On Her Own Ground Page 28

  As the well-coiffed, fashionably dressed agents traveled throughout the city on streetcar sightseeing tours and automobile excursions, they were easily identified by their distinctive convention badges. Beneath a buttonsized photograph of Madam Walker, a wide, deep-yellow satin ribbon announced the Madam C. J. Walker National Association of Hair Growers in black letters.

  Setting aside the morning sessions for business, Madam Walker opened the afternoon and evening sessions to the public. Among her keynote speakers were her friends George Knox and S. Willie Layten, the National Baptist Convention’s Women’s Auxiliary president and an independentminded divorcée who shared with Madam Walker an abiding concern for the thousands of young black women who were migrating to Northern cities. A resident of Philadelphia, Layten had founded the city’s branch of the Association for the Protection of Colored Women, an organization designed to help these recent arrivals find jobs, adapt to city life and avoid unscrupulous employers. Reflecting Madam Walker’s interest in movies and new technology, two pioneering black filmmakers—Clarence Wells of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and Walter Sammons of the Monarch Talking Picture Company—discussed their innovative communications devices with the evening audience.

  Throughout the sessions the agents shared their personal triumphs—new homes, increased monthly earnings, children’s educational accomplishments—in proceedings similar to those of the National Association of Colored Women and the National Negro Business League. Women who had earned little more than a few dollars a week as domestic workers now took in two and three and ten times that much in one day. Margaret Thompson, president of the Philadelphia Union of Walker Hair Culturists, told her colleagues that she had been a $5-a-week servant when she met Madam Walker. “Her income [now] is $250 a week,” reported the Kansas City Star. And there were scores more like Thompson because Madam Walker, Annie Pope-Turnbo Malone, Anthony Overton of Overton Hygienic and dozens of other black manufacturers had revolutionized the cosmetics industry by customizing products for black women. Each decade had seen steady growth in those who made their living as hairdressers, from only 514 black women who identified themselves as hairdressers in 1890 to 984 in 1900, then 3,093 in 1910. The most significant growth was to come in the decade between 1910 and 1920, when there would be 12,666 African American beauty culturists, according to the United States Census. And while it remains impossible to document the exact number of women who supplemented their incomes with part-time “hair work,” the Walker Company alone claimed to have trained 20,000 agents by the end of the twentieth century’s second decade.

  For her own keynote message—“Woman’s Duty to Woman”—Madam Walker reserved the final night. Emphasizing her “great interest” in her agents’ “successes and their failures,” she met head-on the grousing that had led to a brief boycott of her products by her Cincinnati agents in the spring. She also aimed to counter the complaint Ransom had discovered after visits with another group of agents who, he said, charged that “you were all for yourself.” Assuring her that he considered the allegations neither “fair [nor] just,” he wrote, “I have always resented it wherever I heard it, yet that is what one hears when one comes in contact with a bunch of your agents.” Rather than become defensive, she vowed to position her enterprise “on a co-operative basis so that her agents will share in the profits.” From Union Baptist’s pulpit she reminded the women of her intention “to have this organization, its rules and regulations so strict, and perfect, until it will be utterly impossible for any one to handle our goods, unless such a one is a regular agent of the Company, and is a member of this National Organization.” And she was extremely proud to announce that “the art of hair culture” was now being taught at black secondary schools and on college campuses, thus helping to raise the status of those who worked in the industry. She took special pleasure in presenting the prizes—$500 in all—to the members who had trained the most new agents, logged the highest sales figures and contributed the most to their local charities. In an early recycling program, necessitated by wartime restrictions on the use of metals, she awarded $25 to the agent who had returned the largest number of tin containers.

