunday at Saint paul Amy Church and even though
Sarah was struggling, she had a good enough voice that
(04:07):
she was in the choir. Being in the choir allowed
her to meet some of the more middle class women
to travel around the city when the choir performed, and
so she was being exposed to a way of life
that made her aspire to something better. So time went on,
and in eighteen ninety four, a couple of her brothers
(04:30):
had died, and so now her support system, her emotional
and financial support system, was really crumbling, and she met
a man named John Davis. She married John Davis. She
thought that that would be helpful to her, that she
would be helpful in raising her daughter, and that turned
out to be a disaster. John Davis was a heavy
drinker and he had a lot of girlfriends. And even
(04:52):
though it's you know, thinking about him, it's hard to
believe that anybody would be interested in John Davis, but
you know, she was. You know, her life was hard,
and sometimes people make really unwise decisions. So she married
John Davis and they fought a lot and he was
arrested for you know, public drunkenness, and he really just was,
you know, not a good partner, so they ended up
(05:14):
splitting up. But around this time, she was under so
much stress and she was having so many problems that
her hair began to fall out. And I think one
thing that is really important for us to understand in
this era, in the twenty first century is that in
nineteen oh six, most Americans didn't have indoor plumbing. That
(05:34):
mean people didn't bathe very often, which we don't like
to think about. But you know, people would have to
go outside and pump water at the well by hand,
put it in a bucket, heat it on a wood
stoveboard and open fire, get the water hot enough to
fill a big, large tin tub, and take a bath.
And that might happen once a week, and everybody in
(05:56):
the family might use the same bathwater. So it's really gross.
But as you can see, this would not you know,
bathing was not the sort of luxury thing that we
think about now. So most people didn't have indoor plumbing,
they didn't bathe very often, they washed their hair even
less often, sometimes once a month, sometimes not at all
during the winter. Because you think about what that would
(06:17):
take if it's snowing outside, how were you going to
pump the water? And Sarah was one of those women,
and there were many women like her. Because they weren't
washing their hair very often, they had really horrible scalp
infections and as a result, they were going bald. So
that was really Sarah's real problem is that she was
going bald and she wanted to figure out a way
(06:39):
to have healthier hair. She said, I was so ashamed
of my frightful appearance that I prayed to the Lord
for a solution. And one night, in a dream, a
big African man appeared and he told me what to
mix up for my formula. And some of the ingredients
came from Africa. I sent for them, I mixed them together,
(06:59):
I applied them to my scalp, and my hair began
to grow back faster than it had ever fallen out.
That is part of the truth. It's also true that
she sold products for a while for women who became
her competitor, women named Annie Malone. It's also true that
she worked for a while as a cook for after
(07:21):
she moved to Denver, for a man named el Schaltz,
who owned the largest pharmacy west of the Mississippi River,
and he was well aware of products that were already
on the market, like Quticura and formulas that pharmacists had
been using and the medical profession had been using, really
for hundreds of years. A basic formula that was cleaning
(07:43):
your hair more often with a shampoo and an ointment
that contained sulfur, and sulfur is a century's old remedy
for healing Dandriffin scalp infections. She moved to Denver in
nineteen oh five, and her good friend Charles Joseph Walker,
(08:07):
whom she had met in Saint Louis, who was a
newspaper man, moved to Denver and they got married, and
she began to take out ads in the newspaper. All
of a sudden, instead of being Sarah McWilliams and her
ads in the black newspaper in Denver, now she was
Missus C. J. Walker. And then in April of nineteen
(08:27):
oh six she began to call herself Madam CJ. Walker.
And you can think, well, that's a bit of an affectation,
but it was really a nod to the fact that Paris,
where people were called madam rather than missus. Paris was
the center of fashion and beauty culture. And she, like
(08:47):
women who were her contemporaries, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, they
all called themselves madam, and that gave them a bit
of respect, you know, made them sort of stand out.
And then if you looked at the old newspapers of
the time, you see that women who own boarding houses,
or who were seamstresses, or who were caters called themselves madam.
So it was really kind of a business honorific as
(09:08):
well as a way to have some respect and some dignity.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
And what a story you're hearing from a Lelia Bundles,
who happens to be the great great granddaughter of Madame CJ.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
And what a life, I mean, Moore said, stories, more
tragic stories than anything you'd read in the Old Testament.
Loses her parents young, lives in a home that's so
brutal with her sister that she has to get out
and get married. Her husband dies, she moves to Saint Louis,
her brothers die, and my goodness, somehow she just manages
to keep going. The stress in her life is so
terrible that her hair keeps falling off. And then we
(09:44):
learned about this partnership with this newspaper man the ed
start and up comes the new and improved Madam CJ.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
When we come back more of the life of Madame CJ.
