On Her Own Ground Read online

  As Madam Walker made new acquaintances, she persuaded a group of respected church and civic leaders to sign a letter endorsing her work, with the intention of enhancing her standing in the community. “We, the undersigned, highly recommend Mme. C. J. Walker’s work and worth,” the petition read. “As a hair grower she has no equal . . . We found her to be a strictly honest, thorough-going business woman. Until her advent into this city . . . we did not believe in such a thing as a hair grower.”

  As 1908 closed, Madam Walker had earned $6,672—nearly doubling her 1907 tally—and had trained or treated several hundred Walker agents and customers since leaving Denver. The next year her earnings increased by 25 percent to $8,782, or just over $150,000 in today’s dollars. She also landed a coveted feature article in the Pennsylvania Negro Business Directory, which called her “one of the most successful business women of the race in this community.”

  In her full-length directory photograph Madam Walker struck a more refined pose than she had in her 1906 Denver newspaper ad. Reflecting her increased income and newly acquired status, she wore a dress with a delicate ivory lace bodice. A thin fabric belt cinched her waist, accentuating her full-figured, well-proportioned body. With her hands clasped behind her back, the only sign of her former life as a farmworker and washerwoman was the stumpy shape of her forearms, their muscles enlarged from years of twisting and squeezing soap through waterlogged sheets and tablecloths. But of course it was her hair that she wished to emphasize. Madam Walker had pinned her now healthy tresses into a carefully coiffed crown, styled so that it gracefully swooped away from her face.

  When women saw her photo and heard her life story, they clamored to take her course and sit for her treatments. The twin promises of enhanced beauty and financial gain—not to mention Madam Walker’s own phenomenal personal example—served as a magnet to women who had always believed they would never be more than maids and laundresses. Except for only a dozen or so clerks and stenographers who worked in the city’s small black businesses, and about a hundred dressmakers and seamstresses, more than 90 percent of Pittsburgh’s employed black women were domestic servants.

  Their husbands, sons and brothers had relatively more choices, but because the men’s wages were rarely sufficient to support a family, the women had little choice but to work. Although half of the city’s teamsters were black during the first few years of the twentieth century, and a fortunate few occupied municipal jobs as policemen, firefighters and postal workers, Pittsburgh’s black men made up the large army of unskilled, poorly paid, underemployed laborers as they did in other cities.

  By 1909, the financial crisis of 1907 had faded into a temporary and minor setback to Pittsburgh’s growth. Its U.S. Steel Corporation remained the nation’s most profitable company, with assets of $1,804,000,000. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey was second with $800,000,000, and American Tobacco was a distant though unquestionably substantial powerhouse valued at $286,000,000.

  Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, the founder of the company that became U.S. Steel, had engineered the transformation of the city into an industrial force and become an American legend in the process. A native of Scotland, Carnegie was born in 1835, the son of a weaver who had immigrated to the United States in 1848. With little formal education, he moved from a $1.20-a-week cotton mill job as a bobbin boy to clerical positions at Western Union and the Pennsylvania Railroad. After the Civil War, he established a bridge-building business, then leveraged his profits to construct the first of many steel mills. An antebellum-era abolitionist, Carnegie was viewed favorably by many black Pittsburghers, especially because his mills had hired blacks as early as the 1880s, then brought them in as replacements for striking workers during the union-busting Homestead Strike of 1892. In 1907 nearly 350 black men held jobs in Carnegie mills, though in most instances they were clustered in the least-skilled, lowest-paying jobs.

