An old saying goes: ‘If life gives you lemons, then make lemonade’. But if life gives you racial oppression, grinding poverty, gender discrimination – and hair loss – then what to do? 

Madam CJ Walker knew exactly what. In doing so, she became not only America's first female Black millionaire but its first self-made female millionaire of any race, according to the Guinness Book of Records. Discover the extraordinary story of how a girl born on a 19th-century cotton plantation built a trailblazing hair-care empire and ended up one of New York’s most influential society figures. 

All dollar amounts in US dollars.

On 23 December 1867, on a cotton plantation near Delta, Louisiana, a baby girl was born to a formerly enslaved couple. Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove called their new arrival Sarah. The American Civil War had only recently ended slavery in the US, and Sarah was theoretically born free, unlike her older siblings. However, the southern states remained a hostile environment for Black people, as reactionary elements fought to assert white supremacy.

Sarah Breedlove's young life was an arduous one. By the time she was seven, both her parents had died and she was sent to live with her sister Louvinia and her husband Jesse Powell. Together, the three of them moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi where Sarah got a job picking cotton. She also did the housework and endured regular mistreatment at the hands of her brother-in-law. Orphaned, impoverished and exploited, she could surely never have imagined where her life would lead.  

Young Sarah needed an opportunity to liberate herself from Jesse’s abuse, and at the tender age of 14 she thought marriage might provide it. We don’t know much about the man she married, Moses McWilliams, whose age isn’t even recorded. But we do know that in 1885, he and Sarah had a daughter of their own, Lelia (later known as A’Lelia). Just two years after that, Moses was dead, and so by the age of 20, Sarah was an orphan, a widow and a single parent.

Things once again looked dire, yet there could be no going back to Jesse and Louvinia. Sarah became one of the many people to make up the Great Migration, a period when African Americans moved further north from the Deep South. Like thousands of others fleeing oppression and seeking work (pictured), she travelled up the giant Mississippi River, in her case aiming for St. Louis, Missouri where her older brothers lived and worked as barbers. 

The streets of St. Louis were hardly paved with gold for Sarah. She found employment as a washerwoman, earning just $1.50 a day (the equivalent of around $25/£19 in 2025) and struggled to send Lelia to the city’s municipal schools. She just about managed, sometimes attending night classes herself when she could afford it. 

Yet while money was tight, community spirit was bountiful, and it would profoundly affect her future. The congregation of her local African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church included educated women such as teachers who mentored and encouraged her. She eagerly accepted their support. Through the church, she also became active in an emerging advocacy group called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Women. The building blocks of her later philosophy – African-American sisterhood and self-improvement – were in place. 

There was one other building block too. Sarah had met an advertising salesman for the St. Louis Clarion newspaper named Charles Joseph (CJ) Walker.

Because they typically didn't have access to indoor plumbing, regular bathing was out of reach for many African Americans in the 1890s, and headlice and bacteria thrived in unwashed hair. As a consequence, many women suffered hair loss, and Sarah was one of them. To add to her woes, white businesses ignored the Black population, so no mainstream remedies existed.  

Over time, African Americans themselves stepped in to provide a solution. So it was that Sarah met Annie Turnbo Malone (pictured), who hailed from Illinois but had just established herself in St. Louis and whose company, Poro, supplied a “Wonderful Hair Grower” product. Before long, Sarah was not only using it but selling it as a company rep. 

Meanwhile, she married for a second time. That relationship wouldn’t last long, as her husband proved to be abusive and unfaithful. But her friendship with the canny and resourceful ad man CJ Walker endured.

At the turn of the century, Sarah was absorbing the various influences of her inspiring church companions, the enterprising businesswoman Annie Turnbo Malone and CJ Walker’s talent for publicity. She was also honing her own skill at selling Annie’s products directly to other African American women, detecting a vast unmet demand both for Black hair care and Black social mobility. 

In 1905, she moved yet again to escape the cruelty of her second husband and headed for Denver, Colorado with just over a dollar to her name. There, she joined another AME church and worked as a cook for a successful pharmacy owner while still acting as a sales agent for Poro. It was with the pharmacist's help, and her barber shop brothers’ haircare expertise, that she began experimenting with creating her own hair restorer. 

In 1906, CJ Walker joined her in Denver, and they married. Sarah started going by the name Mrs CJ Walker. 

Sarah said the formula for her hair product came to her in a dream. Some of the ingredients came from Africa. “I sent for them”, she later recalled, and at some point, she hit upon a mixture that worked. We know that it was a thick ointment that used sulphur to heal scalp infections – not unlike Annie Malone’s recipe. The dream told Sarah that she could both use it and sell it. But how to sell a dream to others? That’s where her third husband, CJ Walker, came in.

She adopted his surname for the product, styling herself as “Madam”. The result, “Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower”, had not only a hint of French cache to it, but also rejected the patronising white tendency to use only forenames or monikers like ‘Auntie’ for Black people, Meanwhile, it celebrated its African heritage. 

By its very existence, the new pomade was a powerful step forward for Black Americans. However, there was much more to come. 

Over time, Madam Walker’s product expanded to become ‘the Walker system’, and it eventually included scalp treatments, lotions, cold creams, witch hazel and hair straighteners. A myth has emerged that she invented the latter tool; although that's not the case, she did improve an existing hot comb design. 

What was genuinely revolutionary was her business approach. She wanted not only to fill a gap in the market but, with a reformer's zeal, to change her customers’ lives. Firstly, she turned them into evangelists for the product, enrolling them as paid agents to convince friends, family and fellow worshippers to buy it too. And this went beyond business alone: Sarah was only too aware that African American women had few job opportunities beyond domestic work, and she wanted to change that. She also used them to promote “cleanliness and loveliness” as a way of boosting their social status. 

