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Short Stuff: Madam C.J. Walker · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Dave's here in spirit, Jerry's here in spirit. Um who
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: else is here in spirit? We can't say because we
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  Speaker 1: can't see spirits, because we're among the living. This is
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  Speaker 1: short stuff. Let's go. This is the story of Madam C. J. Walker,
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  Speaker 1: who Guinness Book of World's Record says is the first
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  Speaker 1: self made, the female millionaire in the world. Yeah, not
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  Speaker 1: African American female or woman millionaire. Um, straight up, first
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  Speaker 1: woman in America to be a millionaire. It's through through
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  Speaker 1: her own work and hard, hard labor. That's right. She
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  Speaker 1: has a very cool, more assistinct. Put she's a very
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: cool story. She was a daughter of sharecroppers and uh
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  Speaker 1: ended up building this huge brand which employed and empowered
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  Speaker 1: many hundreds of women. UM. Oxtavia Spencer I think played
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  Speaker 1: her in Self Made. It was a mini series on
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  Speaker 1: Netflix recently. And she was born Sarah Breedlove on a
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  Speaker 1: cotton plantation in eighteen sixty seven, one of five kids.
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  Speaker 1: It's a great name too. I love that name, breed Love.
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  Speaker 1: Sarah breed Love in particular has a nice rain, doesn't it.
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  Speaker 1: If you're wondering why she c. J. Walker will get
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  Speaker 1: to that. But in Louisiana, she was you know, she
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  Speaker 1: struggled in life. She was an orphan by the age
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  Speaker 1: of seven and then went to live with her older sister, Louvinia,
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  Speaker 1: another very nice name, and they settled in Mississippi and Vicksburg, Mississippi,
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  Speaker 1: where she did domestic work and worked in the cotton fields. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And I mean like, she was born so close to
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  Speaker 1: slavery that she was the first child in her family,
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  Speaker 1: UM who was born free. Like that's how that's how
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  Speaker 1: recent slavery UM was was a thing. So her lot
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  Speaker 1: in life wasn't particularly much better because it was just
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  Speaker 1: so close to the slave era. UM And when she
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  Speaker 1: was fourteen, as a matter of fact, she got married
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  Speaker 1: to a man named Moses McWilliams um at least in
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  Speaker 1: part to escape her home life. Basically, Yeah, her brother
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  Speaker 1: in law apparently was not a very nice guy and
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  Speaker 1: mistreated her, So she got out of there with Moses
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  Speaker 1: and had a daughter name I guess Lelia or Lilia,
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  Speaker 1: very pretty name, l E. L I A. I think
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  Speaker 1: she later changed her name to put an A on
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  Speaker 1: the front of it and was a Lilia and her
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  Speaker 1: husband sadly died in seven. So she moved to St. Louis,
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  Speaker 1: where her brothers lived. They were barber's there and started
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  Speaker 1: earning a money doing laundry, making about a buck fifty
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  Speaker 1: a day. So You're like, Okay, where where are we
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  Speaker 1: going to get to the fact that she's a self
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  Speaker 1: made person? Like she's you know, starting to get up
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  Speaker 1: there in years she's all she's like in her and
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  Speaker 1: he's now she's making a dollar fifty a day, which
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  Speaker 1: is enough to put her kids through school. But I
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  Speaker 1: looked and as far as the West Saga inflation calculator says,
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  Speaker 1: that's still only forty three dollars a day in today's money.
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  Speaker 1: And I feel like we're missing something, Chuck. I think
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  Speaker 1: that that's not a full picture of of, you know,
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  Speaker 1: what money was worth. I think things were just cheaper.
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  Speaker 1: I think life was just less expensive at other times
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  Speaker 1: in American and probably world history than it is today.
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  Speaker 1: I think you're right. You want to take a break, regroup,
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  Speaker 1: and then talk about the real beginning of Madam C. J. Walker. Okay, alright, Chuck.
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  Speaker 1: So we said that Madam C. J. Walker was the
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  Speaker 1: first self made woman millionaire in the United States, She's
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  Speaker 1: an African American woman who was born almost into slavery
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  Speaker 1: uh in the South Um. But she became self made
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  Speaker 1: because she ran into a problem in the eight nineties.
