|
photo by Ed Swiatkowski
A'Lelia Bundles,
author of
On
Her Own Ground:
The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker
_____________________________________________________
Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 on a Delta, Louisiana plantation,
Madam C.J. Walker -- the daughter of former slaves -- transformed herself
from an uneducated farm laborer and laundress into of the twentieth century's
most successful, self-made female entrepreneur. Orphaned at age seven,
she often said, "I got my start by giving myself a start."
During the 1890s, Sarah began to suffer from a scalp ailment that caused
her to lose most of her hair. She experimented with many homemade remedies
and store-bought products, including those made by Annie Malone, another
black woman entrepreneur. In 1905 Sarah moved to Denver as a sales agent
for Malone, then married her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, a St.
Louis newspaperman. After changing her name to "Madam" C. J. Walker, she
founded her own business and began selling Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair
Grower, a scalp conditioning and healing formula, which she claimed had been
revealed to her in a dream.
To promote her products, the new "Madam C.J. Walker" traveled for a year
and a half on a dizzying crusade throughout the heavily black South and
Southeast, selling her products door to door, demonstrating her scalp treatments
in churches and lodges, and devising sales and marketing strategies. In 1908,
she temporarily moved her base to Pittsburgh where she opened Lelia College
to train Walker "hair culturists."
By early 1910, she had settled in Indianapolis, then the nation's largest
inland manufacturing center, where she built a factory, hair and manicure
salon and training school. Less than a year after her arrival, Walker grabbed
national headlines in the black press when she contributed $1,000 to the
building fund of the "colored" YMCA in Indianapolis.
Walker moved to New York in 1916, and once there, quickly became involved
in Harlem's social and political life, taking special interest in the NAACP's
anti-lynching movement to which she contributed $5,000. By the time
she died at her estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, she
had helped create the role of the 20th Century, self-made American businesswoman;
established herself as a pioneer of the modern black hair-care and cosmetics
industry; and set standards in the African-American community for corporate
and community giving.*
Walker's biographer, her great-great-granddaughter A'Lelia Bundles, visits
with Jerry Jazz Musician in a March 11, 2004 interview.
*
A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection
Earliest known photograph of Madam C.J. Walker -- taken in the
1890's (center) -- used in a "before and after" advertisement, circa
1906
*
"As a pioneer of the modern cosmetics industry and the founder of the
Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, Madam Walker created marketing schemes,
training opportunities and distribution strategies as innovative as those
of any entrepreneur of her time. As an early advocate of women's economic
independence, she provided lucrative incomes for thousands of African American
women who otherwise would have been consigned to jobs as farm laborers,
washerwomen and maids. As a philanthropist, she reconfigured the philosophy
of charitable giving in the black community with her unprecedented contributions
to the YMCA and the NAACP. As a political activist, she dreamed of
organizing her sales agents to use their economic clout to protest lynching
and racial injustice. As much as any woman of the twentieth century,
Madam Walker paved the way for the profound social changes that altered women's
place in American society."
- A'Lelia Bundles
*
Mamamita
,
by Jelly Roll Morton
_____________________________________________________
JJM As an introduction to Madam C.J. Walker
-- your great great grandmother -- the writer Ishmael Reed wrote, "Madam
Walker is the key to understanding her generation. She had to battle the
society who had consigned her to doing its laundry, yet she triumphed to
become one of the most fabulous African American figures of the twentieth
century." Madam Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, was orphaned at a very early
age. What characteristics did she possess that allowed her to turn her
vulnerability as an orphan into resolve and resilience?
AB One explanation is that she was a genius.
In every generation there are geniuses like Henry Ford or Bill Gates or Andrew
Carnegie, so let's use that characterization as the headline. In addition,
she was a very resilient child. There are many children of poverty who overcome
very difficult circumstances, and in a family where everyone doesn't succeed,
sometimes there are children who possess the resilience necessary to turn
the difficulties into positives. Because she had so much loss in the early
part of her life -- including the death of her parents -- rather than being
beaten down by it, it made her a fighter.
| JJM Following the death of her parents,
among the difficulties she encountered was dealing with an abusive
brother-in-law. What did she do once she got away from that?
