Difference between revisions of "Sarah Breedlove Walker"

Revision as of 15:07, April 23, 2020

​ Sarah Breedlove Walker (December 23, 1867 – May 1916) was the inventor of the formula and method of straightening the hair of her fellow African-American women. She became one of the first black millionaires through the sale of her popular products.

Background

Walker was born in Delta in Madison Parish in northeastern Louisiana, the daughter of an impoverished couple, Owen and Minerva Breedlove. Orphaned at the age of six, she was reared by an older sister. She was married at the age of fourteen to a man from Vicksburg, Mississippi, named McWilliams, had a daughter named A'Leila, and was widowed at the age of twenty and moved from Vicksburg to St. Louis, Missouri, where she worked as a washerwoman and attended night school.^{[1] [2]}

Career

In 1905, Walker developed her hair straightening formula, along with a cream for improving complexion. She spent the next year perfecting her line of products in Denver, Colorado, where she wed the newspaperman Charles Walker. She hired agents to sell her goods door-to-door but also relied on mail-order sales, and she travelled across the South and the East to establish her cosmetics enterprise. In 1908, she opened a second office managed by her daughter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She then decided to combine the Denver and Pittsburgh offices into one headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana, where she also built a manufacturing plant for her products, 1910. At the height of her career she employed more than three thousand, mostly African Americans, with two thousand employess selling her products. She did an annual business of more than $50,000^[1] (1.3 million in 2020 dollars).^[3]

She was a large donor to the then newly-established civil rights advocacy group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She helped in the establishment of houses for the aged in St. Louis and Indianapolis. She organized a black YMCA in Indianapolis. She funded scholarships for women at the historically black Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina. Her bequests established industrial and mission schools in West Africa. As her health deteriorated, Walker ignored her physician's warnings that her heavy schedule was a threat to her health. Nevertheless, Walker herself continued to oversee the marketing and distribution of her products until she died in 1916 from chronic nephritis at her country estate, “Villa Lewaro,” in Irvington-on-Hudson in suburban Westchester County, New York.^[1]

References

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