Madam C. J. Walker
Born to formerly enslaved parents, she became the first self-made female millionaire in America
Sarah Breedlove was born on a Louisiana cotton plantation in 1867, the first child in her family born free. Both her parents had died by the time she was seven. She married at 14 to escape an abusive brother-in-law, was a mother at 17 and a widow at 20. For the next 18 years she washed other people's clothes for about a dollar a day.
In her thirties, stress and poor diet caused her hair to fall out. She experimented with remedies, worked briefly as a sales agent for another Black haircare entrepreneur, and in 1905 moved to Denver and began selling her own product, "Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower", door to door. She adopted the name of her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, and the title "Madam" from French beauty houses.
Her real innovation was the sales model. She trained Black women as "Walker agents", gave them a route to earn money on their own terms in an economy that offered them almost nothing, and organised them into clubs that rewarded charity work as well as sales. By 1917 she was employing around 20,000 agents and running a factory, laboratory and beauty school in Indianapolis.
She donated to the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign and to Black schools and YMCAs, and lobbied President Wilson on racial violence. When she died at 51 her estate was worth close to a million dollars, and her will left two-thirds of the company's future profits to charity.