return to the homepage
Learn about the history of the NCBW Organization
Click to view the toolkit »
View & Listen To The "12th Annual CJW Comcast Newsmakers Interview"
View the interview »
View photos from the 2009 11th Annual Madam C.J. Walker Luncheon »
2009 Sponsors
To become a sponsor -
click here to fill out an
application (pdf)
Biography of Madam C.J.Walker
Prepared by A’Lelia Bundles, Family Historian
Madam C.J. Walker Website
Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 on a Delta, Louisiana plantation, this daughter of former slaves transformed herself from an uneducated farm laborer and laundress into of the twentieth century's most successful, self-made women entrepreneur.
Orphaned at age seven, she often said, "I got my start by giving myself a start." She and her older sister, Louvenia, survived by working in the cotton fields of Delta and nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi. At 14, she married Moses McWilliams to escape abuse from her cruel brother-in-law, Jesse Powell.
Her only daughter, Lelia (later known as A'Lelia Walker) was born on June 6, 1885. When her husband died two years later, she moved to St. Louis to join her four brothers who had established themselves as barbers. Working for as little as $1.50 a day, she managed to save enough money to educate her daughter. Friendships with other black women who were members of St. Paul A.M.E. Church and the National Association of Colored Women exposed her to a new way of viewing the world.
During the 1890s, Sarah began to suffer from a scalp ailment that caused her to lose most of her hair. She experimented with many homemade remedies and store-bought products, including those made by Annie Malone, another black woman entrepreneur. In 1905 Sarah moved to Denver as a sales agent for Malone, then married her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, a St. Louis newspaperman. After changing her name to "Madam" C. J. Walker, she founded her own business and began selling Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower, a scalp conditioning and healing formula, which she claimed had been revealed to her in a dream. Madam Walker, by the way, did NOT invent the straightening comb, though many people incorrectly believe that to be true.
To promote her products, the new "Madam C.J. Walker" traveled for a year and a half on a dizzying crusade throughout the heavily black South and Southeast, selling her products door to door, demonstrating her scalp treatments in churches and lodges, and devising sales and marketing strategies. In 1908, she temporarily moved her base to Pittsburgh where she opened Lelia College to train Walker "hair culturists."
By early 1910, she had settled in Indianapolis, then the nation's largest inland manufacturing center, where she built a factory, hair and manicure salon and another training school. Less than a year after her arrival, Walker grabbed national headlines in the black press when she contributed $1,000 to the building fund of the "colored" YMCA in Indianapolis.
In 1913, while Walker traveled to Central America and the Caribbean to expand her business, her daughter A'Lelia, moved into a fabulous new Harlem townhouse and Walker Salon, designed by black architect, Vertner Tandy. "There is nothing to equal it," she wrote to her attorney, F.B. Ransom. "Not even on Fifth Avenue."
Walker herself moved to New York in 1916, leaving the day-to-day operations of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis to Ransom and Alice Kelly, her factory forelady and a former school teacher. She continued to oversee the business and to run the New York office. Once in Harlem, she quickly became involved in Harlem's social and political life, taking special interest in the NAACP's anti-lynching movement to which she contributed $5,000.
In July 1917, when a white mob murdered more than three dozen blacks in East St. Louis, Illinois, Walker joined a group of Harlem leaders who visited the White House to present a petition favoring federal anti-lynching legislation.
As her business continued to grow, Walker organized her agents into local and state clubs. Her Madam C. J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America convention in Philadelphia in 1917 must have been one of the first national meetings of businesswomen in the country. Walker used the gathering not only to reward her agents for their business success, but to encourage their political activism as well. "This is the greatest country under the sun," she told them. "But we must not let our love of country, our patriotic loyalty cause us to abate one whit in our protest against wrong and injustice. We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible."
By the time she died at her estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, she had helped create the role of the 20th Century, self-made American businesswoman; established herself as a pioneer of the modern black hair-care and cosmetics industry; and set standards in the African-American community for corporate and community giving.
Tenacity and perseverance, faith in herself and in God, quality products and "honest business dealings" were the elements and strategies she prescribed for aspiring entrepreneurs who requested the secret to her rags-to-riches ascent. "There is no royal flower-strewn path to success," she once commented. "And if there is, I have not found it for if I have accomplished anything in life it is because I have been willing to work hard."