  And while Madam Walker focused on business opportunities for her agents, she was determined that they be politically conscious citizens concerned about more than their own personal interests. In “a ringing message” she “spoke of the present war and advised her people to remain loyal to their homes, their country and their flag,” the convention minutes reported. “After all, this is the greatest country under the sun. But we must not let our love of country, our patriotic loyalty cause us to abate one whit in our protest against wrong and injustice,” she declared, undaunted by Woodrow Wilson’s rebuff after the Silent Protest Parade. “We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible.” Moved by Madam Walker’s speech—and emboldened by her visit to the White House—the Walker Union dispatched a telegram to President Wilson:

  We, the representatives of the National Convention of the Mme. C. J. Walker Agents, in convention assembled, and in a larger sense representing twelve million Negroes, have keenly felt the injustice done our race and country through the recent lynching at Memphis, Tennessee, and the horrible race riot at East St. Louis. Knowing that no people in all the world are more loyal and patriotic than the Colored people of America, we respectfully submit to you this our protest against the continuation of such wrongs and injustices in this “land of the free, and home of the brave” and we further respectfully urge that you as President of these United States use your great influence that congress enact the necessary laws to prevent a recurrence of such disgraceful affairs.

  With that gesture, the association had become what perhaps no other currently existing group could claim: American women entrepreneurs organized to use their money and their numbers to assert their political will.

  As the convention closed with a church service in Union Baptist’s semicircular sanctuary, Madam Walker was already thinking ahead to the next week’s activities. After a brief stop in Cape May, New Jersey, where she was honored at a reception at the Hotel Dale—a popular destination for middle-class blacks who lived along the East Coast—she returned to New York to host the first trade association meeting of the country’s black hair care products manufacturers.

  That Wednesday night, more than a dozen company founders from St. Louis, Boston, New York and Chicago gathered in the Walker salon on 136th Street. Madam Walker told them she had brought them together because she believed it was “necessary and urgent” that they organize in the face of competition from a few well-funded white-owned companies that had begun to encroach upon their territory. Just as they had begun to overcome the exaggerated claims of businesses that pushed skin bleaches and caustic chemical concoctions, the black manufacturers—most still woefully undercapitalized—found themselves struggling to protect the market niche they had created. “[I]t has been so often the case that the white man who is not interested in Colored Women’s Beauty only looks to further his own gains and puts on the market preparations that are absolutely of no aid whatsoever to the Skin, Scalp or Hair,” read the minutes of the first session of the National Negro Cosmetics Manufacturers Association. In fact, they all were probably aware of a particularly insulting letter that had been exposed in the Chicago Defender a year earlier. Sent to white drugstore retailers by a distributor of Palmolive Soap products, its author had signed the correspondence: “Yours for Nigger Business.”

  Among those at the meeting were Alexander Johnson, the former president of the Boston NNBL, who, along with his wife, Mary L. Johnson, a scalp specialist and wig maker, had founded the Johnson Manufacturing Company in Boston in 1899. Noticeably absent was Annie Pope-Turnbo Malone, whom Madam Walker had chosen to exclude despite her prominent position in the industry. By assembling what she considered, “some of the best and most successful business men and women of the Race,” Madam Walker ho
ped to create an organization to protect the members from “fraud and false representation . . . to encourage the development of Race enterprises and acquaint the public with the superior claims of high class goods.”

  That evening when the group assembled upstairs at 108 for dinner, the members discussed plans to reduce production costs by purchasing raw materials in bulk and ways to pool promotional resources by “devising some form of cooperative advertising.” Madam Walker further proposed that they “fix a standard both in their prices and quality of their products,” a plan that, had it been implemented, could have been in violation of federal antitrust laws prohibiting price fixing within an industry. But the motivation that triggered such a scheme—“unscrupulous persons who placed fake preparations on the market” and undercut prices with adulterated goods—was all too real and threatening.

  With Madam Walker elected president, and with women holding half of the six executive committee positions, the members adjourned with renewed “enthusiasm and inspiration” to enhance their industry. Her goal, she reminded one of the officers, was to lay the groundwork for “the beginning of a powerful organization representing more working capital with more real results than any other among Colored Americans anywhere.” The woman who had scrapped to have her words heard just five years earlier at Booker T. Washington’s NNBL convention now intended to develop her own influential trade organization.

