On Her Own Ground Page 25
Certainly other women had developed large companies and created fortunes before hers. Henrietta “Hetty” Green—called the “witch of Wall Street” because of her miserliness—would die later that year with an estate of $100 million. Annual sales of Lydia Pinkham’s patent medicine tonic had reached $300,000 by the time of her death in 1883. Other direct-sales companies had preceded Madam Walker’s. Avon, founded as the California Perfume Company in 1886, counted 10,000 door-to-door sales agents by 1903. The Fuller Brush Company, manufacturers of high-quality cleaning supplies, had been established in 1906—the same year as the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. Its founder, Alfred C. Fuller, watched sales leap from $30,000 in 1910 to $250,000 in 1917 and $1 million in 1919. And of course Annie Pope-Turnbo Malone’s Poro Company, Madam Walker’s former employer, had been a pioneer of commission sales. All had their merits, but none had proposed what Madam Walker was now creating: a national sales force expressly organized around the principles of corporate responsibility, social betterment and racial justice.
Initially Ransom viewed her grand scheme with skepticism, believing that she planned to offer life insurance and burial policies for her saleswomen. “I think you misunderstood my meaning. I didn’t mean to organize as a Fraternal Society,” she corrected Ransom. “I meant to organize clubs all over the country, and at some time call a meeting of all the agents and form a National which would be similar to the Women’s federated clubs.” Uninterested in the entanglements of collecting local dues, she imagined a decentralized structure where “there would be no handling of money other than just to pay for literature and the like. Each club will handle its own money.” Instead she meant to set up chapters in any town with “at least five agents” who would “come together and organize . . . for mutual protection and . . . charity work.” As an incentive, she proposed annual prizes for state organizations with the most new agents, the highest sales and the most generous philanthropy. As well, she planned to hire a few carefully selected women whose exemplary leadership qualities had prepared them to “treat, teach, and organize.” For the generous monthly salary of $125, she also expected them to deliver slide lectures on “The Negro Woman in Business” just as she was doing. At $1,500 a year, the pay was almost double the average annual wage for nonfarm workers, nearly $300 more than an executive-level federal employee and more than four times the average $337 paid that year to white public school teachers, who almost always took home more in their payroll envelopes than their black counterparts.
As Madam Walker prepared a spring sweep through the South, her central focus had become recruiting agents for her new association. Kicking off her tour in mid-April 1916, she reached the region as the dogwood trees were in full bloom. “An enthusiastic audience” greeted her at Salisbury, North Carolina’s Livingstone College, one of the many campuses she had added to her itinerary. “I was very much flattered Sunday night at the splendid turn out to hear my lecture. Both white and colored came,” she wrote with satisfaction. “They were all loud in their praise [and] frequently interrupted my lecture with loud and long applause.”
Continuing her blitz across the Southeast, she arrived in Tuskegee later that week to visit the still-mourning Margaret Murray Washington. No longer an outsider among Tuskegee’s leadership—having royally entertained Robert Russa Moton, its new president, in her Indianapolis home exactly a year earlier—she appeared before the students and faculty as an honored guest. Soon afterward she initiated a bold, behind-the-scenes campaign to gain appointment to the school’s board of trustees. “I fear you might [think] me egotistical, [but] that has been the one desire of my life,” she confided to Mr. Ransom, wishing for him to gauge Moton’s receptivity on her behalf. “If Mr. Washington had lived I am sure it would come in time. I have been asked it by many smaller schools, but they will not mean as much to me.” Still she knew such a suggestion would require powerful persuasion if she were to join the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Julius Rosenwald and several wealthy white New York and Alabama businessmen, as well as President Moton and Tuskegee treasurer Warren Logan, two of the three black members. “Of course I know there are no women on the Board, but I believe if it is put up to them strong enough they will think kindly of it for I am now doing more for it than many who are on the Board,” she wrote, confident that her contributions since 1912—as well as her efforts on behalf of the Washington Memorial Fund—had accumulated into a respectable sum. “After I build my home I mean to give them $1,000 per year. But I do think it is worth some recognition,” she said without modesty.