2009 MCJW Awardee Summary Bios
Corporate
MELANIE TERVALON, MD, MPH, is Director for the National Diversity Institute for Culturally Competent Care which is a key component of Kaiser Permanente’s strategic plan to achieve the organization’s mission and leverage diversity to differentiate Kaiser Permanente in the marketplace. As Director, Dr. Tervalon leads the vital work of helping to increase Kaiser Permanente’s organizational capability to deliver culturally competent medical care reduce health disparities, and assist the Centers to develop, validate and replicate effective culturally competent care practices across the Program. Dr. Tervalon is uniquely qualified to lead this innovative work and brings to this role, a wealth of knowledge, skill, experience and expertise in multicultural health and health disparities, clinical instruction, business consultation, public speaking and process facilitation. Prior to joining Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Tervalon served as Director of Education for the National Center for Minority Health Disparities at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute and UC Davis. Dr. Tervalon received her MPH from UC Berkeley, MD from UCSF School of Medicine, and is a board certified pediatrician.
Advocacy
REGINA JACKSON, is the Executive Director of the East Oakland Youth Development Center (EOYDC) where she develops and oversees EOYDC’s general administration and program management, supervises public relations and fiscal management, raises funds, develops and maintains partnerships with corporations and other organizations and serves on statewide and community boards and task forces. Regina Jackson has made it her mission to invest heavily in the future of children, our nation’s greatest resource. She has taken on the challenge of molding, training and inspiring young people here in her hometown of Oakland, CA. Her involvement with EOYDC actually began in 1984 when, as a recent graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in political science; she worked at EOYDC as an intern on the CORO Foundation graduate fellowship in Public Affairs. Ms. Jackson has done an excellent job of getting the Center recognized as a valuable community resource. The Center offers a safe, nurturing environment where young people can learn, dream and aspire by developing their self-esteem. She has led the way for thousands of youth at EOYDC to realize the importance of continued personal growth.
Pioneer
SHARON WILLIAMS, MD was the first African American female to be the Chief Resident and then elected as Medical Staff President of Children’s Hospital of Oakland. Educated in the Oakland public schools, Williams completed her undergraduate studies at U.C. Davis. She attended medical school at U.C. Davis with 120 classmates where she was the only African American student to successfully complete the program in a four year period. Upon graduation, she chose to pursue primary care in the Fresno area. After a year of caring for underserved children, she decided to pursue a sub-specialty in cardiac care and postoperative care. She has continued to share her expertise with other doctors where she was a Lecturer in the first Pediatric Advanced Life Support Lecture Series given to over 200 physicians of African and Hispanic descent. She also shared her medical expertise with physicians in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is presently on assignment in Logos, Nigeria to help create a Pediatric Critical Care Unit. She is very active in the community and serves as the Chairperson of the Evergreen Missionary Baptist Church.
Entrepreneur
C. DIANNE HOWELL is the Publisher of the Black Business Listings and Producer of the Oakland Black Expo. In early 1989 Howell decided to follow her desire to do something to promote African American businesses. With no capital reserves, she founded the Black Business Listings (BBL) and desktop published the publication on her Mac Plus. She designed the basic small business listing to include a 25 word description of the business in order to give the public the information they might need to determine which business in a given category might best meet their needs. She included articles to encourage people to look for future issues of the publication and thus see new businesses that were listed. She soon discovered that the articles would be a key feature of the publication since there were many issues which needed to be addressed which affected the economic future of the African American community. Originally published bi-monthly, Howell started publishing BBL 10 times a year in 1990. Throughout the last 19 years, Howell has been determined to promote African American economic development in every way conceivable. She has sponsored monthly networking breakfasts to encourage networking among African Americans in business. She has been a popular speaker throughout the community always advocating the self-empowerment of the African American community. Most recently she took on the task of producing the multifaceted Black Expo in Oakland.
Keynote Speaker
The Center for the Advancement of Women is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to research-based education and advocacy for women. An independent, non-partisan organization founded in 1995 and led by Faye Wattleton, their mission is to conduct national opinion research among women to measure experiences in their daily lives. Their research presents a profile of women that is used to educate opinion leaders, policy makers and the general public.
Faye Wattleton (born Alyce Faye Wattleton on July 8, 1943) is the first African-American and youngest President ever elected to Planned Parenthood (1978 - 1992). Currently, she serves as the President of the Center for the Advancement of Women, and also serves on the board of trustees at Columbia University. She is best known for her contributions to the family planning and reproductive health, as well as the pro-choice movement.
Wattleton was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1943, the only child of a factory worker father and a mother who was a seamstress and a Church of God minister. Entering Ohio State University at age 17, she was awarded a bachelor's degree in nursing in 1964, and went on to teach at a nursing school in Dayton, Ohio for two years. She earned her Master of Science degree in maternal and infant care, with certification as a nurse-midwife from Columbia University in 1967. She has received 13 honorary doctoral degrees.
In 1986, the American Humanist Association named her Humanist of the Year.
She was a 1993 inductee into the National Women's Hall of Fame