Walker here on our American stories, and we continue with
our American stories and our story on the first female millionaire,
(10:14):
Madam C. J.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Telling this story is her great great granddaughter, Alilia Bundles.
Let's get back to the story here again. Is Alilia Bundles?
Speaker 2 (10:25):
She really was, She really was a marketing and distribution genius.
She begins to sell her products. You know, her hair
is now growing longer, and other women who had scalp
infections like she did are wondering, Sarah, what have you done?
(10:45):
How come your hair is growing? And she and her
new husband traveled around Colorado to the various mining towns,
to Trinidad, to Pueblo, to Colorado Springs, and it really
became clear to her that she could only grow her
market so much in a state where there were very
few black residents. So she and Charles Joseph Walker began
(11:08):
to travel around the southwestern part of the United States.
In the South, they went to Texas, to Kansas, to Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana.
She'd take out a little ad in whatever black newspaper
for the town where she was going the next week,
so that she would have a crowd, and every town
she would go to she would demonstrate the products. She
(11:29):
would find a woman in the town who seemed to
have a scalp infection. In that she would hire a
room in a church and get the water heated and
wash the woman's hair and then show just what her
products could do. And you know, you figure, at this
point in time, there's no radio, there's no television. There
are very few places that actually have movie houses. So
(11:51):
when somebody comes to do a lecture and they have
a little few bells and whistles and they've gotten the
local minister to pay attention, she's the entertainment perhaps for
the month. She knew how to develop a crowd and
how to create buzz. And then she was always very
good about picking out the women who seemed to have
(12:13):
the most personality, who might be leaders in their church,
who might be with their missionary society or with their choir.
She had a really great knack for finding women who
were leaders, and she would pick that woman to be
her sales agent. So that when she left the town,
she would leave a supply of products with that person
(12:33):
and then she would stay in touch. And then as
the woman began to develop a customer base, she would
order more products from Sarah. By training thousands of women
to be her sales agents, she developed a workforce, an
army of women who were selling her products. One story
(12:53):
I remember from her secretary. She had a secretary who
came to work for her in nineteen fourteen when she
was still a teenager and when I was growing up
and really starting to do my research, Violet Reynolds was
still working for the Walker Company. When she talked about
Madam Walker. She had a certain reverence for her, of course,
but she said when Madam Walker, as she traveled, she
would go to large towns, but sometimes she would go
(13:17):
through on the train through a town that was really
too small for the train to stop. And people may
remember those old cowboy movies where a train would sort
of slow down as it went through a town, and
there was a big hook, and that was the hook
that the mail bag went on, and so the train
would slow down and they would take the mail off
the hook that was going away from the town, and
(13:38):
then they would put a bag onto the hook for
the mail that was to be delivered to the town. Well,
Madam Walker, when she was going through a town that
was too small for the train to stop, knew the
train would slow down. She would make advance arrangements with
her local sales agent to say, I'm coming through this
town at three twenty eight on Thursday, please be there,
(14:00):
and she would throw off a little bundle of her
flyers and her order forms and some products for the agent,
and then the agent would be able to distribute that
material to her customers. So Matta Walker used every available
avenue to promote her products, to distribute her products, to
sell her products. But she also understood the power of image.
(14:24):
If she had Instagram, I know she would be all
over Instagram. She needed to find a new base, and
in nineteen oh nine she visited Indianapolis and she was
very impressed with Indianapolis. There was a very thriving black
business community. There were three black newspapers, including one that
(14:47):
was a nationally distributed newspaper called the Indianapolis Freeman. So
just imagine a black USA today in nineteen ten. It
had a very robust current events front st action, an
excellent sports section that told you what was happening with
black baseball teams, and a very interesting entertainment section like
(15:09):
the Life section in USA Today, and it was writing
about the Lafayette players in Harlem and Bert Williams and
the different singers and actors who were traveling all over
the United States. So this Indianapolis Freeman was something mount
Walker immediately recognized as a great place to advertise. She
took out an ad and she used before and after photographs.
(15:31):
The before picture she put in the center and her
hair was very short. This was when her hair been
falling out. And then on either side, in a sort
of trio of pictures, she had a front view and
a side view and her hair was long, and her
hair was down to the middle of her back and
very healthy. It was kind of like a Jenny Craig commercial.
I think you could really see the impact that her
(15:52):
products really worked. And in that ad, she took a
third of the page from top to bottom, placed the
pictures at the top, and then the ad included letters
that were testimonials from women who both were her customers
and women who were her sales agents. One woman wrote
her letter and she said, before I started using Madam
(16:13):
Walker's wonderful hair grewer. My hair was an eighth of
an inch long, and now my hair is down my
back and I have been able to throw my wig away.