AB She married at age fourteen in order to
get a home of her own and escape this cruel brother-in-law. After she was
married she had her only child, A'Lelia, at age seventeen. Her first husband,
Moses McWilliams, died when she was twenty. So, by the time she turned twenty
she had experienced more loss and abuse and deprivation than many people
experience in a lifetime. Once Moses died she knew that she was not going
back to live with the sister and brother-in-law. Instead, she moved up the
river to St. Louis, where she had three brothers who were barbers. For the
next eighteen years she struggled as a washerwoman, trying to save enough
money to educate her daughter. During this time she became very influenced
by some of the women of the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church,
which was located very near her brother's barbershop. The women of the Church
had a long tradition of reaching out to those in need. And these women gave
Madam Walker -- at that point known as Sarah Breedlove McWilliams -- a vision
of herself quite different from that of an illiterate washerwoman.
JJM There was some speculation that her first
husband had been lynched.
AB Yes, and it is something that is fabricated,
yet it gets repeated so many times. In doing the research, the first time
I discovered this appearing in print was in a three or four part series on
Madam Walker in the Pittsburgh Courier during the forties, and it
was very clear that the writer used a lot of creative and literary license.
For example, he made up a name for her first husband, and speculated that
he rode off on a horse across the levy -- which of course he would have no
way of knowing. He then wrote that he was killed in a race riot in Greenville,
Mississippi. I did a lot of research on riots and lynching in that area,
and surprisingly, there is a lot of documentation on the lynchings, because
people in the communities were proud of this crime, and there were people
who kept records of it. The other thing that I believe proves her husband
was not lynched is because Madam Walker was such an outspoken advocate of
the anti-lynching legislation. If her husband had indeed been lynched, she
would have mentioned that in some of her advocacy. The lynching story is
a made-up story. |
Portrait by Addison Scurlock
Madam Walker, circa 1914
*
"I was at my washtubs one morning with a heavy wash before me.
As I bent over the washboard, and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds,
I said to myself, 'What are you going to do when you grow old and your back
gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?' This
set me to thinking, but with all my thinking I couldn't see how I, a poor
washerwoman, was going to better my condition."
- Madam C.J. Walker |
A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection
Madam C.J. Walker's Vegetable Shampoo
*
Everybody
Wants a Key to My Cellar , by Bert Williams |
JJM In the prologue to your book, you
write, "As a pioneer of the modern cosmetics industry and the founder of
the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, Madam Walker created marketing
schemes, training opportunities and distribution strategies as innovative
as those of any entrepreneur of her time." Can you talk a little about her
business?
AB When Madam Walker started her business in 1905
- 1906, there was no national or international cosmetics industry. We take
for granted now when we go into the drug store or the grocery store that
there will be thirty kinds of shampoo, and fifteen kinds of conditioners
and hair ointments and other hygiene and cosmetics products. But in 1905,
Madam Walker and women like Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein were creating
what is now a multi-billion dollar industry. For the most part, beauty products
of that time were created in people's homes, or perhaps a local company had
very limited distribution. These women carved out a niche that was being
ignored by the larger corporate world -- making products that appealed to
women.
Madam Walker's system used a vegetable shampoo and an ointment that contained
sulfur to heal scalp disease, and promoted hygiene and grooming. At the time,
most women only washed their hair once a month. People bathed very irregularly
because so few of them had indoor plumbing, electricity or central heating.
After she developed this shampoo and what she called her "wonderful hair
grower," she began to sell those products door to door. As it became popular,
she traveled throughout the United States and began to train other women
to be her sales agents. Her mail order operation then began to grow, and
she could see that advertising was a very critical and important way to expand
her business. |
| JJM Thomas Fortune, editor of the New
York Age, one of the nation's most widely read black newspapers of the
time, wrote, "It is generally the case that those black men who clamor most
loudly and persistently for the purity of Negro blood have taken themselves
mulatto wives." The activist Fannie Barrier Williams wrote, "What our girls
and women have a right to demand from our best men is that they cease to
imitate the artificial standards of other people and create a race standard
of their own." National Association of Colored Women member Nannie Helen
Burroughs wrote, "There are men right in our own race, and they are legion,
who would rather marry a woman for her color than her character." What was
the black man's standard for beauty during this era?
