Causes of Pearl Harbor

MADAME C. J. walker

In 1905 Madame C. J. Walker developed a conditioning treatment for straightening hair. Her name was also Sarah Breedlove. Starting with door to door sales of her cosmetics, Madame C. J. Walker amassed a fortune. In 1910 she built a' factory in Indianapolis to manufacture her line of cosmetics. Before her death in 1919 she was a millionaire, one of the most successful business executives in the early half of the twentieth century.

She was one of the first American women of any race or rank to become a millionaire through her own efforts was Sarah Breedlove Walker. She was born in 1867 to Minerva and Owen Breedlove on the shores of the Mississippi River in northeast Louisiana. Sarah’s parents both ex-slaves, were sharecroppers who lived on the Burney plantation in Delta, Louisiana. Madame C. J. Walker always said in her public speeches that she “orphaned at seven”. Her mother died first and her dad remarried and apparently died before she turned eight in December, 1875. Because of her impoverished background she had only a limited formal education. She was married to Mr. McWilliams at fourteen, “to get a home” {as describe Walker herself },and had a daughter, A’Lelia, in 1885. Widowed at twenty years oldin1887,Sarah and her daughter moved from Vicksburg to St Louis, Missouri. For eighteen years,