  Having become the world’s wealthiest man when he sold his Carnegie Steel Company to banker J. P. Morgan for $400 million in 1901, Carnegie set about to disperse the funds to an astonishing range of causes and organizations. Especially after contributing $600,000 to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in 1903, Carnegie gained even more recognition among African Americans. That unprecedented gift to Tuskegee was widely discussed for years in the black community and would have been known to Madam Walker, who had already begun to develop her own approach to giving through her church missionary society and other organizations. But Carnegie’s largesse, on full display throughout Pittsburgh, was on a scale beyond imagination, an outgrowth of the philanthropic philosophy he expressed in his famous 1889 essay, “The Gospel of Wealth.” “The man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth . . . will pass away ‘unwept, unhonored, and unsung,’” he admonished those who were miserly. “Surplus wealth which a man accumulates in a community is only a sacred trust to be administered for the good of the community in which it was accumulated.” As Madam Walker became more prosperous, she would adopt a similar outlook.

  During her travels Madam Walker perfected her sales pitch by using compelling, commonsense lessons. Because many of her students had only recently left the farms of the South, she found that agricultural analogies were particularly effective teaching tools. “Do you realize that it is as necessary to cultivate the scalp to grow hair as it is to cultivate the soil to grow a garden?” she inquired. Just as a farmer turned the soil around plants, she advised her students to loosen and remove the dandruff that blocked the flow of air and blood to the scalp. “Soil that will grow grass will grow a plant,” she taught. “If the grass is removed and the soil cultivated, the plant will be a very healthy one. The same applies to the scalp.”

  No case was too difficult to solve, she assured potential agents, telling them that her “years of experience and personal contact with thousands of persons with scalps in all conditions” had proven to her that “every woman who wants hair can have it, no matter how short, how stubby, or what the condition of the scalp may be.”

  Having trained dozens of agents in Pittsburgh, she charged Lelia with keeping them supplied with goods as she went on the road again to expand her sales to women in nearby states. In Wilberforce, Ohio, during the late summer of 1909, she personally treated fifty-one women and girls, including Ada Parks, who informed her that “every one of them tells me that their hair is growing, and they are well pleased.” Another Ohio woman, Mrs. W. A. Snead of Columbus, was also ecstatic about her new appearance. “I have not the knowledge or words to express my gratitude for what you have done for me,” she wrote. “My hair is about 7 inches in the front and 6 in the back, and as thick as a woven rug.” Like so many others who had put away their wigs and hairpieces, she was pleased to report, “The hair I wore when you first treated me I have on a doll now. I haven’t worn it since before Xmas.”

  Hoping to groom twenty-three-year-old Lelia to eventually run the company, Madam Walker dispatched her daughter to untapped markets along the East Coast. Lelia dutifully complied, but sometimes chafed at the control her mother’s wishes exercised over her life. At the end of October 1908, Lelia was in Bluefield, West Virginia, near the state’s southern border, teaching the course and “making” agents. Madam Walker, no doubt, was focused on the possible business prospects of the community, aware that blacks had had a strong presence in the area since the coal boom of the late nineteenth century. As well, they had been lured by the jobs that came from the town’s role as a terminus for the Norfolk & Western Railroad. As Bluefield grew, a small black middle class developed around Bluefield Colored Institute, founded in 1895 to prepare black teachers for the segregated schools in communities around the coal mines.

  A year after Lelia’s trip to Bluefield, she married John Robinson, about whom little is known. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1885, he was described years later by a newspaper reporter as a “hotel telephone operator” who “had a nice figure and looked like somebody in his uniform.” But a city directo
ry published shortly after the marriage described him as a laborer, and many of the reporter’s details—including the name of a nonexistent Pittsburgh hotel—appear to be inaccurate.

  How long the bride and groom had known each other is uncertain, though it is possible that they met through a mutual friend, Grant White, who had known Lelia since her childhood in St. Louis. What is certain is that the marriage ceremony—performed by a justice of the peace in Washinton, Pennsylvania’s Italian Renaissance courthouse—took place a twenty-seven-mile train ride away from Pittsburgh without Lelia’s mother. If the two women disagreed about Robinson, they left no record of their feelings.

  The newlyweds moved into Lelia’s well-furnished home in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty section at 5707 Mignonette, where Lelia continued operating a supply station for Walker agents. By the end of the year, Madam Walker had left her daughter in charge of the Pittsburgh office and was traveling again, looking for another city with a more vital black business presence in which to base her growing enterprise.