AB I don't want to generalize and say that
all black men had identical interests, but the standard for beauty in America
during that era was European. The color consciousness that permeated America
also infected the black community, so the people who were light skinned often
had more privilege. Within families, it was sometimes felt that the lighter
skinned member of the family might be able to get the best jobs. So, there
were also economic reasons why people made decisions based on skin color.
But, while mulatto and light skinned women were sought after by black and
white men, there were plenty of dark skinned women who managed to be married.
JJM Along those lines, Burroughs said, "If
Negro women would spend half the time they spend on trying to get white,
to get better, the race would move forward apace."
AB Yes, that is probably true. Similarly
there has always been ambivalence on the part of women regarding how they
should use their cosmetics -- whether or not to dye their hair blonde, how
much makeup to wear, how much eye shadow to apply -- and there will always
be that tug and pull, but this was especially apparent in the early twentieth
century, a time when women who even wore makeup were considered either actresses
or whores. People were still developing their attitudes about what was
appropriate. There is a great deal of evolution since the early twentieth
century regarding the aesthetic of what is acceptable in the black community.
People of the era felt the need to conform. In the sixties, hair was liberated
for people of all colors. In the musical Hair, white kids let their
hair grow long, and black kids let their hair grow into Afros, so everyone
was liberating himself or herself. Today, it is interesting that the whole
range is acceptable, whether it is dreadlocks or beads with blonde hair.
Some people have psychologically painful hang ups about their natural hair,
and other people are just experimenting and changing their styles on a whim.
JJM Booker T. Washington had an interesting
view of the cosmetics industry. He wrote to New York Age editor Fred
Moore that he had come to "view with alarm" the "considerable amount" of
"clairvoyant advertising, hair straightening advertising, and fake religious
advertising" that appeared in his newspaper.
AB Yes, and I think most of those were white
owned companies who were playing on some of the insecurities African Americans
felt at the time. Remember that during slavery there was a great deal
of shame imposed on African Americans by whites regarding their skin color
and hair texture, and some of those insecurities remained. Booker T. Washington
was concerned that people in the black community were being misled by these
charlatans who were trying to market what he considered to be hair straighteners
-- when in fact no one's hair can be straightened permanently. Madam Walker
tried to distinguish herself from that. |
The Day Dream, 1909
Magazine illustrator Charles Gibson's work epitomized beauty and elegance
of the era
*
"It was not only whites who enforced a social hierarchy based on
skin color. Those slaves and free people of color who could claim white
ancestry -- especially those whose slave-owning fathers had provided for
their education in America and abroad -- formed the core of an antebellum
elite that clustered in Washington, Philadelphia, Charleston, New Orleans,
Atlanta and a handful of other cities. Well into the twentieth century
some of their descendants continued to distance themselves from their darker
brethren to protect their own tenuous social standing."
- A'Lelia Bundles |
A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection
The Delta, Louisiana plantation where Sarah Breedlove (Madam C.J.
Walker) was born
__________
"When women saw her photo and heard her life story, they clamored
to take her course and sit for her treatments."
- A'Lelia Bundles
*
A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection
and Indiana Historical Society
Madam Walker and Booker T. Washington (to her right), at the Senate
Avenue YMCA dedication in Indianapolis
_________
"I know I can not do anything alone, so I have decided to make
an appeal to the leaders of the race…I feel no hesitancy in presenting
my case to you, as I know you know what it is to struggle alone with the
ability to do, but no money to back it."
Madam C.J. Walker, in a letter to Booker T. Washington
*
Charleston Rag
, by Eubie Blake |
JJM You wrote, "When women saw her photo
and heard her life story, they clamored to take her course and sit for her
treatments." How did she market her past to generate more business?
