african american studies

Madame C.J. Walker
By: Tiera McCoy, L’nette Patterson,
& James Randall
Madame C.J. Walker birth name was Sarah Breedlove. She was born in Delta, Louisiana on December 23, 1867. She was born into a former slave family. Her parents name was Owen and Minerva Breedlove. She had four brothers and one sister. Her parents were slaves. Madame C.J. Walker was seven years old when she became an orphan because her parents’ died because of yellow fever. When she was ten years old her and her sister moved across the river to Vicksburg and obtained work as a maid.
When she was fourteen she got married to Moses McWilliams to get away from her sister’s abusive husband.
Her and her husband had a baby together. Her name was Lelia Walker. When Lelia was two Moses McWilliams died. Madame C.J. Walker got married a second time on August 11, 1894 to John Davis but it failed and ended in 1903. She married a third time in January,1906 to Charles Joseph Walker which was a newspaper sales agent and they divorced around 1910.
Her accomplishments were that she was an entrepreneur and she built her company developing hair products for black women. She said that she built her company on an actual dream where a black man appeared to her and gave her a formula for curing baldness. She was confronted with that idea and that she was trying to conform black women’s hair to whites. She started to stress because she thought that her products were simply an attempt to help black women take proper care of their hair and promote its growth. She died on May 25,1919 in New York, New York. Everyone believes that she invented the straightening comb but she didn’t.