Free
The baby’s name was Sarah. She was born late in 1867 in Delta, Louisiana.
Her parents were Owen and Minerva Breedlove, both former slaves who worked as sharecroppers on a cotton plantation. Sarah was their fifth child and the first to be born free (after the Emancipation Proclamation). Just six years after Sarah’s birth, yellow fever swept through the area. It was – and is – a deadly disease. The fever took both her parents. By the time Sarah was seven, she was an orphan.
Sarah Breedlove’s first home
▲ Sarah’s childhood was anything but enviable. After her parents died, she moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, with an older sister, where she worked as a maid. Then she moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she worked as a laundress, or washerwoman. Sarah had no formal education, mostly due to Jim Crow laws. (Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation.) When Sarah was 14, she got married. Four years later, she had a daughter, Lelia. When Lelia was two, Sarah’s husband died, and Sarah was on her own again.
◀ In her twenties, Breedlove began to lose her hair. (In the image center left, she can be seen before using treatments to regrow it.) Was her hair loss caused by the harsh lye soap, steam, and dirt she was exposed to as a laundress? Perhaps. Was it the cayenne pepper, quinine, ox marrow, lye, and sulfur many Black women of the time used to straighten their hair? Maybe. Was it the lack of indoor plumbing and electricity? In her biography of Breedlove, A’Lelia Bundles, Breedlove’s great-great-granddaughter, describes the situation this way:
During the early 1900s, when most Americans lacked indoor plumbing and electricity, bathing was a luxury. As a result, Sarah and many other women were going bald because they washed their hair so infrequently, leaving it vulnerable to environmental hazards such as pollution, bacteria, and lice.
Many women of the day wore head wraps to cover their bald patches, but Breedlove didn’t want that for herself. Her search for a solution to her hair loss began with her brothers. They were barbers. Unfortunately, their knowledge was limited to cutting hair, mostly men’s hair. Next, Breedlove turned to products on the market. But there were very few designed to treat Black women’s hair. Then she began experimenting with home-made remedies by mixing items she found in her local drugstore. ▶
Barber shop, early 1900s
◀ As part of her research, Breedlove enrolled at Poro College, a cosmetology school founded by African American Annie Turnbo (later Annie Malone). (Cosmetology is the practice of beautifying the hair, face, and skin.) Poro also trained African American women interested in business. While enrolled as a student, Breedlove used one of Turnbo’s hair-care products, the Great Wonderful Hair Grower. It worked well, and Breedlove became a Poro sales agent.
Pharmacy, early 1900s
▲ In 1905, Breedlove moved to Denver to sell Turnbo’s products. A business-owner at heart, she also pursued her own solutions. While in Denver, Breedlove worked as a cook for Edmund L. Scholtz. Scholtz was a pharmacist who is said to have helped her understand the chemistry of the products she was selling. Breedlove may have used the information to help her come up with a product of her own.
▲ The ingredients of Breedlove’s product included a form of sulfur, copper sulfate, beeswax, coconut oil, a substance similar to petroleum jelly, and a perfume to cover the smell. The formula may have been little more than an adaption of Turnbo’s. However, according to A’Lelia Bundles, Breedlove said this:
God answered my prayer, for one night I had a dream, and in that dream a big Black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up for my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp, and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out. I tried it on my friends; it helped them. I made up my mind I would begin to sell it.
▲ In 1906, Sarah Breedlove married Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper ad salesman. Rather than being known as Mrs. C.J. Walker, she officially changed her name to Madam C.J. Walker, to add a bit of French prestige. Then she used it to name her product: Madam C.J. Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower. This was the start of something very big.
Think Piece!
Reflect on the narrative about the origin of the formula and name of Madam C.J. Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower. What is your reaction?
