Walker, C. J., Madam, 1867-1919

Sarah Breedlove was born in Delta, La., on Dec. 23, 1867, the daughter of Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove. Orphaned at 7 she moved to Vicksburg with her sister, Louvenia, when she was 10. At the age of 14, she married Moses McWilliams. In 1885, they had a daughter named Lelia, who later changed her name to A’Lelia and became a
central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. McWilliams died in 1887.

Left a widow at 20, Sarah Breedlove McWilliams moved to St. Louis. She made a living as a laundress and furthered her education by studying in public night schools. After the turn of the century, she sold products for Annie Pope Turnbo (later Malone), another African
American woman. She moved to Denver in 1905 selling Malone’s hair care products. During the spring of 1906, after her marriage to C.J. Walker, she marketed herself and her products as Madam C.J. Walker. This was done perhaps to dignify her products, or to avoid being called by a condescending name like “Aunt Sarah.” The “secret formula” in her products included sulfur and a more frequent cleansing of the hair and scalp. After disagreements about the business and perhaps about other subjects, she divorced Walker in
1912. He died in 1926.

By 1908, after time in Denver and time spent traveling to publicize her products, she opened an office in Pittsburgh. There she founded Lelia College, which offered a course in her methods. In 1910, Madam Walker moved to Indianapolis, setting up a laboratory and a
beauty school. In September 1911, with the help of Robert Brokenburr, a young attorney, she incorporated her company with herself, Lelia, and C.J. Walker listed as the board of directors. At the height of her career, between 1911 and her death in 1919, her annual sales
increased. She had several thousand agents around the country to sell her full line of products for growing and beautifying hair. These included Wonderful Hair Grower, Temple Grower, shampoo, Glossine (pressing oil) and Tetter Salve, a remedy for the scalp. Integral to the use of her products was an emphasis on cleanliness, hygiene and personal pride.

The function of the Walker agents throughout the country was not merely to sell Walker products, but to educate customers in hygiene and in the value of good personal appearance. In 1916 the agents were organized into a National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association of Mme. C.J. Walker Agents (later called The Madam C.J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America). Members paid dues of 25 cents a month entitling their beneficiaries to a $50 death benefit. Local unions were encouraged to engage in philanthropic and educational work and were given prizes for doing so. The benevolent association had regular regional and national conventions, which combined both business and educational purposes. To increase opportunities, Madam Walker established beauty schools in several cities. The beauty treatments taught called for the use of her products.

From 1913 to 1915 she purchased property for a beauty parlor and school in Harlem at 108–110 West 136th Street. These houses were extensively remodeled with a large bay window and a front of Indiana limestone. The upper floors served as living quarters. Madam Walker expressed the hope that the handsome parlor would serve as a monument
to herself and A’Lelia.

In addition to A’Lelia, her only child, other family members worked for Madam Walker’s company. A’Lelia was put in charge, first of the operation in Pittsburgh, then of the New York school and parlor. A’Lelia’s adopted daughter, Mae Walker, worked in the company and the image of her hair was often used as an advertisement for the business. Madam Walker’s sister, Louvenia Powell, worked in the Indianapolis factory. Walker’s nieces, Thirsapen Breedlove and Anjetta Breedlove, had an agency in Los Angeles. Early on the Walker Company had the support of enterprising and energetic attorneys, F.B. Ransom and Robert Brokenburr. The company provided two new ways in which black women could make a living, as beauty culturists and as sales agents. In an age when there were very few work outlets other than domestic service and manual labor, this was a major accomplishment.


Madam Walker devoted her time mainly to travel and speaking on behalf of her company. Very often she arranged to make appearances at black churches. She served as a spokeswoman, not only for her products, but also as the most successful black businesswomen of her day. After being snubbed by Booker T. Washington, and with the support of Freedom publisher, George Knox, she seized the podium at the National Negro Business League meeting in Chicago in 1912. Speaking before the most influential group of black entrepreneurs within the country, she stated: “I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South. I was promoted from there to the wash-tub. Then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of
manufacturing hair goods and preparations.”

By the end of her life, Walker’s friends and acquaintances included Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Mary Talbert, William Monroe Trotter, Ida B. Wells, and Bert Williams. Her association with the National Negro Business League, the National Association of Colored Women, the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, and the organizing committee of the 1917 Silent Protest Parade, etc. informed some of her political activities.