AB She very much used her own personal narrative
as a way to inspire women. In an era when there was no radio, television
or Internet, a person speaking at the local church or town hall was very
exciting. Because she was a woman who might arrive in a chauffeured driven
car, possibly wearing a fur, and who was a bit more sophisticated than the
people in the town, she was an attraction. She used some of that public persona
to get people interested in hearing her story. Once they heard her story
and how she had become economically independent, they became even more
fascinated.
JJM I was amazed by her courage. The way that
she reached out, for example, to Booker T. Washington, took a lot of guts.
Here was a woman who grew up in poverty and was only a few years into her
business when she started to appeal for his attention…
AB Some of these early coping mechanisms
she used to survive the trauma of being an orphan as well as an abused young
person inspired her. The AME Church, as I mentioned earlier, was also very
important for her. The Church has a long tradition of being politically militant,
of having effective leadership, and of educating and empowering African
Americans. Also, the relationship with some of the women friends she made
who were higher in status when she first arrived in St. Louis gave her role
models to follow. She took what they had and propelled beyond them.
JJM Regarding her interest in getting Booker
T. Washington's attention, before an assembled audience at the National Negro
Business League convention, which included Washington, Walker stood up and,
among other things, said, "Perhaps many of you have heard of the real ambition
of my life, the all absorbing idea which I hope to accomplish. My ambition
is to build an industrial school in Africa. By the help of God and the
cooperation of my people in this country, I am going to build a Tuskegee
Institute in Africa!" After hearing this, Washington ignored her remark and
moved to the next order of business. Why did Booker Washington frequently
dismiss her?
AB Well, I think he dismissed her, yes, but
that was probably the last time he did so.
JJM Yes, she had tried to get his attention
in writing a couple of times prior to that.
AB Yes, she had written to him, she had visited
the Tuskegee campus, and they had met each other at previous conventions
of the National Association of Colored Women. In the instance you talk about,
the 1912 convention, he resented the fact that she tried to take over even
though she wasn't included in the program, or part of his inner circle. She
was being pushy, he was a chauvinist, and he didn't really like other people
telling him what to do. As a result, he didn't want to give in, but after
she had made such an impression on others, he couldn't ignore her any longer.
At the dedication of the YMCA the following year, and at the subsequent National
Negro Business League convention, he was full of praise for her and was very
happy to see her. They got to be so close that when he visited Indianapolis,
he stayed at her home.
As Madeline Albright has said, sometimes women should not "shut up," and
at times we do need to interrupt. That is as true now as it was before, and
maybe more so. If you sit on your hands and let other people define you,
no advances are made, and the only way Madam Walker was going to break that
barrier with Washington was to startle him. Afterwards, there was at least
a mutual respect for one another. |
| JJM Yes, concerning her thinking that
women really need to stand up for themselves, she said, "I had little or
no opportunity when I started out in life. I had to make my own living and
my own opportunity. But I made it. That is why I want to say to every Negro
woman present, don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come, but
you have to get up and make them!" She certainly demonstrated that.
AB That's right. I believe that she really
was a visionary in terms of women and economic independence. She was saying
all of these things before women had the right to vote, and before they could
own property in their own name. She was very aware that there were many women
like her who had been widowed or abandoned, who did in fact have to make
their own living, and the only way to do so was by doing it themselves. She
was a tremendous advocate for women's independence. In 1917, the year before
Mary Kay was born, she was having conventions of her sales agents, giving
prizes not just to the women who sold the most products, but to the women
who contributed the most to charity and political causes. She had a vision
of her sales agents -- made up of economically independent women -- using
their money to make a difference in their community. |
A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection
and Indiana Historical Society
Graduates of the St. Louis Walker Beuaty School
*
"I want my agents to feel that their first duty is to humanity."
- Madam C.J. Walker |
A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection
A'Lelia Walker
*
"Regardless of their periodic spats, they were more alike than
different, plagued by an early sense of emotional abandonment and an attendant
need to control and cling to those closest to them. On a healthier
plane, they also shared a love of music, dancing and entertaining, and their
generous spirits ultimately prevailed over the flare-ups that were ignited
by their quick tempers."