  CHAPTER 9

  Bold Moves

  During early 1910, as Madam Walker scouted a new city for her permanent headquarters, she seized every social and business occasion to engage potential investors. Each meeting, each introduction, each chance encounter, furnished an opportunity to advance her commercial dreams.

  In January during an extended stay in Louisville, Madam Walker unveiled plans for a Walker Manufacturing Company stock offering to Reverend Charles H. Parrish, president of the Eckstein-Norton Institute, and Alice Kelly, one of the most accomplished faculty members at this Kentucky training school for black teachers. They were so impressed with Madam Walker’s spunk and presentation that they urged her to solicit the support of Booker T. Washington, the founder of both the Tuskegee Institute and the ten-year-old National Negro Business League. Parrish, whose international travels on behalf of the black National Baptist Convention had made him well known among African Americans, allowed Madam Walker to mention his name in her letter of appeal to Washington. Parrish’s gesture supplied just the opening she needed to capture the attention of the most powerful black man in America.

  “Now what I would like to do, is to establish a factory and advertise it properly,” she wrote enthusiastically of her “remedy that will grow hair of any kind” and of her plan to raise $50,000 from one hundred men and women. “We could form a stock company . . . and make this one of the largest factories of its kind in the United States.” Just as important, she said, was her plan to “give employment to many of our boys and girls.” She had come to him specifically, she wrote, because “I know I can not do any thing alone, so I have decided to make an appeal to the leaders of the race . . . I feel no hesitancy in presenting my case to you, as I know you know what it is to struggle alone with the ability to do, but no money to back it.”

  Madam Walker also was concerned, she confided, about bids from “white firms” that “want me to sell out my right[s] to them, which I refuse to do as I prefer to keep it in the race if possible.” Washington’s quick reply was reserved and noncommittal. “My dear Madam,” he wrote, thanking her for her “kindly” suggestion. “My time and attention are almost wholly occupied with the work of this institution and I do not feel that I can possibly undertake other responsibilities. I hope very much you may be successful in organizing the stock company and that you may be successful in placing upon the market your preparation.” While she surely recognized his artful dismissal, she could now feel certain that he knew her name and her objectives. In time, she would persuade him that those objectives were consistent with the self-help message he so ardently preached.

  The more Madam Walker’s horizons expanded, the less C.J. seemed able to keep up. While a guest at the Louisville home of C.J.’s sister, Peggie Prosser, Madam Walker began to learn more about the man she had married four years earlier. “My heart went out to her then,” Prosser said. “I knew she was a good woman struggling to make a name for herself. And I know what a hard fight she had.”

  Prosser was particularly attuned to her brother’s shortcomings, having been disappointed by him as a young girl. After their mother’s death, he vanished from her life, leaving her with a grandmother. When she finally tracked him down sixteen years later, he agreed to a reunion at her home, but apparently with no intention of making amends for abandoning her. While enjoying her hospitality, he had the audacity—though likely in his characteristically charming manner—to request train fare for his return trip to St. Louis.

  Prosser could not help being sympathetic to her sister-in-law’s frustration with C.J.’s irresponsible ways. Even in early 1910, Prosser felt sure that he was squandering company funds. He was, Prosser said, “meeting the postman, getting the mail, not filling orders.” Disillusioned as Madam Walker was, she continued to tolerate his behavior, likely hoping he would manage to make his own significant contribution to what had always been more her business than his.

  Corpulent slate clouds glowered over central Indiana’s snow-carpeted farmland as the train carrying Madam Walker and C.J. approached Indianapolis on Thursday, February 10, 1910. Outside the city’s granite-trimmed Romanesque Union Station, street-cleaning crews, in one of their “worst battles of the winter,” chipped away the ice chunks that had clogged trolley switch points since Tuesday night’s storm. More freezing precipitation was expected on Friday.