Walker left day-to-day operation of the business and its finances to Freeman B. Ransom, an attorney who had an early association with the company from the time of its relocation to Indianapolis. Born July 13, 1882 in Grenada, Mississippi, Ransom studied theology at
Walden University in Nashville, Tennessee and law at Columbia University. After coming to Indianapolis, he boarded at Madam Walker’s house and gave her legal help. He became general manager and attorney of the company and he remained until his death in 1947.

Ransom had a distinguished career in his activities outside the Walker Company. He served as a member of Indianapolis City Council under Mayor Reginald H. Sullivan and was president of Flanner House for many years. Ransom was a member of the National Bar Association, and he served as a trustee of the state school for the blind under three governors. He worked actively for the Community Fund, Young Men's Christian Association, and the Young Women's Christian Association. He was also a trustee of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Ransom Place, an Indianapolis neighborhood where he and his wife, Nettie, bought a house and lived with their children, was named in his honor fifty years after his death.

During her lifetime, Madam Walker kept a firm hand on company operations, not only by contacts made during her travels, but also by a series of letters to Ransom from wherever she happened to be. 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. B. Ransom dated March 4, 1918, 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.

As her wealth grew, Madam Walker gave increasing amounts of money to African American charities. In Indianapolis, Flanner House, Alpha Home, the Senate Avenue YMCA and Bethel AME Church were among her beneficiaries. Farther afield, she made donations to Tuskegee Institute, Mary McLeod Bethune’s Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls in Florida (the school later merged with Cookman Institute to become Bethune-Cookman College), Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, Haines Institute in Georgia, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Both Walker and her daughter, A’Lelia enjoyed many genres of music
including opera, classical, ragtime and blues. A major patron of the arts, Madam Walker supported African American musicians, actors, and artists. She was conscious of her position as a leader of her race.

Though most of her activities on behalf of blacks were aimed toward education and the building of personal and racial pride, Walker on occasion registered protest. In 1915, she brought suit against the Central Amusement Company to protest discrimination at the Isis
Theater in Indianapolis. Madam Walker encouraged her agents to develop their political muscle and advocate for civil and human rights. In 1917, she urged the group to decry lynchings in the South. During World War I she was a member of a delegation to Washington to protest the War Department’s segregationist policies to President Woodrow Wilson. In late 1918 and early 1919, she considered going to the Versailles Conference as an alternate delegate of the National Equal Rights League to ask for a provision in the treaty concerning the rights of Americans of African descent. Like other members of the
delegation, she was unable to obtain a passport. Early in 1919, she was briefly involved with Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., in the formation of the International League of the Darker Peoples.

Madam Walker invested heavily in real estate. In Indianapolis, she bought property on Indiana Avenue where the Walker Building now stands, and also lots in the Ballard and Hilltop additions. She also bought property in Los Angeles; Chicago; St. Louis; Idlewild, Michigan; and Gary, Indiana. In New York, in addition to the business property in Harlem, she bought an apartment house at 374 Central Park West, and a house at 1447–1449 Boston Road in the Bronx.


About 1916, Madam Walker moved to New York to a house in Harlem. After an unsuccessful attempt to buy an estate on Long Island, she purchased a four-and-a-half-acre estate at Irvington-on-Hudson. Engaging a black architect, Vertner W. Tandy, she built a mansion with a formal Italian garden and swimming pool. Construction of this mansion was intended to be an example of what someone of her race and sex could accomplish. At the suggestion of tenor Enrico Caruso, the estate was later called Villa Lewaro, an acronym based on the name of her daughter, A’Lelia Walker Robinson. Among its accoutrements were a Weber piano covered with gold leaf, a Victrola to match and an Estey pipe organ. The project strained her resources to the limit. There was a mortgage on the house, and some of the furnishings, including the piano and pipe organ, were not paid for in full for several years.

Madam Walker had lived a strenuous life, both in her early days of hard physical labor and in her later years of constant travel and public speaking. The strain began to tell on her, especially in the form of high blood pressure and kidney failure. She was persuaded to take periods of rest at Hot Springs, Arkansas and at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. In April 1919, while in St. Louis on a trip, she became very ill. Taken home to Villa Lewaro, she did not recover. She died on May 25, 1919, at the age of 51.

