MADAME C.J. WALKER, AMERICA’S FIRST BLACK FEMALE MILLIONAIRE

Madame C.J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867.  The fifth child of Owen and Minerva, Louisiana sharecroppers, she was the first in their family to be born free after the Emancipation Proclamation.  Her early life was very hard.  She was orphaned at age six; married at fourteen to Moses McWilliams; and widowed at age twenty with a young daughter A’Lelia.

Sarah took two year old A’Lelia and moved to St Louis.  There she got a job as a laundress and entered night school.  She also became active in the National Association of Colored People.  It was also there that she met Charles J. Walker, the man who would become her second husband and inspire the name of her eventual empire.

Walker was a talented promoter whose story of how she came up with her products often varied.  What is known is in the 1890’s Walker’s own hair loss prompted her to seek a cure.  It is believed likely her work as a laundress contributed to the hair loss because of her exposure to harsh lye soap, heat and hot water.  For a variety of reasons at that time, it was common for Black women to have hair loss.  Many of them wore head wraps to hide their problem.   Walker did not want to do that because she believed the head wrap was a symbol of a lower social class.

She embarked on a search for a cure.  She drew on her experience as a laundress and what she had learned about the properties of cleaners like lye soap.  She experimented with home remedies and she learned from products she could purchase.  However, few products were made for the texture and curls of Black women’s hair.  Around 1903 Walker did begin to use Annie Tumbo’s Poro line of products like the Great Wonderful Hair Grower.  Apparently, these products were beneficial to Walker’s hair problem so she became a salesperson for the company.

In 1905 Walker moved to Denver to sell these products while continuing to work on creating her own line of products.  During this time she also had a job as a cook for pharmacist Edmund L. Scholtz who may have helped her with the chemistry of such products.

The next year she married Charles J. Walker and began calling herself Madame C.J. Walker, a name she kept even after their marriage ended.  By this time she had developed her own line of products.  Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company began selling Madame C.J. Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.  Her early products also included Glossine (a pressing oil) and a vegetable shampoo.  Her homemade products were sold directly to Black women and her personal approach made her extremely popular to an ever-growing following of loyal customers.  She went on to employ a fleet of sales women she called “beauty culturalists”.

At first Charles Walker helped his wife with advertising, marketing and mail orders but, as the business expanded, they grew apart.  They were soon divorced.

In 1908, Walker opened a beauty school and factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  In 1910, she moved her company’s headquarters to Indianapolis and left the management of the Pittsburgh branch to her daughter.  At the height of production, the Madame C.J. Walker Company employed more than three thousand people, mostly Black women selling her products door-to-door.

The wealth she amassed gave her a lifestyle far from that in which she grew up.  But her reputation as an entrepreneur was matched by her reputation as a philanthropist.  She encouraged her employees to give back to their communities and gave them bonuses when they did.  When there were few jobs for women, she provided them and promoted female talent within her company.  Her company charter stipulated that only a woman could be president.  Her generous contributions to charities included educational causes, the NAACP, the Black YMCA; and she provided scholarships for women at Tuskegee Institute.

Madame C.J. Walker passed away May 25, 1919, at her country home in Irvington-on-Hudson, from hypertension.  She was fifty-one.  The plans for her Indianapolis headquarters were not completed until 1927.

 

“"Peaceful revolutions are slow but sure. It takes time to leaven a great unwieldy mass like this nation with the leavening ideas of justice and liberty, but the evolution is all the more certain in its results because it is so slow.’" Susette La Flesche Tibbles, an Omaha woman, spent her entire life tirelessly campaigning for Native American rights as a speaker, activist, interpreter, and writer.  

La Flesche was born in Bellevue Nebraska in 1854, the oldest daughter of Joseph La Flesche. Her father, known as “Iron Eyes,” was the last recognized chief of the Omaha tribe. 1854, the year of La Flesche’s birth, was a consequential one for her people; that year the Omaha gave up their hunting grounds and move to a reservation in northeastern Nebraska. La Flesche grew up on the Omaha Reservation with her family. One of her younger sisters, Susan La Flesche Picotte, became the first Native American physician. 

From 1862 to 1869, La Flesche attended Presbyterian Mission Boarding Day School on the reservation where she learned to read, write, and speak in English as well as cook and sew. Reservation schools were notorious for their brutal mistreatment of Native American children. Many were forced to assimilate, stripped of their tribal clothing, name, and connections. Local governments sometimes forcibly took Native American children away from their parents and forced them to attend reservation or boarding schools. While La Flesche may have not experienced this type of brutality while attending the reservation school, hundreds of other Native American children did. 