That September, Madam Walker’s $300 contribution to the school paved the way for Ransom’s discreet query regarding the seat made vacant earlier that month by the death of board chairman Seth Low, a former Columbia University president and New York City mayor. “I am writing to suggest the name of a person, not to take Mr. Low’s place, but one who is in every way worthy of a place on such a Board and the appointing of whom . . . would mean so much to your great institution,” Ransom ventured a few days after receiving Emmett Scott’s “grateful” acknowledgment of the scholarship gift. “The name that I would suggest is Madam C. J. Walker.” Ever the circumspect lieutenant, he added, “You understand that I have made this suggestion without the knowledge of Madam Walker.”
Moton delicately replied that while he and the school had “the highest respect for Madame Walker,” he was “of the opinion that there is a certain custom to keep the balance on the Board of Trustees about as it has been hitherto, that is to say, filling the place of white men with white men.” Even more to the point, he preferred “a man as near as possible to Mr. Low’s type, a man of Mr. Low’s spirit and wealth [and] business ability.” In other words, a man capable of building the kind of magnificent, million-dollar library that Low had provided for Columbia University. “[T]hat is what Tuskegee needs just now. In the meantime I shall keep the Madame in mind, and I need not tell you it would give us a great deal of pleasure to have such a person on our board,” he wrote, without commitment, but ever mindful of her past and potential contributions.
During April and May, Madam Walker barnstormed Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana, juggling invitations to speak at black colleges, fraternal conferences, religious gatherings and prestigious churches, including “a packed house” at Reverend Peter James Bryant’s renowned Wheat Street Baptist Church in Atlanta. After brief stays at her homes in Indianapolis and Harlem, she was off again in her touring car toward New England, stopping in New Haven during Yale’s commencement week, then New London, Boston and Springfield as she cultivated local agents’ clubs and signed up delegates for her forthcoming convention. At summer’s end, Madam Walker crossed the Mason-Dixon Line again to make what she called “her last tour of the South” from Florida to Kentucky, from North Carolina to as far west as Texas and Oklahoma. In a carefully coordinated promotional drive, Ransom arranged for advertisements in local Negro papers the weeks before and during her arrival. Along the way Madam Walker tailored her message to appeal to women trapped in menial jobs and tied to communities suffering from the back-to-back boll weevil infestations of 1915 and 1916. Financial independence was her message for eager ears: “Open Your Own Shop. Secure Prosperity and Freedom. Many women of all ages who had despaired for years of acquiring success, confronted with the problem of earning a livelihood, have mastered the Walker System.” For the new edition of her annual Walker Company brochure she advised Ransom to shift the emphasis from “hair work” to team building and community involvement: “We do not want to lay as much stress on the growing as we do on what the agents are doing.” Regarding material promoting the national convention, she wrote, “In those circulars I wish you would use the words ‘our’ and ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ and ‘my’ . . . Address them as ‘Dear Friend.’”
During mid-September, Madam Walker pronounced her National Baptist Convention speech—“From the Kitchen to the Mansion”—a “howling success in that I have been able to get before
thousands of people.” With nearly three million members—more than 60 percent of them women—the NBC was the largest black organization in the country by 1916, with more members than either of the two most prominent white Baptist groups, which had split apart prior to the Civil War. Madam Walker particularly relished the reception she received in Savannah from NBC president Reverend Elias Camp Morris and S. Willie Layten, president of the group’s fiercely autonomous Women’s Auxiliary. “All the big guns have shown me the greatest courtesies and kindness,” she noted with glee. Madam Walker also had encountered “the Poro woman”—very possibly Annie Malone herself—in the convention hall. Noting that her competitor was “only in evidence by pinning tags on anyone who will allow them as they pass by,” she allowed herself a moment of devilish gloating.