In 1917 Madam Walker signed a will, which she modified by a codicil in 1919. Basically, the bequests fell into four main categories. First, to A'Lelia she left one-third interest in the Walker Company, the house on 136th Street, the Villa Lewaro, and her personal property and household goods. Second, to a group of five trustees, including A'Lelia and F.B. Ransom, she left two-thirds of the company stock, to be used, half for the maintenance and upkeep of Villa Lewaro and half for the support of worthy charities. Third, there were specific bequests totaling over $100,000 to a number of charities. This included $10,000 for an industrial and mission school which she hoped to have founded in Africa. Finally, there were personal bequests to relatives, young friends, domestic servants, and company employees. Division of the estate took some time, because of difficulties in construing the will and problems over back taxes and estate tax.

After Madam Walker's death, her affairs were divided into two categories, distinct yet interrelated: first, the company; second, the estate. In the company, A'Lelia Walker Robinson (who adopted the name A'Lelia shortly before she married Wiley Wilson, whom she divorced in 1924) was president; F.B. Ransom remained manager and attorney. Actual management of the company was the responsibility of Ransom and the profits went entirely to A'Lelia and the estate. The company owed the federal government a large amount of back income taxes from the World War I period.

For a period before her mother's death, A'Lelia had been quite active in the operation of the New York beauty parlor and had shown interest in the general affairs of the company. In the 1920s, however, she became much less active, spending her time largely in travel, or at
Villa Lewaro or the townhouse at l08 West l36th Street. She became a leading hostess of the Harlem Renaissance, giving lavish parties which were attended by black intellectuals and artists including W.E.B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Alberta Hunter, and Walter White, and by whites including Rebecca West, Osbert Sitwell, and Carl Van Vechten. Her guests also included European and African dignitaries.

A’Lelia Walker decided to make a room at the 136th Street house into a cultural gathering place. It was called 'The Dark Tower' after a column written by Countee Cullen. It was decorated with French gold wallpaper and red furniture and had a grand opening in 1927. In 1923 she gave a 'million-dollar wedding' (actual cost about $46,000) for her adopted daughter Mae, at St. Philip's Protestant Episcopal Church in Harlem.

In her lifestyle after her mother's death, A'Lelia was lavish in her expenditures. She not only depleted her share of profits from the company, but she also mortgaged the New York parlor, and amassed large debts. In 1926 she married her fourth husband, James Arthur
Kennedy, M.D. who had attended to her mother at her death. They divorced in 1931.


In 1927 the Walker Company, partly because of prevailing prosperity and partly to keep up with its competitors, built a new factory building at the corner of West Street and Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis. Designed by the well-known local firm of Rubush and Hunter, this legacy to Madam Walker contained, in addition to space for the company factory and offices, a theater, casino, drug store, and coffee shop, as well as office space to rent. The cost of $350,000 was raised partly by taking out first and second mortgages.

Just two years later, however, the Depression struck, sales dwindled drastically, and the company found itself saddled, not only with the debt on the Walker Building, but also with the expenses of Villa Lewaro and the needs of A'Lelia and the estate. The beauty parlor on 136th Street was running at a loss; another in Philadelphia was making no profit. Both these parlors were closed, and the Harlem building was leased to the city of New York.

Efforts were made to sell Villa Lewaro, but buyers for large estates were scarce, and the title to the property was complicated by the fact that the NAACP was a sort of residuary legatee. An auction of the furnishings was held in 1930. The building itself was later sold
in 1932 to the Companions of the Forest, a white women’s benevolent organization. Harold Doley, an African American investment banker, and his wife Helena bought the estate in 1993 and owned it for twenty-five years. In December 2018, Villa Lewaro was purchased by the New Voices Foundation, an organization founded by Richelieu Dennis, a Liberian immigrant who earned his fortune though the haircare industry.

In the midst of all these problems, A'Lelia Walker Kennedy died in 1931 at the age of forty-six, in Long Branch, N.J. Langston Hughes, Muriel Draper, Rita Romilly, Alberta Hunter, Revella Hughes, Col. Hubert Julian, and Mrs. Roy Sheldon were among the attendees at the funeral. Mary McLeod Bethune and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., spoke.