So this was real, you know, real endorsement. But there
were also letters from women who had become her sales agents,
and one woman said, you have made it possible for
(16:34):
black women to make more money in a day selling
your products than she could in a month working in
somebody's kitchen. This was huge because there was so much
discrimination against, you know, women in general working outside the home,
but especially women of color. The only jobs that they
(16:54):
could be hired for were maids and cooks and laundresses
and sharecroppers. For a woman to be able to make
her own money, her own independent money meant she didn't
have to go work in somebody else's house, live in
somebody else's house, and leave her children at home. She
could have her own business in her house doing hair.
(17:14):
So Madam Walker always was pushing not just the products
and you can feel beautiful at a time when very
few people were telling black women they were beautiful. She
always pushed financial and economic independence and empowerment. So these
ads were very powerful. Added to that, one of the
reasons she had picked Indianapolis is because it was a
(17:38):
transportation hub. It was called the Crossroads of America, and
that was because of all of the trains that went
through Indianapolis every day. At that point in nineteen ten,
it was near the center of population in America. The
Western United States was still pretty sparsely populated. California was
not the powerhouse that we think of it now with
(17:59):
a large pop so Indiana really had quite a bit
of train traffic. And because the trains were going through town,
that meant that it was a great place for her
to do business with her mail order business. It also
meant that the black men who worked on the trains,
the pullman porters, who were traveling from coast to coast,
(18:20):
could take papers, copies of the Indianapolis Freeman and sell
those papers as they traveled around. So Mada Walker placed
her ad in the Indianapolis Freeman, knowing that these black
pullman porters would pick up stacks of those papers as
they came through town, and if they were going to
San Francisco or Boston or Detroit or Atlanta or New
(18:42):
York or Chicago, her ads were going to be seen
by people. So she didn't have Instagram, but she had
the Indianapolis Freeman. That was how people began to know
about her products.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
And you've been listening to Aleilia Bundles, Madam CJ. Walker's
great great granddaughter, to one heck of a story about
the marketing and distribution genius of Madam CJ.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Walker.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Before there was Mary Kay, there was Madam CJ. When
we come back more of the remarkable story of Madame CJ.
Walker here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(19:39):
our American stories, and the final portion of our story
on the first female millionaire, Madam CJ. Walker telling the
story is a great great granddaughter, Alilia Bundles. Let's continue
with the story. Here again is Alilia.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
So I'm going to tell you a story about her
first convention, but I'm going to lead up to it
just to sort of sort of set the state. So
nineteen ten, when Madame Walker moves to Indianapolis, she's just
really just on the cusp of breaking out. She's still
you know, making a few thousand dollars a year, which
(20:16):
is more money than most you know, even you white
businessmen in America are making at the time, but she's
just really poised to become nationally known. And shortly after
she moves to Indianapolis, there is a big push to
build a new YMCA in the black community, and Madam
Walker becomes friends with George Knox, the publisher of the
(20:39):
Indianapolis Freeman, the paper that has done so much to
improve her advertisements and to raise her profile. And George
Knox is the chairman of the board of the Black YMCA.
This big push to build a YMCA is led by
George Knox. He invites Jesse Morland, one of the first
Black secretaries of the YMCA, to come to Indianapolis to
(21:03):
do what he has done in many other cities, which
is to hold a big rally to raise money. And
he has persuaded Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears Roebuck,
to pledge twenty five thousand dollars to any city in
America where the black and white communities will work together
to raise the balance of seventy five thousand dollars to
(21:25):
build a hundred thousand dollars building. Now, one hundred thousand
dollars may not go very far now, but then it
would build you a quite nice building. So Jesse Morland
comes to Indianapolis and holds a rally, brings together the
leadership of the Black YMCA and the leadership of the
white YMCA, and some of the wealthy white business men
(21:46):
stand up during the rally and they pledge one thousand dollars,
five thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, and everyone's astonishment, Madam C. J.
Walker stood up and said, I pledge one thousand dollars
doing this because I believe if I help our boys,
it will help our girls, and that is what I
(22:06):
am interested in. People were stunned. No black woman had
ever contributed that amount of money to that kind of
secular cause. And she began to be written about in newspapers,
not just black newspapers, but white newspapers, and they were
writing about not just her business, but they were writing
about her philanthropy. And eventually the YMCA was built. But
(22:30):
Madam Walker in the meantime, realized that people wanted to
hear her story, and so her crowds began to get larger.
She traveled from town to town to sell her products,
and she decided during the summer of nineteen twelve that
she wanted to attend the National Negro Business League Convention.
(22:50):
That organization had been sounded by Booker T. Washington. It
was the most powerful black man in America. He had
had dinner at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt. That
was quite controversial because segregation was still very much a
part of the ethos of America. And even though Booker T.
