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Staff post about: Madam C.J. Walker Become an Author

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“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South,” said Walker. “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.”

The Guinness Book of World Records cites Walker as the first female sale-made millionaire. That achievement is a long way from the poverty that Walker was born into. Today, Walker’s life story is living proof that success is not something into which you are born. People may be born into different situations with different advantages and disadvantages, but Walker illustrates that success is not what you are born with, but rather what you do with what you are given.

Walker received no formal education as a child. Her only source of learning was from occasional visits to her family’s small church in Delta, Louisiana, where Reverend Curtis Pollard helped moved her forward. But by the time Walker was old enough to attend school, it was still an impossibility. State legislators – all of whom were white – did not provide any funds for the education of black children in Louisiana. Her family could not afford to send her or her siblings to school and, after the death of her parents, Walker had no other alternative but to work to support herself.

Later in life, Walker made it her mission to gain more education. In St. Louis, she sought the help of her fellow churchgoers to acquire reading and writing skills. While starting up her business, Walker also enrolled in night school. Even once Walker had become successful, she hired a private tutor to enhance her education.

With little formal education, Walker demonstrated that success is not only for the well-educated. That, however, does not mean that she did not understand the importance of education. She came from an impoverished background and made it her mission to make up for the disadvantages she was born into. She took informal learning from whatever sources she could find. So, too, was Walker determined to ensure her daughter received the education she never did.

When Walker was working as a laundress in St. Louis, she was determined to save enough money to send her daughter to a good school. She made $1.50 a week and for 18 years, saved most of it for her daughter’s education fund, spending little on herself. After graduating from college, Walker knew the investment in her daughter had been a wise one. She was able to hand off control of her company to her daughter, who continued to expand its affairs well after Walker’s death.

Walker proved that success does not only come to the wealthy and well-educated. Anyone who works hard to overcome the disadvantages they might have been born with can achieve the same success as she did. Indeed, it was to that end that Walker saw it as her mission to open up new opportunities and create new jobs for others who had begun much the same way she had.

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