Biography of madam c j walker
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Madam C.J. Walker
Sarah Breedlove was born in Delta, La., on Dec. 23, She was the daughter of Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove. Both had formerly been enslaved. She was an orphan by the age of 7 and moved in with her older sister. At the age of 14, Sarah married Moses McWilliams. She maintained that she married young because of early hardships and in order to get a home of her own. In , they had a daughter named Lelia, who later changed her name to A&#;Lelia and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Sarah&#;s husband died in , leaving her to care for their daughter on her own.
Sarah then moved to St. Louis where three of her brothers lived and worked as barbers. She worked as a laundress and attended night school. Around this time, she started to lose her hair and noticed a lot of other black women had the same problem. Poor hygiene, diet and scalp diseases like dandruff led to brittle hair and hair loss. She experimented with many ingredients and finally c
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Madam C.J. Walker’s Early Life
Madam CJ Walker, Self-Made Millionaire
Madam C.J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, Her parents, Owen and Minerva, were Louisiana sharecroppers who had been born into slavery. Sarah, their fifth child, was the first in her family to be born free after the Emancipation Proclamation. Her early life was marked by hardship; she was orphaned at seven, married at 14 (to Moses McWilliams, with whom she had a daughter, A'Lelia, in ) and became a widow at
Walker and 2-year-old A’Lelia moved to St. Louis, where Walker balanced working as a laundress with night school. She sang in the choir of the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church and became active in the National Association of Colored Women. It was in St. Louis that she first met Charles J. Walker, the man who would become her second husband—and inspire the name of her eventual empire.
The Walker System
Walker was inspired to create haircare products for Black women after a scalp
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(H)our History Lesson: Madam C. J. Walker, African American Millionaire, Philanthropist, Activist
In , Sarah married C. J. Walker, a newspaper salesman she had known from St. Louis. From then on, Sarah began calling herself Madam (sometimes spelled Madame) C. J. Walker, invoking the French title used in the kosmetika and mode industries.3 As the business expanded, C. J. Walker helped his wife develop marketing and organize a mail-order business.
Madam Walker’s business model involved both mail-order sales and door-to-door sales. Walker’s saleswomen, called “Walker Agents,” did more than just sell products. Walker Agents also gave scalp treatments, styled hair, and did manicures and massages. Working as a Walker agent was empowering for African-American women. Many former schoolteachers, cooks, and washerwomen were able to earn far more money as Walker Agents than they could before. One agent wrote that Walker "opened up a trade for hundreds of colored women to make an honest a