From Savannah, Madam Walker traveled to Augusta, then had a brief layover in the small farming community of Washington, Georgia. Although she reported “quite a deal of success here with the work,” she “found so many poor people” who could not raise the $25 fee she now charged for her course that she “decided to let them have the trade for $10,” supplying them with a “half dozen each of grower, Glossine, shampoo and comb. I put them on their honor to pay where they can.”
She reached Atlanta in early October within days of Mae’s arrival at Spelman Seminary, the all-female school founded in 1881 by two devoted white New England teachers. Initially called the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary—the sister school to the Atlanta Baptist Seminary (later Morehouse College)—its “primary aim was to provide training for teachers, missionaries and church workers.” In honor of the generosity of its first major benefactor—the religiously pious and astronomically wealthy Baptist John D. Rockefeller—the church boards that oversaw the school voted to change the name in 1884 to honor the parents of Rockefeller’s wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller. By 1916, Spelman had added to its ranks many daughters of the black elite during an era when only about 5 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one were enrolled in a college, university or female seminary like Spelman. Among the 768 students was Laura Murray Washington, Margaret Murray Washington’s niece, whom she and her husband had adopted in 1904 after the death of Laura’s parents. It was Margaret Washington, in fact, who had suggested that Mae join Laura on the Georgia campus. Upon receiving Lelia’s request to enroll Mae, Spelman’s third president, Lucy Hale Tapley, solicited a reference from Margaret Washington in part because the seventeen-year-old Mae had not attended school for more than four years. Assured by Washington that she knew Mae “very well”—having just seen her during the summer—she added, “I know Mrs. Walker cares for and protects her. I am sure that she has good health while I do not know much about her disposition.”
To enhance Mae’s chances for acceptance, Madam Walker had prevailed upon Reverend James W. Brown, her pastor at Harlem’s influential Mother AME Zion Church, to draft a recommendation on her granddaughter’s behalf. “It gives me great pleasure to place in the hands of the bearer, Miss Mae Robinson, this letter of introduction, and at the same time to bear testimony of her good character,” he wrote Tapley. “Fortune has favored her with a good home, and with the very best family and social connections. Mme. C. J. Walker, her grandmother, is a member in good standing in this church, and being her pastor, I have had an opportunity to come in close touch with the home life of every member of the family.” AME Zion bishop Alexander Walters—an NAACP vice president and founder who was well known for his progressive attitudes toward women’s rights—also lobbied on Mae’s behalf. “Miss Robinson has a most amiable disposition, is modest, docile, ambitious and industrious, besides having had the advantage of training by her very worthy and capable grandmother and mother,” he waxed with the requisite hyperbole reserved for such testimonials. “I am sure you will find her a most welcome addition to your body of students and that she will reflect credit on your school should she have the good fortune to study there.”
On the application, Lelia called Mae both “honest and industrious” and in “perfect” health, though Mae may well have been experiencing some of the early diabetes symptoms that were to plague her throughout her adult life. At the time, however, Spelman officials likely were more concerned about tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. As explanation for Mae’s lack of schooling since 1912, Lelia offered the commendable excuse that she had been “managing our business.” Just a few weeks before Mae’s eighteenth birthday, she entered the High School Department’s academic English-Latin curriculum with plans to study music as well, finally fulfilling the Walkers’ promise to Sarah Etta Bryant that her daughter would receive a formal education. By year’s end, Dean Edith Brill praised Mae’s “pleasing personality,” as well as her academic performance. “We felt that she developed well for a first year. We are always anxious to give the best training possible for a life of usefulness, and to have students who desire that training and respond to our efforts,” the earnest Brill wrote to Lelia. A classmate later recalled that Mae was “always very pleasant [and] she had a nice smile.” Like many other young Spelman women, she eagerly anticipated campus concerts and the “social affairs” when “the Morehouse boys came over.”
