Louisiana Leaders: Notable Women in History

Born Sarah Breedlove on a Delta, LA cotton plantation, she is considered to be the first Black American woman millionaire. In some references she is described as the first self-made American woman millionaire. After being orphaned at age seven, and widowed with a two year old daughter, she moved to St. Louis where on a laundress' salary she educated her daughter and sent her to Knoxville College. She decided to start her own line of hair care products and with less than two dollars in savings, set up a mail order business in 1906 in Denver, CO with the help of her new husband Charles Walker. The company grew to include a beauty school in Pittsburgh, and later offices in Indianapolis and Harlem. By 1916 the Walker Company included 20,000 agents, both men and women, in the U.S., Central America, and the Caribbean.

A noted philanthropist, Madam Walker gave $1000 to the building fund for the YMCA in the Indianapolis black community, the largest gift given by an African American woman. At the 1912 National Negro Business League convention, after League founder Booker T. Washington had refused her request to be on the program, she spoke from the floor and so impressed the mostly male audience that they invited her back the following year as a keynote speaker. In 1918 she gave the keynote speech at several NAACP fund-raisers for the anti-lynching effort and in her will contributed thousands of dollars to Black schools, individuals, organizations, and institutions.

Madam Walker was a strong advocate of Black women's economic independence which she fostered by creating business opportunities for women at a time when the only other options were domestic work and sharecropping. Her business philosophy stressed economic independence for women: "...I want to say to every Negro woman present, don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come...Get up and make them!" (National Negro Business League, 1913) Her entrepreneurial strategies led to what has become a multibillion dollar Black cosmetics industry and she used her wealth and status to work towards political and economic rights for African Americans and women.