Salute to a Self-Starter

When, after several days of trying, Madam C. J. Walker was finally allowed to speak at a 1912 convention of mostly male business owners, she described herself as a woman who started in the cotton fields of the South, was promoted to the washtub and finally promoted herself into manufacturing.

Walker, the first female African American millionaire, just got another promotion: onto a first-class U.S. postage stamp.

The 21st stamp in the U.S. Postal Service’s Black Heritage series, the Walker commemorative issue was unveiled Thursday in Gardena. Designed by Richard Sheaff of Scottsdale, Ariz., it features a 1914 photograph of the woman who often said: “I got my start by giving myself a start.”

Born Sarah Breedlove shortly after the end of the Civil War, Walker was orphaned at 7, married for the first of three times at 14 and widowed at 20. She turned a $1.50 investment into a successful national hair products business, became a prominent philanthropist within the African American community and, along with her daughter A’Lelia, was a patron of African American art.

Her interest in hair products grew in part from her own scalp, which at one point didn’t have much hair on it.

In a 1996 article in American History magazine, Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer, A’Lelia Perry Bundles, wrote that her ancestor was nearly bald from a scalp ailment. She found some relief in a commercial hair pomade, began selling it and then, as she later recounted, came up with her own formula “in a dream.”

The “hair grower” worked for her. It worked on her friends. So she began marketing it, opened a factory in Indianapolis and made her entrepreneurial mark.

Richard Yarborough, director of the Center for African American Studies at UCLA, said Walker’s new stamp is particularly noteworthy because it celebrates her achievements in what “is essentially, traditionally a male arena--establishing a business and making money.”

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Along with selling hair-care products, Walker popularized use of the straightening comb, a role she struggled to reconcile with her sense of racial pride.

In her magazine article, Bundles repeated a quote Walker gave to a reporter before her death in 1919: “Right here let me correct the erroneous impression held by some that I claim to straighten hair. I want the great masses of my people to take greater pride in their personal appearance and to give their hair proper attention.”

Even during the 1960s, at the height of the black pride movement’s disdain for hair straightening, there remained an appreciation of Walker’s accomplishments as a self-made millionaire, Yarborough said.