B orn Sarah Breedlove in 1867 near Delta, Louisiana to sharecropper parents, Madam C.J. Walker became the first black woman millionaire in America. She made her fortune through the development and sale of homemade hair care and cosmetic products for black women.

Unlike her parents and four older siblings, Sarah was born free— because of the Emancipation Proclamation; but she was orphaned by six, married at fourteen (to her first husband Moses McWilliams, with whom she had a daughter A’Lelia in 1885), and widowed at twenty. In 1887, she moved to St. Louis where three of her brothers lived, and where she married her second husband, John Davis, but left him in 1903. She worked as a laundress while attending night school and joined the National Association of Colored Women.

Sarah initially learned about hair care from her brothers who were barbers. When she suffered from severe dandruff, baldness, and other scalp disorders—all common conditions among black women of her time due to the application of harsh hair and scalp products—she started experimenting with her own product ideas. Starting in 1904, Sarah worked as a sales agent for two years for Annie Malone, a black entrepreneur who developed a line of non-damaging hair care products for black women. In 1906, Sarah married Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper advertising salesman, and used his name to invent herself as Madam C.J. Walker.

A tenacious entrepreneur, Walker promoted herself as a hairdresser and retailer of her own hair growth and scalp conditioning products “to make lackluster and brittle hair become soft and luxuriant.” Along with her cosmetic creams, she promoted her products door to door, aided by her husband’s advertising and promotional advise. In 1908, the Walkers relocated to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. There they opened a beauty parlor that practiced the “Walker System” and trained black women “hair culturists” on the use and sales of Madam Walker’s products. These women became her national network of licensed sales agents. In 1910, the Walkers moved their business to Indianapolis, Indiana. At the peak of the business, between 1911 and 1919, Walker employed thousands of sales agents.

In 1912 she divorce her husband and went on to establish the National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association of Madam C.J. Walker Agents, which later became the Madam C.J. Walker Beauty Culturists Union of America. She financially rewarded her agents who made both high sales and contributed to charities in their communities. Walker built a 20,000 square foot mansion—Villa Lawaro—in Irvington, New York, as a gathering place for blacks to discuss how to advance their communities. Madam C.J. Walker was a community activist and philanthropist. She died in 1919 from complications of hypertension at age 51.