  Despite the bone-chilling high of twenty-eight degrees, the Walkers found themselves “so favorably impressed with Indianapolis” that they decided to move their operation to the Hoosier capital.

  Their warm and “cordial” reception was substantially enhanced by their gracious host, Dr. Joseph Ward, the first president of the Indiana Association of Negro Physicians, Dentists and Pharmacists. A native of Wilson, North Carolina, and an early vice president of the National Medical Association, he had established Ward’s Sanitarium, the city’s primary black hospital, in 1910. Located on Indiana Avenue—the African American community’s main commercial thoroughfare—the facility also served as a training school for black nurses. Ward, like Jessie Robinson’s husband, C. K. Robinson, had been a state and national officer of the Knights of Pythias, the common tie that may have enabled Madam Walker, a member of the group’s women’s auxiliary, to approach him for lodging.

  Two days after the Walkers’ arrived, the Indianapolis Recorder announced, “Mme. C. J. Walker of Pittsburgh, Pa., THE NOTED HAIR CULTURIST, is in this city at the residence of Dr. J. H. Ward at 722 Indiana Avenue, where she will demonstrate the art of growing hair.” She hoped her photograph—the same one that had appeared earlier that year in the Pennsylvania Negro Business Directory—would attract the black women of Indianapolis to her temporary salon.

  It was Madam Walker’s good fortune to have arrived during a particularly lively social season, one that, despite the raw, icy weather, displayed the community’s vitality. February—the birth month of President Abraham Lincoln and the adopted birth month of abolitionist Frederick Douglass—had become a time of celebration among African Americans. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation only three years away, the annual observances consistently drew sizable crowds.

  The Walkers’ host, Joseph Ward, rarely missed a Sunday at Bethel AME, one of the oldest and most prestigious black churches in the city, where he was a leading member. That week the sanctuary was busier than usual as Reverend Theodore Smythe led “soul-stirring” revival services. On Sunday afternoon another local church hosted an Abraham Lincoln celebration featuring reminiscences from black residents who had heard the President-elect’s 1861 preinaugural address from the balcony of Indianapolis’s Bates Hotel. That Monday, Joseph and Zella Ward—and their intriguing, out-of-town visitors—were quite likely on the guest list for the Valentine’s Day tenth wedding anniversary celebration of Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Wallace, who lived directly across the street from the Ward home. Reveling continued into the night as the black waiters of the Columbia Club—an all-white Republican downt
own men’s club—hosted a masked ball for their friends at the Odd Fellows’ Hall. Then, three days before the February 20 Douglass Memorial parade and celebration, elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown, a pivotal player in the NACW’s 1904 boycott of the World’s Fair, performed dramatic readings and orations. But perhaps most important to Madam Walker was Friday’s meeting of the local chapter of the National Negro Business League, the organization founded in 1900 by Booker T. Washington to encourage entrepreneurship among African Americans. Having just elected a slate of officers, the group was seeking new members. Madam Walker, still angling for its founder’s support, was eager to join.

  As much as she loved to socialize, Madam Walker focused almost entirely on her work after her first few days in Indianapolis. “Don’t fail to call and see Mme. Walker,” her ad invited. “Persons calling for treatment will kindly bring comb, brush and 2 towels,” she advised. While she charged nothing for “consultation,” her scalp treatments were a relatively expensive $1. Tins of her Wonderful Hair Grower sold for 50 cents. A month later, however, she had lowered the price of scalp treatments to 50 cents and added a 25-cent shampoo and a 35-cent manicure with hopes of gaining “the patronage of every woman of pride, who is in need of her services.”

  From time to time, Madam Walker offered incentives, including free treatments and cash awards, to build her client base. Through an early form of multilevel marketing, she challenged customers to compete with each other, offering “3 months treatment to the first one bringing or sending 10 customers.” The strategies were so effective that by late March Wonderful Hair Grower sales had reached such levels that Madam Walker and C.J. were able to move around the corner from the Wards’ home into a $10-a-month, five-room rental flat at 638 North West Street.