The great woman — Madame C. J. Walker

“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. . . I have built my own factory on my own ground”

Madam Walker, National Negro Business League Convention , July 1912
My personal journey to write On Her Own Ground, the first comprehensive biography of my great-great-grandmother, really began before I could read.

Black history books had long recited the outlines of Madam Walker’s classic American rags-to-riches rise from uneducated washerwoman to international entrepreneur and social activist, from daughter of slaves to hair care industry pioneer and philanthropist.

It was widely circulated2 that Madam Walker had invented the straightening comb. In fact, this metal hair care implement probably had been sold at least as early as the 1870s, when Parisian Marcel Grateau3 created his famous Tag Heuer Carrera Replica Marcel Wave4 , and was advertised in Bloomingdale’s and Sears’s catalogues during the 1880s and 1890s, presumably for the thousands of white women who also had kinky5 hair. Years later I would learn that the claim probably originated in 1922 — three years after Madam Walker’s death — when the Walker Company purchased the rights to a patent from the widow of a man who had manufactured combs for Madam Walker. 6

Certainly in 1970 most people who recognized Madam Walker’s name associated her with the hot comb. And so did I , even as I sat in the Walker Beauty School watching the cosmetology7 students transform my chemically straightened flip into an Angela Davis-sized Afro8. During college I remained self-conscious about my connection to Madam Walker until one winter afternoon when I discovered W. E. B. Du Bois’s laudatory9 obituary10 of her in the August 1919 issue of The Crisis. From deep in the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, Du Bois, whom I considered my intellectual hero, had armed me with a strong retort11. Madam Walker, he wrote, did not intend “to imitate white folk. ” Whereas Frazier had criticized her “conspicuous consumption,” in The Black Bourgeoisie12 , Du Bois praised her philanthropy and credited her with13 “revolutionizing the personal habits and appearance of millions of human beings” by educating them about hygiene and grooming. Even to this day, the complex issues surrounding African American women and beauty continue to be debated.

An innovator and visionary, Madam sped through the final decade of her life too busy to reflect and ruminate1*. Where others of her generation had penned memoirs and autobiographies, she left only the flimsiest clues about her early life15. Fortunately for me she understood the power of the press, and actively cultivated relationships with Replica Watches black newspaper reporters who chronicled16 her activities on a weekly basis. As well , hundreds of her personal letters and business records, faithfully preserved by her secretary, Violet Reynolds — and now archived at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis17 — provided my original road map to her travels between 1913 and 1919.

Certainly whatever teenage reservations I may have had about Madam Walker are long gone. My original childhood curiosity has remained my most reliable guide. And now that I am the same age as Madam Walker when she experienced her greatest achievements, I fully understand why many consider her an American icon. It continues to be a privilege to tell her story.