A'Lelia's will left her stock in the Walker Company to her adopted daughter, Mae Walker Perry, the other half to F.B. Ransom, with instruction that at his death it should go to his daughter A'Lelia. The will was contested in a suit brought by Willie Powell, son of Madam Walker's sister Louvenia, and by Anjetta Breedlove, Madam Walker's niece. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.


Mae Walker Perry became president of the company, and Ransom continued as general manager. Actual control remained primarily in Ransom's hands. This situation continued until her death in 1945 and his in 1947. During this period, and on into the 1960s, Violet Reynolds, secretary, and Marie Overstreet, treasurer, both of whose connection with the company had begun during Madam Walker's life, continued their work with the Walker Company.


At Ransom's death, his share of the company stock went to his daughter, A'Lelia Ransom Nelson, who was elected vice-president in 1947 and president in 1953. After 1947, the Perry family filed several legal actions to gain control of the Walker Company. These
cases were finally settled in an arrangement whereby Mae Perry's daughter, A'Lelia Mae Perry Bundles, became vice-president; Mae Perry's husband, Marion R. Perry, was made a director; and her daughter's husband, S. Henry Bundles, joined the Walker staff as general sales manager. A'Lelia Mae Perry Bundles became president of the company after her mother's death and while still a chemistry student at Howard University. Because of the suit filed by her father, Marion Perry, she stepped down as president. She later rejoined the company after the lawsuit was settled and remained vice president and active in day-to-day company affairs until her death in l976. Robert L. Brokenburr, who had acted as Ransom's assistant, served as general manager from 1947 to 1955, and as chairman of the board until his death in 1974. Willard B. Ransom, Freeman B. Ransom's son, became general manager in 1955, serving until 1971.

Both Brokenburr and Willard Ransom were known in their own right for their activities outside the company. Brokenburr, who served twelve years as a deputy prosecuting attorney, was the first African American admitted to membership in the Indiana Bar Association; he was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court in 1953. He won some landmark cases concerning segregation in theaters and in housing. The first African American to serve in the Indiana Senate, he was elected as a Republican member in 1940, 1944, 1952, and 1956. He was the author of important legislation on racial matters. President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him an alternate delegate to the United Nations in 1956. He was the second president of the local branch of the NAACP and served on the boards of Hampton Institute and the United Negro College Fund. He also worked for Flanner House and the YMCA.

Willard Ransom, a graduate of Talladega College and Harvard Law School, was state president of the NAACP, and was active in the civil rights movement in other ways. He was a director of the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce, and a longtime trustee of the YMCA. He supported Henry Wallace and the Progressive party in 1948.

Over the years, the company's products expanded to include cleansing cream, cold cream, vanishing cream, toothpaste, face powder, rouge, skin brightener, bath oil and powder, perfume, and deodorant. A hair conditioner called Satin Tress was introduced with considerable fanfare in 1948. Marjorie Joyner, a long-time employee of the Walker
Company and supervisor of the Walker Beauty Colleges, developed Satin Tress. Marketing continued to be done through individual agents and through the Kiefer-Stewart Company. Products were promoted by advertising in national magazines, by morale-building newsletters and conventions for agents, and by other promotions. A particular effort was made with an anniversary celebration in 1960. Products were also promoted by the beauty schools, supervised by Marjorie Joyner. At various times there were beauty schools in Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, and Tulsa.

In the mid-1960s, the company continued to expand the product line with Perm-It, a permanent hair culture system marketed exclusively for salons. Released in 1965, Perm-It clinics and training sessions were offered, and certificates awarded to participants. Willard
Ransom spearheaded the development and push for Perm-It and added the improvement and reorganization of the company's trade show appearances, beauty schools, retailing, and marketing to his busy schedule. A new beauty college building in Kansas City, Missouri
opened in 1961, and improvements were made to the schools in Indianapolis, Chicago, and Dallas. Unfortunately, the beauty schools continued to lose money through the 1960s, and plans were enacted to rent or sell the buildings and convert the schools to franchises as a
means to divert critical funds elsewhere.