Washington had founded Tusky Institute and had founded the National
(23:11):
Negro Business League and was very influential, he was not
welcome in many places in America. Madam Walker arrived at
the nineteen twelve National Negro Business League Convention and sent
word to Booker T. Washington that she wished to tell
her story. She wanted to be included on the program,
and she had met Booker T. Washington before, but he
(23:32):
had been relatively dismissive of her. He had pretty much
ignored her. But she was not a woman who wanted
to be ignored. So on the first day of the
convention she asked politely about speaking, and he overlooked her.
And on the second day of the convention, her good
friend George Knox, the publisher of the Indianapolis Freeman, stood
(23:56):
up and said we should hear from Madam C. J. Walker.
She is the woman who gave one thousand dollars to
the building fund of the YMCA in my hometown of Indianapolis.
She has an incredible story to tell. And even though
Knox was a longtime member of the National Negro Business
League and a good friend of Booker T. Washington's, he
(24:17):
dismissed George Knox, and Booker T. Washington said, you know,
we're discussing lifetime membership. But rather than call on somebody
to discuss lifetime membership, he called upon one of Madam
Walker's neighbors from Indianapolis, a man named H. L. Saunders,
and mister Saunders proceeded to talk about his business. Now,
(24:37):
he was very successful. He manufactured uniforms for people who
worked in hotels and who worked in service industries, and
his business was now a regional business with customers in
Indiana and the four surrounding states. At this point, Madam Walker,
just six years after she had started the Madams DJ.
(25:00):
Walker Manufacturing Company, had customers all over the United States,
the Caribbean, and Central America. As it turns out, mister
Saunders had been the treasurer for the fundraising campaign for
the YMCA, and he had given the very generous sum
of two hundred and fifty dollars, but Madam Walker, of course,
(25:22):
had given four times as much, one thousand dollars. Now,
I know she was a good church going woman, and
she knew that you weren't supposed to compare what you
put into the collection basket to what others put in. However,
I can't help but imagine that she felt at least
a twinge of presentiment. And on the third and final
(25:43):
day of the conference, as the last banker was completing
his report, she stood at her seat, looked toward Booker T.
Washington at the podium, and said, surely you are not
going to shut the door in my face. I am
a woman from the cotton fields of the South. From
there I was promoted to the washed up. From there,
(26:06):
I was promoted to the kitchen, and from there I
promoted myself. I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing
hair goods and preparations, and I have built my own
factory on my own ground. The next year he invited
her back as a keynote speaker, and then when he
(26:29):
came to the dedication of the YNCA in Indianapolis, in
nineteen thirteen, Madam Walker sent her chauffeur to pick him
up at the train station, and he was a guest
in her home. At the dedication of the y, he
praised Madam Walker and all the things that she was doing.
So she really believed that you had to speak up
(26:51):
for yourself. She believed that you first had to have
an excellent product, that you had to make people aware
of your pride, that you had to surround yourself with
highly competent people, and that you had to deliver on
what you were promising. And so she continued to develop
(27:13):
this army, this workforce of sales agents, of employees who
were with her at her headquarters. She became very wealthy,
and it was really an American rags to riches story.
She had been born on a plantation in Delta, Louisiana,
one of the poorest areas, an American area that had
(27:34):
been devastated during the Civil War, and she was on
a cotton plantation making no money, so an orphan at
a very early age, very little education. And yet by
the time she died in May of nineteen nineteen, she
was living in a mansion in one of the wealthiest
communities in America, just a few miles away from John D. Rockefeller. Well.
(28:01):
When people would ask her the secret to her success,
she would say to them, there is no royal flower
strewing path to success, and if there is, I have
not found it. For whatever success I have attained has
been the result of much hard work and many sleepless nights.
I got my start by giving myself a start. So
(28:24):
don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come.
You have to get up and make them for yourself.
She had, during those fifty one years, gone from an
uneducated washerwoman to a millionaire. She was one of the
wealthiest American businesswomen of her time. Many people believe that
(28:49):
she was the first self made American woman millionaire to
make her own money in business, not to inherit it
or to marry someone who was a millionaire. She was
making this money one thousand dollars a month, then ten
thousand dollars a month, then twenty thousand dollars a month,
and on and on at a time when white men
(29:10):
who were managers in corporate America were only making twelve
hundred dollars a month. And she was also making it
possible for other African American women to create their own
financial independence, to create their own wealth. I still hear
from people when I'm making speeches, who will say, my grandmother,
(29:32):
my aunt, my great grandmother was a Walker agent, and
she was able to buy real estate, and then she
became a realtor. She was able to start another business.
And so this wealth was created in black families by
women who were independent entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own monty Montcomery and a special thanks to
Baleleia Bundles. My success was the result of much hard
work and many sleepless nights. I got my start because
I gave myself a start a terrific message for her
times and for ours. The story of Adam C. J.
(30:12):
Walker here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!