The recent end of fall was marked by all the usual things I expect. Days shorten. Temperatures drop. Leaves fall. First snow lands. Birds soar southward.

Another marker of this perennial transition has emerged that is equally telling: emails from curious middle school students requesting an interview about Madam C. J. Walker (a.k.a. Sarah Breedlove, 1867–1919), the wealthy beauty culture mogul, for their National History Day (NHD) projects.

It harkens back to when I anxiously crafted a similar email to A’Lelia Bundles, Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer, to discuss my dissertation idea. Graciously, she said yes.

I turned that dissertation into Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy During Jim Crow (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Ms. Bundles remains a friend.

When those student emails beckon, I always say yes, partly to return Ms. Bundles’s generosity toward me and partly for sheer adventure! I’ve been contacted by students from across the country. I had coffee with one student and her mother, and Zoomed with a lycée in Paris, France.

Students’ questions vary. Was Madam Walker really a millionaire? Did she hate beauty rival Annie Malone? Did she invent the hot comb? Were her employee wages fair? What was her impact on entrepreneurship? What did her mansion, Villa Lewaro, symbolize? And on and on.

While responding, I invite students gently into thinking like a historian. Cause and effect. Change or continuity over time. Turning points. And more.

Instead of lecturing, however, I pepper into the conversation under-appreciated Walker facts that I learned while writing about her. They fall into the areas of philanthropy, education, and relationships. I share them below for educators, students, and general readers interested in Walker’s life.

A Different Way of Giving

Walker was widely known as a philanthropist, but what did giving mean to her? Sarah’s first documented gift was made in her early twenties when she was a poor, orphaned, widowed mother struggling in St. Louis, Missouri.[1] She knocked on doors in her neighborhood to collect food and money for indigent neighbors.

She continued her service as a member of the Mite Missionary Society at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church, a women’s charitable auxiliary that delivered social assistance.[2]

The Court of Calanthe fraternal order focused on racial uplift through Christian charity. A member, Sarah earned three ritual degrees within the order that were achieved through community service projects.[3]

These experiences enabled her generosity to evolve over time rather than concentrate at the end of life. Thus, while it is tempting to contextualize Walker by looking at her contemporary Andrew Carnegie, known for building wealth and redistributing it in older age, Walker was no “Black” Carnegie.[4] In Jim Crow America, she could not afford to wait to give and fight. She and her community needed freedom from lynching and racial terror in the present. Consequently, she gave along the way.

As she acquired more money, talent, and time, she gave more of the same. Her generosity unfolded and increased gradually over time as a response to multiple community needs from education to social services.

Whether giving fifty cents to her local AME Church offering plate, $5,000 to the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign, or visiting Black World War I soldiers at military camps in Iowa, she did what she could with what she had.[5] She became a treasured donor to many organizations. Thus, her will—among the most popular items in her archives—represented not one final disposition of assets to charity, family, and friends after death, but rather a culmination of a lifetime of generosity dedicated to racial uplift and freedom.

A Passion and Strategy for Education

Students are surprised to learn that Madam Walker was an educator. She established a national network of beauty schools in the 1910s with locations in Indianapolis, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, and Washington, DC. Her schools lasted into the 1970s and trained generations of beauty culturists. There may be graduates living in your community right now.

According to her beauty manual, her school curriculum included physiology, hygiene, salon marketing, office management, anatomy, and scalp diseases. Students wore uniforms and worked at lab stations to learn hair-processing and styling techniques, massage, and skin care. By mid-century, Walker schools offered basketball teams, pageants, and swimming.[6]

With a Walker diploma in hand, graduates had numerous employment options: work for Walker’s company or her competitors; hang a shingle and offer beauty services from their home; or grow a book of business through door-to-door sales of Walker products. Some women received money from Walker to open their own salons.[7]

Walker’s archives contain numerous letters from women thanking her for their newfound financial independence. Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was a notable graduate of Walker schools. Also, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph attributed his ability to dedicate himself to the movement to the financial support his wife, Lucille Green Randolph, generated as a Walker-trained salon owner in Harlem, New York.[8]

Not simply a feeder for her company during the height of Jim Crow, Walker schools helped thousands of Black women, who migrated to the North, become established in their new cities. Consequently, historian Darlene Clark Hine argued that Walker was as significant an educator as Booker T. Washington.[9]

A “Mutually-Made” Woman

The myth of the self-made rugged individual has been standard Americana for generations. Walker’s claim to the label belies an oppressed generation’s hope that demonstrating usefulness and contributing to Jim Crow America would guarantee freedom and acceptance by the mainstream. That did not happen.

Without denying her ambition and achievement, however, another term seems more appropriate: mutually-made.

Historian Judith McGaw coined the term for early nineteenth-century paper mill entrepreneurs who exchanged information and supported each other’s success.[10] Understanding Walker as a “mutually-made” person offers important historical connections and insights, given the many women in her life with whom she engaged in mutual support.

Jessie Batts Robinson was an educator and church and community leader in St. Louis who took young Sarah and her daughter under her wing. Robinson helped Sarah connect with church ministries and a daycare and school for her daughter, and became a lifelong friend who eventually worked in the Walker Company. Without women like Robinson in her life during its most vulnerable period, Walker’s story may have turned out differently.[11]

Sarah worked as a washerwoman from her teenage years into adulthood. Across the Jim Crow South, Black washerwomen constituted communities of mutual aid and activism, often sharing food, childcare, and workloads, and organizing themselves to advocate for legal wage protections.[12] Walker’s public speeches typically led with her washerwoman experiences.

Through organizations like the National Association of Colored Women, Walker became friends with leading figures like Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Lucy Laney, among others. These women mutually supported each other’s organizations while fighting Jim Crow together.[13]

These relationships were instrumental for the woman who would become known as America’s first self-made female millionaire.

Madam Walker’s wealth may be a leading reason why her story endures, but there is so much more to the woman for students to explore. Given that her life spanned multiple historical eras and impacted numerous aspects of American society and culture, there’s no limit to Madam Walker’s utility in the classroom or in students’ imaginations.

Two middle school students from Maryland just confirmed this for me during our recent virtual interview. Their questions were poignant. Their gestures were animated. They were making history their own. Afterward, another student’s email from Wisconsin pinged my inbox.

I can’t wait for next fall to beckon and do it all over again.

Tyrone McKinley Freeman is the Glenn Family Chair in Philanthropy and associate professor of philanthropic studies and Africana studies at Indiana University Indianapolis. He is a leading scholar on African American philanthropy and historical philanthropic studies. His book, Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy During Jim Crow (University of Illinois Press, 2020), has won national and international awards.

[1] Tyrone McKinley Freeman, Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women during Jim Crow (University of Illinois Press, 2020), 38.

[2] A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (Scribner/Washington Square Press, 2001), 58.

[3] Freeman, Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving, 116.

[4] Freeman, Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving, 9.

[5] Freeman, Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving, 7.

[6] Freeman, Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving, 96.

[7] Freeman, Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving, 56.

[8] Freeman, Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving, 113.

[9] Darlene Clark Hine, Speak Truth to Power: Black Professional Class in United States History (Carlson Publishing, 1996), 95–104.

[10] Judith A. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885 (Princeton University Press, 1987).

[11] Bundles, On Her Own Ground, 57.

[12] Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997), 91, 94.

[13] Bundles, On Her Own Ground, 184, 198.