Short Stuff: Madam C.J. Walker

woman in America to be a millionaire. It's through through her own work and hard, hard labor. That's right. She 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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. 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,

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

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 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 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

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 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. 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 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

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 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 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. Walker a k A. Sarah Breed Love a k. A

genuinely admirable person. Uh And that means everybody that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.