Willard Ransom resigned his position as general manager in 1971. The 1970s proved to be a challenging decade for the company, as it faced stiff headwinds in the form of increasing competition from other firms, rapidly rising costs of doing business, and changing tastes in
hair and personal appearance among younger consumers. Balance sheets from this era reveal a gradual, yet steady, decline in sales activity and revenues. As the losses increased, the company struggled to keep the Walker Building maintained and fully functional as their corporate headquarters and production facility. By the late 1970s, the formation of the not-for-profit Madame Walker Building Urban Life Center, later renamed the Madame Walker Urban Life Center, provided the outlet the Walker Company needed to free itself of the expenses associated with a large, aging building while at the same time responsibly ensuring its survival by recasting it as a center for the arts, entertainment, and history.

The Walker Company was an example of an early enterprise founded by blacks to serve black customers. Over the years it has given employment to thousands of African Americans, particularly women. In its advertising and promotion, it has emphasized racial and personal pride. In 1985, Indianapolis businessman, Ray Randolph bought the
company for an undisclosed amount of money. Randolph renamed the company Madame C.J. Walker Enterprises and produced and sold hair care products until his death in 2002. Randolph's family carried on as a mail order business until Sundial Brands, a New York company, purchased Madame C.J. Walker Enterprises in 2013. Sundial CEO Richelieu Dennis consulted with Madam Walker's great-great granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles, to devise new product lines that honor Walker's legacy and respond to the needs and interests of modern consumers. Products from the Madam C.J. Walker Beauty Culture line are available for purchase in Sephora stores and online at
https://www.sephora.com/brand/madam-cj-walker-beauty-culture. Sundial's website dedicated to the Walker line may be found at https://www.mcjwbeautyculture.com/

Madam Walker’s family owns registered trademarks in other categories and maintains the
Madam Walker Family Archives, a private collection of Walker photos, letters, business
records, legal documents, furniture, clothing, and personal artifacts. As well the Walker
legacy is carried forward through two National Historic Landmarks: the Madame Walker
Theatre Center in Indianapolis and Villa Lewaro, Walker’s Irvington-on-Hudson, New
York estate.

Madam C. J. Walker; Born Sarah Breedlove, December 23, 1867, Delta, Louisiana, U.S.; Died May 25, 1919 (aged 51), Irvington, New York, U.S.; Resting place Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York, U.S.); Occupation: Businesswoman, hair care entrepreneur, philanthropist, activist; Founder of Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company; Spouse, Moses McWilliams (m. 1882; died. 1887), John Davis (m. 1894; div. 1903), Charles Walker (m. 1906; div. 1913); Children: A'Lelia Walker; Family: A'Lelia Bundles, (great–great granddaughter);

Sarah Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867, close to Delta, Louisiana, to Owen and Minerva (Anderson) Breedlove. She was one of six children, who included an older sister, Louvenia, and four brothers: Alexander, James, Solomon, and Owen Jr. Her older siblings were enslaved by Robert W. Burney on his Madison Parish plantation. Sarah was the first child in her family born into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Her mother died in 1872, likely from cholera (an epidemic traveled with river passengers up the Mississippi, reaching Tennessee and related areas in 1873). Her father remarried but died a year later.

Orphaned at the age of seven, Sarah moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, at the age of 10, where she lived with Louvenia and brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. She started working as a child as a domestic servant. “I had little or no opportunity when I started out in life, having been left an orphan and being without mother or father since I was seven years of age,” she often recounted. She also recounted that she had only three months of formal education, which she learned during Sunday school literacy lessons at the church she attended during her earlier years.

In 1882, at the age of 14, Sarah married Moses McWilliams to escape abuse from her brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. Sarah and Moses had one daughter, A'Lelia, born on June 6, 1885. When Moses died in 1887, Sarah was twenty and A'Lelia was two. Sarah remarried in 1894, but left her second husband, John Davis, around 1903.

In January 1906, Sarah married Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper advertising salesman she had known in St. Louis, Missouri. Through this marriage, she became known as Madam C. J. Walker. The couple divorced in 1912; Charles died in 1926. A'Lelia McWilliams adopted her stepfather's surname and became known as A'Lelia Walker.

In 1888, Madam C. J. Walker and her daughter moved to St. Louis, where three of her brothers lived. Sarah found work as a laundress, earning barely more than a dollar a day. She was determined to make enough money to provide her daughter with a formal education. During the 1880s, she lived in a community where Ragtime music was developed; she sang at the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church and started to yearn for an educated life as she watched the community of women at her church.

