inspires ywca / depaul women's business accelerator by Suzanne Hanney
Madam C. J. Walker is known for developing a Black hair product early in the 20th century, but according to her greatgreat-granddaughter, her legacy also is that she developed businesswomen, part of her framework for philanthropy and political activism. Born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 on a Louisiana plantation, Walker created her hair growth ointment out of her own need and experimentation, much the way modern businesses do, said her great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles, in a presentation with YWCA Metropolitan Chicago CEO Dorri McWhorter. During the 1890s, Breedlove was losing her hair at a time most Americans didn’t have indoor plumbing. By 1905, she developed an ointment with sulfur (and a masking fragrance) and preached that washing hair more often was healthier for the scalp. But besides healthy hair, she created job opportunities, Bundles said. In an era when most Black women could work only as farmhands or domestics, she took out newspaper ads with testimonials from Walker Agents saying things like, “you have made it possible for a Black woman to make more in a day than she could in a month working in somebody’s kitchen.” Literally thousands of women took her course in person or by mail order and traveled all over the United States and the Caribbean selling it. Growing up, Bundles heard the myth about Walker inventing the hot comb (which was actually around when she was a girl on the plantation), but the bigger discussion was that “she provided jobs for women, helping them become economically involved,” Bundles said. “She was a political radical, a patron of the arts.” It is noteworthy, she said, that Walker was the first generation out of slavery. For too many people, Black history has a huge gap between the end of slavery in 1863 and the Civil Rights Movement nearly 100 years later. “But they were creating the NAACP and economic empowerment, fashioning their own citizenship rights,” Bundles said. Near the end of her life, Walker was part of a delegation that went to the White House to urge President Woodrow Wilson to make lynching a crime “She was part of that generation that included [journalist/suffragist] Ida B. Wells and [educator] Mary McLeod Bethune. They were the Black Lives Matter of their day.”
“Sometimes history gets wasted when we teach it so young,” McWhorter responded. “We need to teach it again and again. The issues we’re fighting today look a little different, but they’re still there. What I really love about her legacy is that she used her money and her influence to make a difference. She helped women become independent, create generational wealth.” Madam Walker’s story is so inspiring, McWhorter said, that the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago is collaborating on a women of color business accelerator with the DePaul University Women in Entrepreneurship Institute (WEI). The YWCA Metropolitan Chicago’s mission is to eliminate racism and to close the racial wealth gap, so the women of color business accelerator will be a mechanism for achieving those goals, said Kelly Evans. As YWCA Metropolitan Chicago vice president of entrepreneurship and community economic development, Evans will oversee the business accelerator. “The spirit we’re creating this in is her image,” Evans said. “Yes, Madam C. J. Walker was the first Black woman millionaire, but the more important story is not just that she created wealth for herself and her family, but for people who could have been domestic workers. She gave them other income-producing opportunities on a much higher level than they would have been able to get.” As a pioneer in community development, Walker created an “ecosystem” for other women’s growth, Evans said. They could learn to read, to ask questions, to replicate her business model. “That’s what economic development is: to create an engine that enables not just women to be successful but to bring that to the communities they’re in.”
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