Madame C. J. Walker was born as Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867. Her parents had been slaves before the Civil War, and with nowhere to go, they stayed at their plantation as sharecroppers. By the time she was six, both her parents had died, and she was an orphan. She moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi with her older sister. To get away from her, she married a man named Moses McWilliams. They had a baby called A’Lelia. Even after the Civil War, the South was a rough place for Africans Americans and McWilliams was killed by a lynch mob. She had to work as a laundry cleaner for fourteen hours a day to support Lelia’s education. She became very stressed and her hair started falling out. One day, she had a dream about an African American man who told her the formula to make a hair growing remedy. It actually worked. She married a man called Charles Walker who helped her sell her hair grower. They had business disagreements and quickly divorced. Madame Walker employed thousands of black people who had very bad jobs and gave them a better job. But starting from 1917, she began to get high blood pressure and died from kidney failure in 1919.
Slavery had existed in North America for hundreds of years, starting in the 1500s. Eventually, slavery ended in 1865, when the American Civil War ended. Even when slavery ended, there were still laws in the South, called Jim Crow laws. They enforced segregation and said that black people couldn’t do some things. The origin of the name Jim Crow is from a white actor called Thomas D. Rice. He would pretend to be a black person by painting his skin black, making his hair messy, and other things to make him look comical. Then, he would sing a song called Jump Jim Crow. That is how Jim Crow got its meaning of African American. Blackface is still used in 20th and 21st century comics to make fun of Black people. Jim Crow laws still existed in the 20th century. A famous court case about this was Brown vs. Board of Education. One white supremacist group that was especially racist was the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865, two years before she was born. They would lynch black people and do many other horrible things. During Madame Walker’s time, discrimination was at its worst. Lynchings were common, and African Americans in the South would live in fear.
In the 1800s and 1900s, women were on the bottom of the social pyramid, without the right to vote; nor could they find any good job that could earn sufficient money to support their family because of the employers’ rejection. Even if they get a job, they would only earn a fraction of a man’s salary. Madame C. J. Walker lived her whole life in a very bad situation. Both her parents died when she was six and she became an orphan. Her first husband was killed and she became a widow. Her family was very poor. Worst of all, she was an African American, born in a slave family, and the white people who lived around her were very racist and would do terrible things to them. She was also a woman, and women could not vote in the United States until a few months after her death in 1919. There were many other things that women could not do. She had to toil over laundry tubs for fourteen hours a day before she started her hair grower business. Even though she worked so hard, she would only earn one dollar a day, and that was barely enough to pay for Lelia’s education and put food on their table.
Although Madame C. J. Walker was poor, an African American, and a woman, she still created her success by founding one of the world’s largest hair grower producing companies at the time and earned almost 9 million dollars from it. This is an example of the American Dream. The American Dream was coined by James Truslow Adams, and it said that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” This meant that everyone should be able to have opportunities to succeed in what they do, no matter how poor, old, young, or African they were. She worked very hard, but maybe a bit too hard, and persisted through all the racism to achieve her goal of becoming rich and famous. She eventually succeeded and earned about $9 million (accounting for inflation). Most people would have given up on them once they have their husband killed and forced to work fourteen hours a day over hot laundry tubs, but Madame Walker did no. She persevered and ended up as the first self made female millionaire.
Madame C. J. Walker was born as Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867. Her parents had been slaves on a plantation before the Civil War, and with nowhere to go, they stayed as sharecroppers. By the time she was six, she was an orphan. She moved to Vicksburg with her older sister. She then married a man named Moses McWilliams. They had a baby called A’Lelia. McWilliams was killed by a lynch mob two years later. She had to work as a laundry cleaner for fourteen hours a day to support Lelia and herself. She became stressed and her hair started falling out. She had a dream about a man telling her how to make a hair growing remedy. It worked. She married a man called Charles Walker who helped her sell her hair grower. They had business disagreements and quickly divorced. Madame Walker employed thousands of black people and gave them a better job. She died in May 1919 from kidney failure. Madame C. J. Walker’s time was a time when racism was very common. She was in a very bad situation, but persevered, and eventually succeeded, becoming the world’s first self made female millionaire.
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