  Two weeks later at Mother AME Zion Church in New York, Madam Walker joined nearly 200 men and women for the tenth annual convention of William Monroe Trotter’s National Equal Rights League. As much as she had admired Washington, and as closely allied as she had become with the NAACP and its antilynching campaign, she did not shun the more pugnacious and zealous Trotter, who had become marginalized by the post-Washington-era black political establishment. Madam Walker’s financial status granted her the independence she needed to be able to choose causes and issues rather than sides and personalities.

  During its September 1917 conference, NERL delegates voted to demand “in precise terms” that President Wilson abolish segregation in federal offices and interstate travel, forbid disfranchisement of black voters, dismantle the peonage farming system and make lynching a federal crime. “Despite progress we are still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which makes our lives a living hell,” their convention petition bluntly stated. By the end of the meeting, Madam Walker had been elected a vice-president-at-large. Antilynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett—who had joined the NERL in 1913 before entirely cutting her ties with the NAACP in 1915—now served as the group’s Chicago delegate. Both she and Trotter remained wary of the NAACP’s predominantly white leadership, preferring “an organization of the colored people and for the colored people and led by the colored people.”

  For Wells-Barnett the highlight of the NERL session proved to be a dinner at which Madam Walker “entertained the entire delegation royally.” After the officers had been “ushered into the dining room, Madam sat at the head of her table in her décolleté gown, with her butler serving dinner under her direction,” Wells-Barnett later wrote in her autobiography. “She had learned already how to bear herself as if to the manner born.” Because that day’s proceedings—like every day’s proceedings—had focused on segregation in the federal government and concerns about lynching, the conversation around Madam Walker’s large table must certainly have turned to East St. Louis. Having visited the devastated town just three days after the riot, Wells-Barnett had firsthand knowledge and graphic observations to share. Because she personally intended to carry the NERL’s petition to Washington after the conference—and to attempt to persuade the Justice Department to “undertake an investigation of Negroes at East St. Louis”—Wells-Barnett and the others also would have been curious about Madam Walker’s impressions of her White House visit in August.

  Wells-Barnett, who had met Madam Walker around 1906, applauded her “hard work and persistent effort,” as well as the “vision and ambition” that had allowed her to expand her business operations to New York. “I was indeed proud to see what a few short years of success had done for a woman who had been without education and training,” Wells-Barnett, a brilliant but sometimes contentious woman, wrote with admiration. “I was one of the skeptics that paid little heed to her predictions as to what she was going to do . . . To see her phenomenal rise made me take pride anew in Negro womanhood.”

  Several times that week the two women motored to Irvington-on-Hudson to inspect the progress on Madam Walker’s Hudson River home. “We drove out there almost every day, and I asked her on one occasion what on earth she would do with a thirty-room house,” Wells-Barnett remembered. “She said, ‘I want plenty of room in which to entertain my friends. I have worked so hard all of my life that I would like to rest.’”

  Throughout the fall Madam Walker continued her frequent visits to Westchester County, quizzing the contractor, monitoring costs and reveling in the possibilities her new home promised. “Of late, Mme. Walker, in her high-powered motor car, has been a familiar visitor in Irvington,” The New York Times reported. “On her first visits to inspect her property the villagers, noting her color, were frankly puzzled . . . ‘Does she really intend to live there, or is she building it as a speculation?’ the people have asked.” When her wealthy neighbors learned that she did indeed intend to live among them, they were stunned. “‘Impossible!’ they exclaimed. ‘No such woman of her race could afford such a place,’” the Times reporter wrote, noting a collective community “gasp of astonishment.”

