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. 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 came up with a secret formula to stimulate hair growth. Sarah started selling her products door-to-door in black neighborhoods in St.
Then she moved to Denver in and married Charles J. With her business becoming more successful, Sarah decided to adopt a new name — Madam C. In , Madam C. Walker set up a laboratory and beauty school in Indianapolis. At the height of her career, between and her death in , her annual sales increased. Madam Walker was repeatedly referred to as a millionaire during the last few years of her life.
However, in a New York Times magazine article and later in a letter to F. Ransom dated March 4, , she specifically denied this. Certainly, by the end of her life, with total ownership of the company and with her holdings in real estate, her wealth could be measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
She had several thousand agents around the country to sell her full line of products for growing and beautifying hair. She did not limit her generosity to Indiana, however, and also gave money to the Tuskegee Institute and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A major patron of the arts, Madam Walker supported African-American musicians, actors and artists.
Though most of her activities on behalf of blacks were aimed toward education and the building of personal and racial pride, Madam Walker fought against prejudice. In , she began a lawsuit to protest discrimination at a theater in Indianapolis. She encouraged her agents to develop their political muscle and advocate for civil and human rights.
In , she urged the group to decry lynchings in the South. Madam Walker worked hard throughout her life, which took a toll on her health. Between traveling constantly, managing her business and speaking at many functions, she developed health problems, including high blood pressure and kidney failure.
She became very ill while on a trip to St. Louis in April Walker family members remain involved in the preservation of her legacy through the Madam Walker Legacy Center and through Villa Lewaro.
They share her story through books, lectures and the Madam Walker Family Archives, a collection of Walker photos, business records, clothing, furniture and personal artifacts. The official Walker biography website, which is maintained by her great-great-granddaughter and biographer, is www. Find images from the Madam C. Walker collection in the digital collection. She took up work as a washerwoman.
She remarried in , and soon found herself supporting a drunkenly abusive and openly unfaithful husband. Determined to provide her daughter with a better life, she managed to send Lelia to Knoxville College in Tennessee. In , she left her husband and took a job as a sales agent for Annie Pope-Turnbo, a St. Louis businesswoman who produced products that claimed to stimulate hair growth. After two years, Sarah moved to Colorado to be closer to her sister-in-law and four nieces.
She was followed by Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper ad salesman from St. Louis, whom she married a few months later.
She decided to begin her own line of hair-care products, created specifically for African-American women. From her travels, she knew there was a national market; from her time in Denver, she knew she needed to relocate her budding business. The Walkers spent over a year travelling through the South, building the foundations of a mail-order business, before deciding to set up shop in Pittsburgh. By , she had trained hundreds of sales agents. A visit to Indianapolis in convinced the Walkers that it would be a good location for a more permanent headquarters.
Initially inclined to help individuals who showed a desire for self-improvement, the focus of her charitable giving gradually shifted away from individuals due to a series of bad experiences and toward organizations and causes instead. In , she created the Madam C. Walker Manufacturing Company of Indiana, putting up the necessary capital herself.
Orphaned at age seven, Walker lived with her older sister Louvenia, and the two worked in the cotton fields. Partly to escape her abusive brother-in-law, at age 14 Walker married Moses McWilliams. Seeking a way out of poverty, in , Walker moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where her four brothers were barbers.
There, she worked as a laundress and cook. She joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where she met leading black men and women, whose education and success likewise inspired her. In , she married John Davis, but the marriage was troubled, and the couple later divorced. After the pair divorced in , she relocated to Indianapolis and built a factory for her Walker Manufacturing Company.
As her wealth increased, so did her philanthropic and political outreach. Just prior to dying of kidney failure, Walker revised her will, bequeathing two-thirds of future net profits to charity, as well as thousands of dollars to various individuals and schools.
MLA - Michals, Debra. National Women's History Museum, Date accessed. Chicago - Michals, Debra. Hobkirk, Lori. Madam C. Walker, Journey to Freedom.
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