- A'Lelia Bundles
*
Maple Leaf Rag , by Scott Joplin |
JJM And I got the sense that this vision
-- while it was a great business strategy -- came from the heart. It
didn't appear to be the least bit fabricated…
AB Yes, I believe you are right. She came
up with many of these ideas herself. She was quite influenced by her spirituality
and her religious connections to the AME Church, as well as to the women's
club movement of the times, including the National Association of Colored
Women. By attending those conventions and by becoming a part of that group
of women, she gleaned ideas from them. Her idea for organizing her agents
into local, state and national clubs came from the structure of the NACW.
It is also likely that her association with the NAACP radicalized her politics
as well.
JJM Your grandmother A'Lelia once said of
her mother, "Mother rules with an iron hand and forces her opinion upon me
regardless of what I may think." What was their relationship like?
AB As many parent/child relationships are,
theirs was very complicated. Madam Walker rose up from abject poverty, founded
her own business, and eventually became one of the most famous people in
the country. As a mother, she intentionally spoiled her daughter but also
wanted her to be successful. As a result, A'Lelia Walker became a very
complicated person. It is pretty simplistic to say, as some do, that Madam
Walker made the money and A'Lelia Walker squandered it. In actuality, A'Lelia
had a lot of great ideas, but only one person could lead, and she often felt
overshadowed or dismissed by her mother. It was very difficult for her to
live up to her mother's expectations, which is probably the case for fifty
percent of the population, it is just that the rest of us are not as famous. |
JJM Did she take any risks when moving her
business to Harlem?
AB The move to Harlem didn't really involve risk,
and for the most part it was all positive. She didn't actually move the business
to Harlem -- it stayed in Indianapolis -- but she moved her personal residence
to Harlem and had a beauty salon and a school in the residence in Harlem.
It was a beautiful, strategic move to keep the manufacturing operation in
Indianapolis, where it was cheaper to do business, and yet have a high profile
presence in Harlem since it was becoming a Mecca for African American politics
and culture.
JJM How was she received in Harlem when she
arrived?
AB Her salon opening was written up under
headlines. She was a big heroine by the time of her arrival in Harlem, and
not just because of her success as an entrepreneur, but because of her work
as a philanthropist and political activist as well. She was very favorably
received. |
The Walker Salon in Harlem
*
Indianola
,
by James Reese Europe |
A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection
and Indiana Historical Society
Walker attorney Freeman Ransom
__________
"I hope you will be very careful in not identifying yourself too
closely with the (Monroe) Trotter bunch, who may do something that will bring
the whole delegation into ill-repute or offend the country. You must
always bear in mind that you have a large business, whereas the others, who
are going, have nothing. There are many ways in which your business
can be circumscribed and hampered so as to practically put you out of
business."
- Ransom advising Madam Walker concerning her interest in influencing
the post WWI Paris peace talks
*
A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection
Madam Walker, circa 1910
*
There's A Great Camp Meeting
, by the Fisk Jubilee Singers |
JJM Her political evolution was pretty
fascinating. Can you talk a little about where she started and where she
wound up politically?
AB I don't know that she started any place
politically, but as she became more exposed to W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B.
Wells-Barnett, and A. Phillip Randolph, her political views became more
radicalized. It could be said that because she was a woman living in an era
when so much chauvinism existed, she was already radicalized. She shared
some of Booker T. Washington's views regarding the importance of having a
skill and of being economically independent. I don't believe she shared his
views about standing back and not integrating -- they probably departed on
some aspects of that. While she was certainly more politically radical than
he was, she had a great deal of respect for him. She may not have agreed
with everything he stood for, but she understood his power.
By the time she made the move to Harlem, she had been approached by so many
people in an effort to get her support of a particular cause that she had
to sort them out. And, unlike some people who become more politically
conservative after achieving wealth, she actually became more politically
radical. The source of her wealth was other black people, so she didn't feel
compelled to support the causes that white people or conservatives did. She
became very outspoken about lynching, discrimination against African American
soldiers, and any kind of civil rights discrimination, and evolved into a
politically militant person. It is interesting that when she applied for
a passport in hopes of observing the Paris Peace Talks -- she had a great
deal of interest in the former German colonies like Togo, Cameroon and German
East Africa -- it was denied because she was described by a spy for the War
Department as a "Negro Subversive." Those charges were based primarily on
her outspokenness on lynching and discrimination.