  That same November 4, 1917, New York Times Magazine feature—“Wealthiest Negro Woman’s Suburban Mansion”—placed Madam Walker’s assets at “a cool million, or nearly that.” The paper significantly overstated her net worth, giving rise to the belief that she had become the first American woman to make a million dollars on her own in business. And although she tried to correct the record, the claim stuck. “I am not a millionaire, but I hope to be some day,” she told the reporter, “not because of the money, but because I could do so much more to help my race.” When a reprint of the article appeared in the January 1918 issue of A. Philip Randolph’s new publication, The Messenger, the story of Madam Walker’s purported millionaire status caught hold among African Americans.

  The news about her Irvington-on-Hudson residence brought white customers—some who also suffered from hair loss, scalp disease and kinky hair—as well as white admirers like Mrs. J. M. Minos of Rocky Ford, Colorado, who told Madam Walker of her “astonishment of your success in gaining the wealth you have. Not many have the brains to do this without financial help.”

  But while the construction on Madam Walker’s house was progressing well, her health was deteriorating at a frightening pace. By mid-November 1917, Dr. George Sauer, a Chicago physician, had braced her for unwanted news. His diagnosis: nephritis, an acute, and often irreversible, inflammation of the kidneys exacerbated by her worsening hypertension. He advised that she check into Michigan’s celebrated Battle Creek Sanitarium for “an indefinite stay.” During her intake physical examination, a Dr. Judd measured her systolic blood pressure at 196, well over the 140 he considered healthy. In order to preserve her life, the sanitarium’s doctors recommended that she cease working altogether. “This is necessary for all time and means she must give little or no attention again to business or heavy social activities,” her traveling assistant, Louis George, wrote to Ransom.

  A multiwinged, 1,000-bed hospital, Battle Creek catered to wealthy chronically ill patients, many of them wheelchair-bound invalids, desperate for relief and cure. Whereas Hot Springs had provided relaxation and respite from Madam Walker’s grueling travel schedule, Battle Creek’s “dictatorial” director, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, prescribed a rigorous “regimen of fresh air, exercise and hydrotherapy.” The bland, tasteless, vegetarian diet—so unlike Madam Walker’s flavorful high-fat fare—banned all coffee, tea and alcohol, and offered such choices as bean and tapioca soup, buttered cauliflower, stewed
raisins and granola.

  Despite the pleasant surroundings—a rooftop dining room with hand-painted murals, a solarium filled with tropical palms and fruit trees and an imposing lobby as grand as that of any nineteenth-century European hotel—Madam Walker could not bring herself to stay longer than a few weeks. Unable to “tear herself away from the active conducting” of the Walker Company, she was also eager to celebrate her birthday and the holidays with Lelia. By mid-December she was back in New York, making regular trips with her architect, Vertner Tandy, to Irvington. “It is getting on fine,” she was happy to report to Ransom of the now nearly completed mansion.

  Two days after Christmas, as mother and daughter enjoyed each other’s company, Lelia wrote Ransom from 108 to thank him for her gift. “You certainly touched my weak spot by sending a book,” she wrote appreciatively. Grateful that her mother had recovered sufficiently to be at home, she added, “You know this was an especially merry xmas for me having mother with me.” During the coming year both women would find themselves, like most Americans, immersed in the war effort.

  CHAPTER 18

  War Abroad, War at Home

  Protest and patriotism vied for headlines in the New York Age during the summer of 1917 as African American troops trained for the war abroad and Harlem leaders challenged mob violence at home. Even as black New Yorkers cautiously monitored congressional response to the East St. Louis riots, they were captivated by the military drills their khaki-clad sons, husbands and friends practiced outside the 132nd Street armory. That James Reese Europe—now a sergeant in the Harlem-based 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York Guard—had signed on to lead the regimental band only boosted their pride. With Noble Sissle strutting as his drum major, and a dozen handpicked Puerto Rican enlistees filling his reed section, Jim Europe’s impromptu street parades did more for recruitment than any ten Selective Service offices.