With Mae settled, Madam Walker headed west to Birmingham and Montgomery on her ambitious crusade to train hundreds more agents in time for her August 1917 assembly. In Mississippi she once again made her base in Jackson, where she was comfortably hosted by Ransom’s father-in-law, Diamond Cox, a revered teacher and early member of the NAACP. From there, she and Louise Thompson, her recently hired traveling assistant, radiated across the state like General Sherman, charging forth to Meridian, Greenwood, Natchez, Clarksdale, Vicksburg and smaller towns in between during a hectic and exhausting four weeks. With long days of training sessions and late but enjoyable nights of speeches, receptions and dinners, Madam Walker and Louise averaged three or four days in each town. During some weeks, the pace quickened. “We are only making two day stops and have such little time to do our corresponding,” she groused. But she could not complain about the large crowds who came to hear her lectures, which she often wisely scheduled on alternate nights at both the local Baptist and Methodist churches. “I truly made a hit in Natchez and am sure we’ll get some good business from there,” she wrote Ransom, elated over the welcome extended her by Henry and Albert Dumas, brothers who were both physicians and pharmacists. They “vied with each other in showing us every courtesy. [They] not only refused to take pay for our room and board, but carriage hire, medicine, professional services and even advertising. I never have met such people before in all my life [for them] to be strangers.”
But it was her late-October side trip to Louisiana that surely touched her most deeply. “Went to my home in Delta yesterday and came back to Vicksburg and gave a lecture at Bethel Church to a very appreciative audience,” she wrote Ransom the following day. Despite what must have been a nostalgic homecoming, she apparently was too rushed, as usual, to reflect upon the emotions she felt upon seeing her childhood cabin and the cotton fields where she and her parents had worked. In her letter to Ransom she mentioned no reunion with childhood friends and gave no introspective account of her memories. But the visit mattered enough that she preserved a clipping from the white Louisiana newspaper that had reported her return to the plantation of her birth. “World’s Richest Negress in Delta,” read the headline.
Delta was honored Sunday by a visit of the richest negro woman in the world, C. J. Walker, proprietress of a hair straightener remedy. She was born Winnie Breedlove, a daughter of Owen Breedlove, a slave owned by Mr. Robert Burney. She came here to see the place of her nativity, and to call on Mrs. George M. Long, the only daughter of Mr. Burney living here. Mrs. Long has a childhood recollection of Owen Breedlove being one of the “lead hands” of her father. The visitor was very quiet and unassuming and a fine example to her race.
Apparently the meeting between old acquaintances was cordial, even pleasant, because Anna Burney Long’s da
ughter visited Madam Walker two years later in New York. But she could not have been happy with the fact that the paper had called her a “Negress” rather than “Madam,” misstated her birth name and insisted on not capitalizing the “N” in “Negro.” Nor did she fail to notice the condescending tone that described her as “quiet and unassuming” and therefore “a fine example to her race.” She was anything but “quiet and unassuming,” and soon afterward told another newspaper, “The report that I advertise to take the kink out of Negro’s hair is not true. I guarantee to make hair grow for them.”
Within days of her triumphant Delta return, Ransom forwarded an unusual request: “I am enclosing a signature card from the Fletcher American Bank,” he wrote. “They asked me to send same to you as you have improved so much in your penmanship since you signed the card they now have on file, until whenever a check comes in signed by you, they call me over to identify your signature before paying same.” For someone who had been denied even the most rudimentary education, recognition of such identifiable personal improvement was all the more ironic because of its timing so close to the moment when she had just retraced the paths of her childhood.
But her euphoria was suddenly tempered by a near-tragedy. A few days before Thanksgiving, she and Louise Thompson almost lost their lives as they were being driven across a railroad intersection in northwestern Mississippi. “We had a narrow escape from death Tuesday in Clarksdale. As soon as the car we were in got on the track we heard a man yelling ‘get out of the way,’” Madam recounted anxiously. “We looked around in time to see a freight train backing down on us, not a bell ringing or anything. The chauffeur in the nick of time put on more gas and shot forward. The train all but grazed the back of the car in which we were riding. I haven’t been myself since.”