As was common among black women of her era, Sarah suffered severe dandruff and other scalp ailments, including baldness, due to skin disorders and the application of harsh products to cleanse hair and wash clothes. Other contributing factors to her hair loss included poor diet, illnesses, and infrequent bathing and hair washing during a time when most Americans lacked indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity.

A container of Madame C.J. Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower is held in the permanent collection of The Children's Museum of Indianapolis.
Madam C. J. Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower in the permanent collection of The Children's Museum of Indianapolis.
Initially, Sarah learned about hair care from her brothers, who were barbers in St. Louis. Around the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World's Fair at St. Louis in 1904), she became a commission agent selling products for Annie Malone, an African-American hair-care entrepreneur, millionaire, and owner of the Poro Company. Sales at the exposition were a disappointment since the African-American community was largely ignored. While working for Malone, who would later become Walker's largest rival in the hair-care industry, Sarah began to take her new knowledge and develop her own product line. In July 1905, when she was 37 years old, Sarah and her daughter moved to Denver, Colorado, where she continued to sell products for Malone and develop her own hair-care business. A controversy developed between Annie Malone and Sarah because Malone accused Sarah of stealing her formula, a mixture of petroleum jelly and sulfur that had been in use for a hundred years.

Following her marriage to Charles Walker in 1906, Sarah became known as Madam C. J. Walker. She marketed herself as an independent hairdresser and retailer of cosmetic creams. ("Madam" was adopted from women pioneers of the French beauty industry. Her husband, who was also her business partner, provided advice on advertising and promotion; Sarah sold her products door to door, teaching other black women how to groom and style their hair. In 1906, Walker put her daughter in charge of the mail-order operation in Denver while she and her husband traveled throughout the southern and eastern United States to expand the business. In 1908, Walker and her husband relocated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they opened a beauty parlor and established Lelia College to train "hair culturists." As an advocate of black women's economic independence, she opened training programs in the "Walker System" for her national network of licensed sales agents who earned healthy commissions (Michaels, PhD. 2015).

After Walker closed the business in Denver in 1907, A'lelia ran the day-to-day operations from Pittsburgh. In 1910, Walker established a new base in Indianapolis. A'lelia also persuaded her mother to establish an office and beauty salon in New York City's growing Harlem neighborhood in 1913; it became a center of African-American culture.

In 1910, Walker relocated her businesses to Indianapolis, where she established the headquarters for the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. She initially purchased a house and factory at 640 North West Street. Walker later built a factory, hair salon, and beauty school to train her sales agents, and added a laboratory to help with research. She also assembled a staff that included Freeman Ransom, Robert Lee Brokenburr, Alice Kelly, and Marjorie Joyner, among others, to assist in managing the growing company. Many of her company's employees, including those in key management and staff positions, were women


Walker's method of grooming was designed to promote hair growth and to condition the scalp through the use of her products.The system included a shampoo, a pomade stated to help hair grow, strenuous brushing, and applying iron combs to hair; the method claimed to make lackluster and brittle hair become soft and luxuriant. Walker's product line had several competitors. Similar products were produced in Europe and manufactured by other companies in the United States, which included her major rivals, Annie Turnbo Malone's Poro System from which she derived her original formula and later, Sarah Spencer Washington's Apex System

Between 1911 and 1919, during the height of her career, Walker and her company employed several thousand women as sales agents for its products. By 1917, the company claimed to have trained nearly 20,000 women. Dressed in a characteristic uniform of white shirts and black skirts and carrying black satchels, they visited houses around the United States and in the Caribbean offering Walker's hair pomade and other products packaged in tin containers carrying her image. Walker understood the power of advertising and brand awareness. Heavy advertising, primarily in African-American newspapers and magazines, in addition to Walker's frequent travels to promote her products, helped make Walker and her products well known in the United States.

In addition to training in sales and grooming, Walker showed other black women how to budget, build their own businesses, and encouraged them to become financially independent. In 1917, inspired by the model of the National Association of Colored Women, Walker began organizing her sales agents into state and local clubs. The result was the establishment of the National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association of Madam C. J. Walker Agents (predecessor to the Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Culturists Union of America). Its first annual conference convened in Philadelphia during the summer of 1917 with 200 attendees. The conference is believed to have been among the first national gatherings of women entrepreneurs to discuss business and commerce. During the convention Walker gave prizes to women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new sales agents. She also rewarded those who made the largest contributions to charities in their communities.