JJM Her attorney, Freeman Ransom, was skeptical
of some of her political affiliations, including that with the International
League of Darker Peoples. He said to her that he was "beginning to grow seriously
apprehensive lest you will impair your usefulness by becoming identified
with too many organizations fostered by highly questionable characters."
AB Yes, and he was probably right about that
specific organization, but, as time goes on, what appeared radical then is
now part of the mainstream. For example, A. Phillip Randolph is looked upon
by most Americans today as a brilliant man who pulled together the Pullman
Porters Union and created the March on Washington in 1963, but he was viewed
as out of the mainstream -- of being too radical. Martin Luther King was
considered a radical by many people as well. You don't make any progress
unless you do something that challenges the status quo, and Mr. Ransome,
for all of his brilliance and all of his contributions, was quite conservative
in his outlook. He was trying to protect his client, and his advice to her
in terms of that particular organization was very positive. But in contrast
to that, he was very dismissive of Randolph, who ultimately turned out to
be one of the most important civil rights figures of the twentieth century.
JJM It didn't appear that any of her political
stances ever interfered with her business.
AB No, they didn't, and they really couldn't,
in many ways. Even though Mr. Ransome was fearful that her opinions may,
as he said, "circumscribe" her business, since her customers were black,
they were not upset by any of her political alliances. Sure, the government
might be opposed to some of the things she stood for, but they weren't using
her products and weren't the source of her income. The one thing that her
political stances did do was prevent her from getting a passport, but dozens
of African Americans were denied passports at the time because President
Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing didn't really want to
have the pesky issue of racial discrimination brought up during the Versailles
talks. |
JJM She had an interest in building a college
in Africa. Did she get far along with that?
AB Not very far at all. It was an interesting
dream that she had, but nothing that ever materialized.
JJM Perhaps it was something she would have
accomplished had she lived longer?
AB Maybe, but probably not. Considering the
transportation of the time, the logistics of that would have been so difficult.
It was certainly a laudable goal but not easily attainable for the era.
JJM Madam Walker's name became synonymous
with hair straightening. You wrote, "Derisively dubbed the 'de-kink queen,'
she had maintained until the end that she was a hair culturist, not a hair
straightener." Was this an unfair legacy? Is she remembered in a way that
does her an injustice?
AB Certainly she is to those people who only associate
her with that. It is an incomplete legacy, and an ill informed legacy.
*
A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection
Madam Walker driving her Model T Ford
Indianapolis, 1912
*
"(Madam Walker is) the clearest demonstration I know of Negro woman's
ability in history. She has gone, but her work still lives and shall
live as an inspiration to not only her race but to the world."
- Mary McLeod Bethune
_____________________________________________________
About A'Lelia Bundles
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
AB My hero while I was in high school was
W.E.B. Du Bois. His intellect struck me. I read Souls of Black Folk
at a very pivotal point in the sixties, while I was in high school, and it
was the first piece I read that was a complex and nuanced treatment of race
in America. I was pleased to see someone articulate things that resonated
so much with me.
JJM Was he an inspiration in your career as
well?
AB I don't know if he served as an inspiration
for my career, but it was personally inspirational because it challenged
the myth that black people are not very bright -- which many people still
believe. Du Bois went to Harvard, which is where I went as well, so his
attendance there was particularly meaningful for me.
The inspiration for my writing was more because of my parents, who were probably
my biggest influences. My father was a Journalism major at Indiana University
in the forties, and when he graduated from college, since the Indianapolis
Star was not ready for a black writer, they hired him instead as circulation
manager, where he oversaw the delivery of the paper. We shared a love of
writing and journalism, which was the icing on the cake for me.
_______________________________
Read a book excerpt
Madam C.J. Walker web site
Madam C.J. Walker products at Amazon.com
A'Lelia Bundles products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
This interview took place on March 11, 2004
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Zora Neale Hurston letters editor Carla Kaplan.
*
_______________________________
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
* Text from publisher.
|
