Madam C.J. Walker was an African-American businesswoman, hair care entrepreneur and philanthropist. She made her fortune by developing and marketing a hugely successful line of beauty and hair products for black women, under the company she founded, Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company.
In 1906 she married Charles Joseph Walker, a St. Louis newspaperman[1], and changed her name to "Madam C.J. Walker". She founded the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company to sell hair care products and cosmetics. Madam Walker divorced Walker in 1910 and moved her growing manufacturing operations from St. Louis to a new industrial complex in Indianapolis. By 1917 she had the largest business in the United States owned by an African-American.
“ I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations...I have built my own factory on my own ground.[2] ”
Walker saw her personal wealth not as an end in itself, but as a means to promote economic opportunities for others, especially black people. She took great pride in the profitable employment — and alternative to domestic labor — that her company afforded many thousands of black women who worked as commissioned agents. Her agents could earn from $5 to $15 per day in an era when unskilled white laborers were making about $11 per week.[3] Marjorie Joyner, who started work as one of her employees, went on to lead the next generation of African-American beauty entrepreneurs.
Walker was known for her philanthropy, leaving two-thirds of her estate to educational institutions and charities, including the NAACP, the Tuskegee Institute and Bethune-Cookman College. In 1919, her $5,000 pledge to the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign was the largest gift the organization had ever received.
Ms. Walker was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1992 and in 2002, Molefi Kete Asante listed Madam C. J. Walker on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[6]. On 28 January, 1998 the USPS, as part of it's Black Heritage Series, issued the Madam C.J. Walker Commemorative stamp.
www.madamcjwalker.com/
Taken from Wikipedia!