Walker's name became even more widely known by the 1920s, after her death, as her company's business market expanded beyond the United States to Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Panama, and Costa Rica.

As Walker's wealth and notoriety increased, she became more vocal about her views. In 1912, Walker addressed an annual gathering of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) from the convention floor, where she declared: "I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there, I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground." The following year she addressed convention-goers from the podium as a keynote speaker.

She helped raise funds to establish a branch of YMCA in Indianapolis's black community, pledging $1,000 to the building fund for Senate Avenue YMCA. Walker also contributed scholarship funds to the Tuskegee Institute. Other beneficiaries included Indianapolis's Flanner House and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church; Mary McLeod Bethune's Daytona Education and Industrial School for Negro Girls (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) in Daytona Beach, Florida; the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina; and the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Georgia. Walker was also a patron of the arts.

About 1913, Walker's daughter, A'Lelia, moved to a new townhouse in Harlem, and in 1916, Walker joined her in New York, leaving the day-to-day operation of her company to her management team in Indianapolis. In 1917, Walker commissioned Vertner Tandy, the first licensed black architect in New York City and a founding member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, to design her house in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Walker intended for Villa Lewaro, which cost $250,000 to build, to become a gathering place for community leaders and to inspire other African Americans to pursue their dreams. She moved into the house in May 1918 and hosted an opening event to honor Emmett Jay Scott, at that time the Assistant Secretary for Negro Affairs of the U.S. Department of War.

Walker became more involved in political matters after her move to New York. She delivered lectures on political, economic, and social issues at conventions sponsored by powerful black institutions. Her friends and associates included Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and W. E. B. Du Bois. During World War I, Walker was a leader in the Circle For Negro War Relief and advocated for the establishment of a training camp for black army officers.In 1917, she joined the executive committee of New York chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which organized the Silent Protest Parade on New York City's Fifth Avenue. The public demonstration drew more than 8,000 African Americans to protest a riot in East Saint Louis that killed 39 African-Americans.

Profits from her business significantly impacted Walker's contributions to her political and philanthropic interests. In 1918, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) honored Walker for making the largest individual contribution to help preserve Frederick Douglass's Anacostia house. Before her death in 1919, Walker pledged $5,000 (the equivalent of about $77,700 in 2019) to the NAACP's anti-lynching fund. At the time, it was the largest gift from an individual that the NAACP had ever received. Walker bequeathed nearly $100,000 to orphanages, institutions, and individuals; her will directed two-thirds of future net profits of her estate to charity.


Death and legacy
Walker died on May 25, 1919, from kidney failure and complications of hypertension, at the age of 51. Walker's remains are interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

At the time of her death, Walker was considered to be worth between a half million and a million dollars. She was the wealthiest African-American woman in America. According to Walker's obituary in The New York Times, "she said herself two years ago [in 1917] that she was not yet a millionaire, but hoped to be some time, not that she wanted the money for herself, but for the good she could do with it." The obituary also noted that the same year, her $250,000 mansion was completed at the banks of the Hudson at Irvington.Her daughter, A'Lelia Walker, became the president of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company.

Walker's personal papers are preserved at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis. Her legacy also continues through two properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places: Villa Lewaro in Irvington, New York, and the Madame Walker Theatre Center in Indianapolis. Villa Lewaro was sold following A'Lelia Walker's death to a fraternal organization called the Companions of the Forest in America in 1932. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has designated the privately owned property a National Treasure. Indianapolis's Walker Manufacturing Company headquarters building, renamed the Madame Walker Theatre Center, opened in December 1927; it included the company's offices and factory as well as a theater, beauty school, hair salon and barbershop, restaurant, drugstore, and a ballroom for the community. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

In 2006, playwright and director Regina Taylor wrote The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, recounting the history of Walker's struggles and success.The play premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Actress L. Scott Caldwell played the role of Walker.

On March 4, 2016, Sundial Brands, a skincare and haircare company, launched a collaboration with Sephora in honor of Walker's legacy. The line, titled "Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Culture", comprised four collections and focused on the use of natural ingredients to care for different types of hair.