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  Speaker 1: Her hair started falling out, and I could not find
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  Speaker 1: what the cause of her hair loss, um was. I
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  Speaker 1: saw a scalp condition almost everywhere. That made me suspect
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  Speaker 1: that as somebody said scalp condition, and everybody else found
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  Speaker 1: that same source, but I couldn't find an actual like um,
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  Speaker 1: you know, diagnosed medical condition. But she started losing her hair,
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  Speaker 1: and she found out in pretty quick order that there
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  Speaker 1: was not a lot of help out there for her
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  Speaker 1: to stop her hair loss or possibly regrow hair, so
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  Speaker 1: she tried to figure it out herself. Yeah, I mean,
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  Speaker 1: I think the reason her hair was falling out was
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  Speaker 1: because there were not products designed specifically for women's hair
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  Speaker 1: or hair of anyone with from African descent. So it
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  Speaker 1: was a market catered to Caucasian styled hair and so
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  Speaker 1: their their hair would suffer as a result. So she
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  Speaker 1: there were a few products out there. She went to
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  Speaker 1: one line um POORO Hair p O r O, which
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  Speaker 1: was created by Annie turnbou Malone, another Black entrepreneur and
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  Speaker 1: it helped some. But and she even sold this stuff
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  Speaker 1: for about a year and a half. But the whole
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  Speaker 1: time she was like, I need to come up with
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  Speaker 1: my own formula here to help myself and to help others. Yeah. So, Um,
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  Speaker 1: about a decade or so later, she got married a
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  Speaker 1: second time to a man named Charles Joseph Walker, UM,
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  Speaker 1: hence the C. J. Walker, And he was in sales.
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  Speaker 1: He was a kind of a marketing whiz, and two
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  Speaker 1: of them together became what you would probably refer to
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  Speaker 1: as an early power couple. Basically, they really complimented and
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  Speaker 1: rounded out one another's um strengths, and they they formed
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  Speaker 1: basically this this hair care empire. At the very beginning
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  Speaker 1: of this hair care empire, um, and Sarah adopted the
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  Speaker 1: name Madam C. J. Walker And that's where that the
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  Speaker 1: whole thing began. Yeah, and it was called Madam C. J.
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  Speaker 1: Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower. Right, I mean, talk about marketing
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  Speaker 1: with let's just call it what it is and what
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  Speaker 1: it does right out of the gate, it makes me
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  Speaker 1: want to throw my money at her, take my money.
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  Speaker 1: So she founded this company in nineteen o six, and
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  Speaker 1: there was no national distribution chain, so they hit the road.
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  Speaker 1: They traveled all around the South for about a year
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  Speaker 1: and a half. As Mark Cuban would say, just hustling,
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  Speaker 1: selling door to door, doing it the hard way, doing
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  Speaker 1: demos and demons and uh, in front of people so
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  Speaker 1: they knew what it did. A lot of times, We'll
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  Speaker 1: go to churches to do this. And she had these
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  Speaker 1: before and after photos. Again great marketing and these and
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  Speaker 1: these women started buying it up. It was fifty cents
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  Speaker 1: and ten, and they said, uh, we love this stuff,
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  Speaker 1: We love that there's a product for us. UM And
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  Speaker 1: she used to say, there would be no hair growing
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  Speaker 1: industry if I hadn't invented it. Right. The thing is, though,
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  Speaker 1: is like she wasn't selling, she wasn't a huckster. She
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  Speaker 1: actually had um a recipe that was lost in its
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  Speaker 1: exactness to time. But this stuff actually did apparently regrow
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  Speaker 1: hair or at least all hair loss. So I'm not
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  Speaker 1: sure where they found it, but they somebody documented that
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  Speaker 1: the ingredients included UM, coconut oil, beeswax, patrol adam, which
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  Speaker 1: I guess is like UM petroleum jelly today, copper sulfate,
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  Speaker 1: and precipitated sulfur. And it had a nice violet scent,
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  Speaker 1: which I like. I don't think it's used quite as
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  Speaker 1: as often as it should be. Um. But the the
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  Speaker 1: key ingredient, the active ingredient, and this thing was sulfur.
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  Speaker 1: That that was probably what was working and causing women
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  Speaker 1: to say, this stuff actually works, I want some more. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And she had a whole system. She had a vegetable
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  Speaker 1: based shampoo. Um. She had something called Glossy in which
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  Speaker 1: smoothed out hair uh that was pressed with a hot comb.