Madam Walker wasn’t the only Black entrepreneur of the time: of course, there was Annie Turnbo Malone, whose Poro brand predated hers and now became a rival. But many other small Black businesses emerged too, largely because they had to. So-called Jim Crow laws had racially segregated US businesses such as motels, stores and hairdressers. It meant that if African Americans wanted those services, they had to provide them for themselves. In its discrimination, the state had unwittingly created an opportunity.

Activists like Booker T. Washington (pictured) and his National Negro Business League also encouraged Black enterprise as a means of community advancement, and African Americans responded enthusiastically. Despite difficulties accessing bank loans and mainstream markets, estimates of the number of Black-owned US businesses around the turn of the 20th century range from 10,000 to 40,000.

Of course, this still meant the vast majority of Black Americans had to fall back on menial employment and were generally viewed as second-class citizens. There was still much work for Madam Walker to do. 

Before she made her commercial breakthrough, Sarah faced a hard slog. She trekked across the huge American South to sell 'Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower' door to door, church to church and town to town.

Her husband helped by designing press advertisements and assisting with mail orders. Thanks to his media experience, she learned to cultivate Black newspaper editors and publishers, helping to build her media profile. 

As Madam Walker began to take on her own staff, she displayed impressive business acumen in selecting the most talented individuals and empowering them to exercise discretion and make their own decisions. She often hired people more scholastic than herself in a deliberate drive to raise overall standards and compensate for her own lack of formal education. 

It quickly began to pay off. Just two years after launching her business, Walker opened the Lelia College of Beauty Culture in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania which was named after her daughter, who she soon entrusted with its management. A'Lelia is pictured here in 1920 receiving a manicure at one of her mother's beauty shops.

In 1910, Madam Walker moved her business to Indianapolis, Indiana which offered both a large and relatively prosperous Black community and well-developed rail links to other parts of the country. She opened another training school and invested $10,000 of her own cash – that’s around a third of a million dollars (£260k) in today’s money – incorporating the Walker Manufacturing Company, opening a cutting-edge factory to supply it.   

Freed from its cottage industry beginnings, the business now really boomed. She had some 5,000 staff working for her and profits of around $7,000 per week – the equivalent of $234,000 (£182k) today. But the grandeur of her vision was increasingly at odds with that of her husband.

She had previously criticised him for being happy to achieve much less, and his poverty of ambition strained their marriage. In 1912, they divorced. Of course, the canny businesswoman retained his name, which was by now a priceless asset. 

By 1913, single again and with US expansion under her belt, Walker took her business abroad. She travelled throughout the Caribbean and into Latin America, imparting the same message of personal care and community pride. Back in the US, her daughter looked after the Pittsburgh college, while Walker’s carefully selected executive colleagues could be trusted to run the main business in Indianapolis. 

As her sales and her workforce grew, she reaffirmed her wider philanthropic objective. At the 1914 convention of Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League she stated: “I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself, for I am endeavouring to provide employment for hundreds of women of my race”. In fact, by 1919, her company had as many as 25,000 agents on its books, some of whom testified to earning more money than they could ever have dreamed of in any other job. 

By now, no stranger to moving from town to town, Madam Walker did so once again in 1916. She now set up home in New York City's Harlem neighbourhood, leaving day-to-day business affairs in the hands of her capable Indianapolis team. 

In recent years, a street in Harlem has been named after her and her daughter.

She commissioned a celebrated African American architect, Vertner Tandy, to design a lavish country home in the Italianate style at Irvington-on-Hudson. She called it Villa Lewaro (pictured). Leading lights of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ Black artistic and intellectual movement would later assemble there to discuss literature, music and politics. Villa Lewaro was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, reflecting its importance to African American culture. 

Despite Sarah's altruism, there remained no shortage of urgent issues facing African American society, and she now threw herself into tackling them head-on.

In 1917, a white mob in East St. Louis went on the rampage, indiscriminately murdering 40 recently-arrived Black residents and driving thousands more out of town. In response, Madam Walker dedicated herself to anti-lynching activism, joining a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) delegation to the White House to demand federal action from President Woodrow Wilson. Their lobbying failed to bring about an anti-lynching law, but Madam Walker still gave today’s equivalent of over $135,000 (£105k) to the NAACP – its biggest donation ever. 

She developed a reputation for philanthropy, giving large donations to a wide range of causes. One of the most significant was her funding of female scholarships to the Tuskegee Institute, the Black teacher training college championed by Booker T. Washington, until his death in 1915.   

Madam CJ Walker would surely have done even more, but tragically, she did not survive long enough. She died at Villa Lewaro on 25 May 1919 as a result of high blood pressure. By that time, her company had employed some 40,000 people, most of whom were Black women. 

By the time of her death, her company was earning close to $600,000 a year, equivalent to around $9.5 million (£7.3m) in today's money.

She passed on a third of her estate to her daughter and left the rest to a range of her favourite charities. The Walker Building, an arts centre she’d begun work on before her death, opened in Indianapolis in 1927, while her hair products continued to sell for decades. In fact, they’re available to this day after being relaunched by a Unilever subsidiary.

And Madam CJ Walker herself continues to be a powerful influence. Most recently, her life inspired the Netflix mini-series Self Made, starring Octavia Spencer. 

“I came from the cotton fields of the South”, she once said. “From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself”. In doing this, she also promoted the needs and wellbeing of Black Americans, and left an indelible mark on the nation's history. 

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