After finishing at the Presbyterian Mission Boarding Day School, La Flesche expressed interest in continuing her education. Her father supported her and made arrangements in 1869 for La Flesche to attend the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies, a private school at Elizabeth, New Jersey. While there, she excelled as a student and as was known for her abilities as a great writer. The New York Tribune published an essay she wrote in her senior year. After graduating, La Flesche returned to the reservation and was accepted to teach at the government school on the reservation. She taught at the school for several years. 

While she was teaching on the reservation, the U.S. government was dislocating and discriminating against other Native American tribes. In 1877, the Ponca Tribe was forced to move to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. La Flesche’s paternal grandmother was Ponca, so she and her father went to the reservation to investigate the conditions under which the Ponca lived. As part of their efforts, La Flesche served as an interpreter for Standing Bear during his 1879 trial. Standing Bear was a Ponca chief who sued the U.S. Government for its treatment of his people. Standing Bear, with La Flesche’s help, won his case, Standing Bear v. Crook, which ruled: “An Indian is a person within the meaning of the law of the United States.” The ruling, an important one for Native American civil rights, meant Native Americans were able to choose where they wanted to live. LaFlesche also worked with Thomas H. Tibbles of the Omaha Herald to publicize the Ponca’s plight. Because of her advocacy for the community, La Flesche got the Native American name Inshta Theumba (“Bright Eyes”). She began going by “Bright Eyes” after the trial. 

Energized by the terrible conditions she saw and the role she played in Standing Bear’s trial, La Flesche began serving as an expert witness and interpreter in court cases in which Native Americans sued the U.S. Government. She was also a speaker, organizing speaking tours for others and herself in which they would speak out against injustice towards Native Americans. One East Coast tour that La Flesche organized for Standing Bear, Tibbles, her brother, and herself was quite successful. During the tour, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow entertained La Flesche and her co-speakers in his home. 

In 1882, La Flesche married Tibbles. Together, they continued to travel, speak, and advocate for Native Americans. They did a speaking tour in England and Scotland where they met royalty and famous literary figures. La Flesche and her husband continued to appear in front of Congressional committees, presenting their concerns about the lack of Native American rights. Her testimony helped pass the 1887 Dawes Act, considered a progressive law of benefits for the tribes at the time. In 1891, the couple traveled to South Dakota to investigate the Battle of Wounded Knee, a series of events that resulted in the death of 250-300 Native Americans, and the problems Native Americans were experiencing on the reservation. 

Alongside all this advocacy, La Flesche continued to write and worked with her husband. She died at age 49 on May 26, 1903 at her home near Bancroft. She was eulogized in the U.S. Senate and recognized for her contributions to the cause of Native American rights. She was inducted in the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994. 

By: Emma Rothberg, NWHM Predoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies I 2020-2022

National Women's History Museum

Burroughs was born May 2, 1879, in Orange County, Virginia, the daughter of John and Virginia “Jennie” Burroughs.  In 1883, her mother left her husband, taking Burroughs and her sister, and moved  to Washington, D.C.   Burroughs attended the M Street High School where she studied domestic science  and achieved high academic honors. During this period of her life she met Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper, two prominent Negro women who became her role models.

 When she graduated, Burroughs attempted to attain a position as a teacher in the Washington school system but was denied the job.  She then moved to Philadelphia to work in the office of the Christian Banner while also working part-time for Rev. Lewis Jordin at the National Baptist Convention (NBC).  She later relocated to Louisville, Kentucky to become a secretary for the Foreign Mission Board of the NBC.  A speech she gave at the 1900 annual conference of the NBC, in which she argued for women’s increased involvement in the organization, led to the creation of the Woman’s Convention Auxiliary (WC).   Burroughs served as corresponding secretary until 1948.  She was then elected president and served in that capacity until her death in 1961.

In 1909 Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls.  It was the first school in the nation to provide vocational training for African-American females.  She was instrumental in persuading the National Baptist Convention to sponsor the institution and purchase the land for it.  Burroughs ran the school and it  was  managed entirely by African-Americans.   Many disagreed with the school curriculum that trained young women to become efficient wage earners as well as community activists. Burroughs also created her own history course to inform women about societal influences on Negroes in history.   The school was renamed in her honor in 1964.

