HOW MADAM WALKER DEVELOPED HER PRODUCTS AND SALES FORCE
After selling her line of products from door to door and turning a room of her Denver home into her first salon in 1906, Madam C. J. Walker began visiting the black communities in Colorado’s small mining towns. Soon she realized her market was limited because of the state’s small black population.
She and her husband, Charles Joseph Walker, began to travel through the Southern, Eastern and Midwestern United States. After a year and a half they settled in Pittsburgh where she opened her first beauty school, Lelia College, which she named after her daughter Lelia McWilliams Robinson (who later was to become known as A’Lelia Walker).
Madam Walker is surrounded by some of her top Ohio sales agents (Madam Walker Family Archives www.madamcjwalker.com)
They continued traveling and training sales agents. In 1910 she moved to Indianapolis where she built her first factory. By this time she already had trained hundreds of women in the Madam Walker System of Beauty Culture.
In 1913 after extensive travel throughout the United States, she visited Cuba, Panama, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Haiti to expand her business internationally.
In 1917–the year before Mary Kay was born–she hosted her first national convention of Walker sales agents. Like Mary Kay, she gave prizes to the women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new agents. But she also gave prizes to the women who had contributed the most to charity. Then she took her leadership a step farther by encouraging the women to be politically active. At the end of the convention they sent a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson urging him to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime.
By the time Madam Walker died in May 1919, she claimed that she and her teaching faculty had trained more than 20,000 Walker agents.
Her original five products–Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, Tetter Salve, Temple Salve, Vegetable Shampoo and Glossine–addressed specific needs. At a time when most American homes lacked indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity, hygiene practices were very different from today. Baths were a weekly rather than daily ritual because of the time and effort it took to pump water from an outdoor well, heat it on a wood stove, etc. Hairwashing happened infrequently: perhaps once a month for many and sometimes only once or twice during the winter. As a result, many women developed severe scalp disease, which resulted in hair loss.
Madam Walker encouraged women to wash their hair more often and to apply the ointments, which contained sulphur, an ingredient that long had been used by physicians and pharmacists to heal skin ailments like dandruff and psoriasis.
Over time Madam Walker began to realize that selling hair products was a means to a more important end. While her vegetable shampoo and ointments effectively healed scalp disease, it’s also true that her system of beauty culture gave her customers more control over the care of their hair. Soon she saw that there was more to what she was doing than selling hair products. She realized that she could empower women and helped them become economically independent at a time when racism and sexism consigned most black women to working as maids, cooks, sharecroppers and washerwomen like she had been for much of her life.
“I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself!” Madam Walker told an audience in 1913. “I am endeavoring to provide jobs for hundreds of women of my race!”
Her mission was about so much more than her Wonderful Hair Grower! Her mission had become to “grow” women’s minds and opportunities.
A’Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer, holds a 100 year old portrait of Walker from her Madam Walker Family Archives
I love Black History Month because I learn something new every day!
The truth is, I’m already immersed in black history every month, week and day of the year, but in February it feels as if I have lots of company. It seems that whereever I turn, there are websites, blogs, television networks, radio programs and lectures all celebrating the fascinating people I love to study.
Langston Hughes called A’Lelia Walker “the joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s”
Writing books about my great-great-grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker, and her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, has given me an opportunity to learn not just about them, but about the eras in which they lived and the people they knew. Whether it’s Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois or Langston Hughes and Florence Mills, they crossed paths with some of the most interesting and influential black women and men of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through their lives, I’ve been able to tell a more inclusive account of American history than the version I learned in school. From Madam Walker’s birth in 1867 as America was emerging from the Civil War through World War I and the Harlem Renaissance to A’Lelia Walker’s death in 1931 during the Great Depression, I’ve been fortunate to view America through a lens that gives women and African Americans their rightful place in the nation’s story.
A’Lelia Bundles with Thomas Jefferson re-enactor Steve Edenbo (Credit: Lauren V. Burke)
“As we listen to more voices, we’ll hear a greater harmony. At times we will hear a more complicated dissonance, too. The problem solves itself, however; for when we invite more sources of insight and information into our fold, we will simultaneously increase our ability to understand the conflicts both in our history as well as in our present.” Steve Edenbo, Thomas Jefferson interpreter, July 8, 2012
One of the delights of the National Archives’s annual Fourth of July celebration is the chance to mingle with the Revolutionary War era re-enactors. Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin. Abigail Adams. Edward “Ned” Hector. John Adams.
Revolutionary War era re-enactors at the National Archives July 4, 2012 (NARA photo)
Each stays in character and is deeply immersed in the biographical knowledge of his or her character. They are so adept at making history come alive that it is easy to be transported to the 18th century. At the same time, we know that out of costume these actors are people equipped with 21st century sensibilities and the advantage of historical context. (more…)
I had a fabulous time last year listening to the Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps and mingling with Revolutionary War era re-enactors Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Ned Hector, a black Continental Army soldier.
Riley Temple (Foundation for the National Archives board member), Laura Murphy (descendant of Declaration signer Philip Livingston) and A’Lelia Bundles
I’ve posted lots of photos on my Facebook page. Because several people were kind enough to ask for a copy of my speech, I’m posting what I said about Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Fourth of July speech and what the holiday means to me 160 years later. [Here, also, is a link to the video.]
Honored guests at the 2012 National Archives Fourth of July Celebration
Columbia J-School Dean Nicholas Lemann and Columbia President Lee Bollinger at renaming of Pulitzer Hall
April 21, 2011–My alma mater, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, launched its centennial celebration yesterday afternoon with the renaming of the Journalism School Building and an evening of festitivies.
More than 40 descendants of newspaper publisher and J-School founding benefactor Joseph Pulitzer joined Dean Nicholas Lemann, Columbia President Lee Bollinger and a crowd of alumni and staff for the unveiling of the newly carved “Pulitzer” name.
"Pulitzer" was carved above the entryway to Columbia's Journalism School in honor of the centennial and its founder
As emcee for the Centennial program, I had the pleasure of reviewing the stellar achievements of a century’s worth of J-School grads from the new collection, “50 Great Stories.” It was an honor to introduce Michael Pulitzer, grandson of Joseph Pulitzer and former Pulitzer Inc. board chair, and Robert Caro , the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer and the evening’s keynote speaker. We all were moved by NPR reporter Martina Guzman , J-School ’08, whose award-winning investigative coverage of Detroit challenges the status quo.
Columbia Grad School of Journalism Program April 20, 2012
After the program, we gathered in the J-School’s World Room for dinner. What a nice coincidence, after an evening of interesting conversation, to discover that my tablemate, Michael Pulitzer, Jr., also is my college classmate. Truly small world.
My remarks about my accomplished fellow alumni and my intro of Robert Caro follow. (more…)
Annie Parrum, Anna Angales, Elizabeth Berkeley and Sadie Thompson–all older than 100–at a 1916 Emancipation reunion (Harris & Ewing Collection/Library of Congress)
I couldn’t stop staring at this photo. Four elderly black women, “all older than 100, at a convention in the District in 1916,” said the caption in last Friday’s Washington Post.
Within a few minutes of online research, though, I discovered two more photos taken on the same day in 1916 by Harris & Ewing at an Emancipation reunion. As the official White House photographers of the early 1900s and then the nation’s largest photo news service, they rarely snapped shots of African Americans. (more…)
HOW MADAM WALKER DEVELOPED HER PRODUCTS AND SALES FORCE
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