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  Speaker 1: And so she had a little you know, a hair
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  Speaker 1: care beauty line basically going in the early nineteen hundreds
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  Speaker 1: to the tune of about a hundred and fifty thousand
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  Speaker 1: dollars a year in today dollars by nineteen o eight,
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  Speaker 1: which is some pretty good money. Yeah. And we should
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  Speaker 1: say there's one thing that I think this um this
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  Speaker 1: house stuff works article just kind of walks right past,
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  Speaker 1: and that is that when you used her Walker system,
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  Speaker 1: you were you were an African American or Black woman
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  Speaker 1: who was making your hair a kin to a white
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  Speaker 1: woman's hair do. And there was a period in time
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  Speaker 1: in black history, especially in like the nineteen sixties and seventies,
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  Speaker 1: where Madam Walker was not particularly thought of that highly
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  Speaker 1: because she had made an empire built on um emulating
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  Speaker 1: Caucasian beauty. And it wasn't until you know, years later
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  Speaker 1: that Um she finally was seen for for what what
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  Speaker 1: she was, which was a downright radical feminist and civil
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  Speaker 1: rights activists who who couldn't read or write from what
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  Speaker 1: I saw her entire life. And yet Um made a
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  Speaker 1: really amazing living for herself but also empowered other Black
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  Speaker 1: women to be more than just you know, domestic help
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  Speaker 1: or laborers. You know, yeah, it's a great story. Um.
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  Speaker 1: She divorced Walker in nineteen twelve, moved to Indianapolis, and
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  Speaker 1: then in the position she was in with that kind
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  Speaker 1: of money and that kind of sort of growing fame,
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  Speaker 1: started kind of buddying up with some of the more
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  Speaker 1: well healed activists in the country like Mary McLoud, Betune
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  Speaker 1: and book or T. Washington. Um moved to Harlem, which
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  Speaker 1: was where you wanted to be if you wanted to
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  Speaker 1: be at the center of black culture in the early
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  Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, and she had her daughter opened up a salon.
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  Speaker 1: It was a very nice salon, parquet floors and velvet
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  Speaker 1: seats and grand piano in the lobby. It was really
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  Speaker 1: really kind of a fine place. Yeah. Apparently in um
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  Speaker 1: the teens the nineteen she had something like twenty thousand
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  Speaker 1: to forty thousand women beauty culturists working for her, tens
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  Speaker 1: of thousands of women, and she held a convention um,
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  Speaker 1: the first convention of her beauty culturists, her agents UM
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  Speaker 1: running around selling her stuff UM in Philadelphia, I believe.
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  Speaker 1: And one of the things that she was noted for
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  Speaker 1: was when she gave speeches. It was a lot more
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  Speaker 1: or about a lot more than just you know, pumping
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  Speaker 1: them up to go seller product. It was about them
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  Speaker 1: demanding you know, better treatment, to be treated like like
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  Speaker 1: human beings, UM, to demand a better, more socially just
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  Speaker 1: world like. Her speeches were peppered with that that kind
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  Speaker 1: of empowerment, telling women, black women no less at you know,
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  Speaker 1: in the early twentieth century, that that they should expect
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  Speaker 1: to be treated better than they were by by men
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  Speaker 1: of all races and and by the white race in particular,
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  Speaker 1: which is again it's just radical, there's no other way
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  Speaker 1: to put it. At the time. In nineteen eighteen, she
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  Speaker 1: moved to Villa Lawairo, a mansion in Irvington on the
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  Speaker 1: Hudson about forty five minutes north of Manhattan. And this
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  Speaker 1: place was a legit mansion like thirty four rooms. It
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  Speaker 1: was huge and an amazing place. It was designed by
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  Speaker 1: an African American architect name uh Vertner Woodson Tandy, great name.
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  Speaker 1: What sad is UM? You know she was able to
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  Speaker 1: enjoy your wealth for a while, but she died the
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  Speaker 1: next year after she moved into this incredible twenty square
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  Speaker 1: foot mansion with her daughter. UM. But she left a
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  Speaker 1: really great legacy. Apparently she left two thirds of her
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  Speaker 1: state to UM historically black universities UM to UH the
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  Speaker 1: N double a C p UM Like she she really
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  Speaker 1: put her money where her mouth was. She was a
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  Speaker 1: really benevolent benefactor to a lot of great civil rights
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  Speaker 1: causes and UM basically laid the foundation for black women
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  Speaker 1: entrepreneurs UM still to this day as a matter of fact.
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  Speaker 1: Great story, wonderful story. So hats off to Madam C. J.
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  Speaker 1: Walker a k A. Sarah Breed Love a k. A
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  Speaker 1: genuinely admirable person. Uh And that means everybody that short
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