A well-known, eloquent speaker and writer, Burroughs was active in the National Association of Colored Women, which helped found; the National Association of Wage Earners; and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.  She toured the country denouncing segregation, employment discrimination and inequality.  A staunch feminist, Burroughs believed suffrage for women was the key to political power to end discrimination.   In spite of or perhaps because of her criticism of President Herbert Hoover’s silence on lynching, she was appointed in 1928 to chair a commission on housing for African Americans in conjunction with his White House Conference on Home Building.

Burroughs never married.  Instead she devoted her entire life to her work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual and evangelist.  She defied societal restrictions on her race and gender and her work foreshadowed the women’s and civil rights movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

 She passed away of natural causes alone in her Washington home on May 20, 1961.

 

 

Library of Congress: In this, BLACK HISTORY MONTH, you might put your time spent sequestered at home to good use and at the same time pay homage to the lives of American slaves by reading from the wealth of material available in the Library of Congress. This could be your opportunity to gain real knowledge and understanding of this part of American history you were never taught in any school. Below is an explanation of the collection from the Library of Congress website. You will be astounded at the wealth of information available. Good examples of what you will find are ROSA PARKS IN HER OWN WORDS and the “With Malice Toward None” inaugural speech of Abraham Lincoln. From the Library of Congress: Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress. The Volumes The published volumes containing edited slave narratives are arranged alphabetically by the state in which the interviews took place and thereunder by the surname of the informant. Administrative files for the project are bound at the beginning of Volume 1. These files detail the instructions and other information supplied to field workers as well as subjects of concern to state directors of the Federal Writers' Project. Historical Overview In the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to write down their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. John A. Lomax, the National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP (and the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress), was extremely interested in the ex-slave material he received from these states. In 1937 he directed the remaining states involved in the project to carry out interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions on what kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects, the result of which may sometimes be offensive to today's readers (see A Note on the Language of the Narratives). The field workers often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of informants and their houses. The interviewers then turned the narratives over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C. The administrative files accompanying the narratives detail the information supplied to field workers as well as subjects of concern to state directors of the FWP. For more information about the interviewers, the people interviewed, and the processes of collection and compilation, see Norman Yetman's essay which accompanies this online collection. In 1939, the FWP lost its funding, and the states were ordered to send whatever manuscripts they had collected to Washington. Once most of the materials had arrived at the Library of Congress, Benjamin A. Botkin, the folklore editor of the FWP who later became head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, undertook the remaining editing and indexing of the narratives and selected the photographs for inclusion. As noted above, he organized the narratives by state, and then alphabetically by name of informant within each state, collecting them in 1941 into seventeen bound volumes in thirty-three parts under the title Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington, D.C., 1941). The multivolume set and other project files, including some earlier unbound annotated versions of the narratives, are housed in the Manuscript Division and described in the finding aid for the records of the WPA. Other records relating to the ex-slave project are among the FWP files at the National Archives and Records Administration (Record Group 69.5.5) and are described in the Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States, Vol. I. (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1995). Volumes 2-17 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, edited by George P. Rawick and others (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79), present these narratives with a slightly different organization; the later volumes of Rawick's series also include ex-slave interviews housed in other archives. Anthologies containing selections from the Library of Congress collection include the Federal Writers' Project's Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by B. A. Botkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945) and Voices from Slavery (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), edited by Norman R. Yetman, author of An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives under the Articles and Essays tab. For additional works using these narratives as well as other slave narratives, please see the list of Related Resources. • About this Collection • Related Resources • Rights and Access Expert Resources • Finding Aid - United States Work Projects Administration Records • Manuscript Reading Room • Ask a Manuscript Librarian • Prints & Photographs Reading Room • Prints & Photographs Online Catalog • Ask a Prints & Photographs Librarian • Blog: Picture This • Collections with Photos • Collections with Manuscripts

Today we celebrate Dr. Justina Ford. Not only was she a true pioneer and trailblazer who made history by overcoming the barriers of race and gender to become the first African American woman to practice medicine in Colorado. She was compassionate, fair, equitable, fearless, and determined to help others. Her drive and determination made her an inspiration to others and continues to inspire us all today.

During her 50-year career at her home in Five Points, she delivered 7,000 babies and provided healthcare for Denver’s financially challenged immigrant communities. We were honored to name one of our state data systems for COVID-19 tracking “Dr. Justina” in honor of her legacy (more about that here: https://cdphe.colorado.gov/dr-justina) Dr. Ford’s impact on our community will never be forgotten. Jarad Polis Governor of Colorado