If it is possible to go from rags to riches, then that is precisely what A'Lelia Bundles's great-great-grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker, did.
Madam C. J. Walker
After nearly 30 years of research, much of it at the Library, award-winning journalist, television producer and author A'Lelia Bundles has written a new biography of Madam Walker, which puts Walker in the context of her times.
Ms. Bundles is a graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a field producer for NBC News and former deputy bureau chief at ABC News.
Madame Walker made a remarkable ascent in status, from life as a worker in the cotton fields of rural Mississippi to life as a successful cosmetics manufacturer, entrepreneur, philanthropist and social activist. In her new book, On Her Own Ground, Ms. Bundles tells how. On March 20, she provided an extensive account of Madam Walker's life in her lecture and slide presentation to a standing room-only audience in the Madison Building's West Dining Room. The lecture, was sponsored by the Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Division.
Introducing Ms. Bundles, Humanities and Social Sciences reference librarian Rodney Katz noted that the author had visited 17 cities and participated in 40 book-signing events. At this program, books were made available for autographing. The lecture also was held in recognition of Women's History Month.
A'Lelia Bundles autographs a book for Library employee Wanda Cartwright. - Larica Perry
Living in a household in which the family used daily Walker's hand-painted Limoges china and silverware bearing her monogram and her mother painstakingly polished a sterling silver punch bowl that held holiday eggnog made with Walker's secret recipe, Ms. Bundles became aware of her famous forebear at an early age. Later, Ms. Bundles became so intrigued by the material accoutrements around her that she began to seek more information about Walker. Yet it was not until Phyl Garland, the only black professor on the Columbia University journalism school faculty, insisted that she do her master's paper on Madam Walker that Ms. Bundles began to learn about her grandmother in a more formal and organized manner.
As Ms. Bundles acknowledged at the beginning of her presentation, her research led to the Library, where she was assisted by staff in several divisions. In the Manuscript Division, she consulted the papers of Booker T. Washington and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She used the Boston Globe and Afro-American newspapers in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room. She found materials on business and diseases in the Science, Technology and Business Division. Using city directories in the Microform Reading Room, she located pertinent biographical information. And she spent a considerable amount of time in the General Collections, consulting reference books and articles of general interest.
Having a well-known relative meant that references to her were found in biographies of other black figures, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, and in histories such as David Levering Lewis's When Harlem Was in Vogue.
An advertisement for Madam Walker's products in an issue of The Messenger, 1926
Madam Walker's name at birth was Sarah Breedlove, and her family lived in Delta, La., not far from Vicksburg, Miss. Walker was born on Dec. 23, 1867, shortly after the Civil War. In fact, Walker was born on the same plantation where her parents had once lived as slaves and where Ulysses S. Grant presided over the siege of Vicksburg.
Walker was orphaned at 7, married at 14 and became a mother at 17, when her only child, Lelia, was born. She was widowed at 20 and married twice again, the last time to Charles Joseph Walker, whose name she adopted in 1906, adding the title Madam, which, Ms. Bundles explained, was the custom of women in business.
Madam Walker's rise to fortune was prompted by her hair falling out in the 1890s, leaving bald spots. Walker decided she would pray to God to give her a solution. "He answered my prayer," Walker vouched. "For one night I had a dream, and in that dream a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix for my hair."
Eventually, Walker concocted a potion containing sulfur, which seemed to cure her baldness and some black women's scalp diseases that Bundles suspected resulted from their belief in an old wive's tale that discouraged frequent shampoos, especially in the winter. The three main products Walker manufactured were Vegetable Shampoo, Wonderful Hair Grower and Glossine.
Walker was very interested in self-improvement. She was not afraid to hire people with more education than she had. She hired a tutor to teach her English, proper grammar and other subjects she felt would increase her ability to operate more effectively in her business. She learned to love luxurious living— cars, opera and the arts, her mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y., that her friend, tenor Enrico Caruso, named "Villa Lewaro" for Walker's daughter, Lelia Walker Robinson, who supported her mother's enterprise.
Ms. Bundles said her research helped refute some of the myths that surrounded Walker, for example, that her first husband, Moses McWilliams, was lynched in 1888 (she found no documentation for that statement); that Walker invented the straightening comb (she did not); and that Walker was a millionaire (Bundles estimates Walker's actual wealth between $600,000 and $700,000).
Ms. Bundles reported two incidents that reveal Walker's character. In 1912, at a National Negro Business League Conference, after Booker T. Washington, who was presiding over the conference, refused to recognize her, Walker stood up and announced: "Surely you are not going to shut the door in my face. I feel that I am in a business that is a credit to the womanhood of our race. I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. I was promoted from there to the washtub. Then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself." It was also in this speech that Walker stated: "I have built my factory on my own ground." The next year, Walker was invited as the main speaker.
Villa Lewaro, Madam Walker's home in Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. The home was designed in 1918 by Vertner Woodson Tandy, New York's first licensed black architect. Asked why she built such a palatial home, Madam Walker replied that she had not built it for herself, but so that blacks could see what could be accomplished with hard work and determination.
At a convention of hair culturalists and agents in 1917, Walker stated: "If I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard. … There is no royal, flower-strewn road to success, and if there is, I have not found it, for what success I have obtained is the result of many sleepless nights and real hard work. That is why I say to every Negro woman present: Don't sit down and wait for opportunities to come. … Get up and make them!"
Interested in more than making money, Madam Walker gave $1,000 toward the construction of a YMCA for blacks in Indianapolis; participated in anti-lynching and women's suffrage campaigns; sought and received an audience with President Woodrow Wilson; founded Lelia College to train stylists in Walker Beauty Shops across the nation and abroad; and gave to nonprofit and charitable organizations.
Ms. Bundles presented Walker as a lover of life, an aggressive and assertive woman who established a business that employed thousands of women. She gave women with little education work that they could do. As Ms. Bundles noted, in the early part of the last century, black stylists in beauty shops made more money than teachers and nurses. Walker amassed a fortune through hard work. She was a woman with a vision, who saw an opportunity and seized it.
