Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Madam C.J. Walker

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Join us today as we dive into the story of the first female self-made millionaire, Madam C.J. Walker. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Dave's here in spirit.

Jerry's here in spirit. Who else is here in spirit? We can't say because we can't see spirits because we're among the living. This is short stuff. Let's go. This is the story of Madam C.J. Walker, who Guinness Book of World's Record says is the first self-made female millionaire in the world. Yeah, not African American female or woman millionaire. Straight up first woman in America to be a millionaire through her own work and hard labor. That's right. She has a very cool story. She was a daughter of sharecroppers and ended up building this huge brand which employed and empowered many hundreds of women. Octavia Spencer, I think, played her in self-made. It was a mini series on Netflix recently.

And she was born Sarah Breedlove on a cotton plantation in 1867, one of five kids. It's a great name too. I love that name. Breedlove? Sarah Breedlove in particular. Yeah, that's a nice ring, doesn't it? If you're wondering why she's C.J. Walker, we'll get to that. But in Louisiana, she was, she struggled in life. She was an orphan by the age of seven and then went to live with her older sister, Louvinia, another very nice name. And they settled in Mississippi in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where she did domestic work and worked in the cotton fields. Yeah. And I mean, she was born so close to slavery that she was the first child in her family

who was born free. That's how recent slavery was a thing. So her lot in life wasn't particularly much better because it was just so close to the slave era. When she was 14, as a matter of fact, she got married to a man named Moses McWilliams, at least in part to escape her home life, basically. Yeah. Her brother-in-law apparently was not a very nice guy and mistreated her. So she got out of there with Moses and had a daughter name, I guess, Lilia, or Lilia, very pretty name, L-E-L-I-A. I think she later changed her name to put an A on the front of it and was a Lilia. And her husband sadly died in 1887, so she moved to St. Louis where her brothers lived. They were barbers there and started earning money doing laundry, making about a buck fifty a

day. So you're like, okay, where are we going to get to the fact that she's a self-made person? Like, she's, you know, starting to get up there in years. She's like in her twenties now. She's making $1.50 a day, which is enough to put her kid through school. But I looked and as far as the West Egg Inflation Calculator says, that's still only $43 a day in today's money. And I feel like we're missing something, Chuck. I think that that's not a full picture of what money was worth. I think things were just cheaper. I think life was just less expensive at other times in American and probably world history than it is today. I think you're right. You want to take a break, regroup and then talk about the real beginning of Madam C.J. Walker? Sure. Okay.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids,

relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars,

if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, kpop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So we said that Madam C.J. Walker was the first self-made

woman millionaire in the United States. She's an African-American woman who was born almost in the slavery in the South. But she became self-made because she ran into a problem in the 1890s. Her hair started falling out. And I could not find what the cause of her hair loss was. I saw a scalp condition almost everywhere that made me suspect that somebody said scalp condition and everybody else found that same source. But I couldn't find an actual diagnosed medical condition. But she started losing her hair. And she found out in pretty quick order that there was not a lot of help out there for her to stop her hair loss or possibly regrow hair. So she tried to figure it out herself. Yeah. I mean, I think the reason her hair was falling out was because there were

not products designed specifically for women's hair or hair of anyone from African descent. So it was a market catered to Caucasian styled hair. And so their hair would suffer as a result. So there were a few products out there. She went to One Line Poro Hair, P-O-R-O, which was created by Annie Turnbow Malone, another black entrepreneur. And it helped some. And she even sold this stuff for about a year and a half. But the whole time, she was like, I need to come up with my own formula here to help myself and to help others. Yeah. So about a decade or so later, she got married a second time to a man named Charles Joseph Walker, hence the CJ Walker. And he was in sales. He was kind of a marketing whiz.

And the two of them together became what you would probably refer to as an early power couple, basically. They really complimented and rounded out one another's strengths. And they formed, basically, this hair care empire, the very beginning of this hair care empire. And Sarah adopted the name Madam CJ Walker. And that's where the whole thing began. Yeah. And it was called Madam CJ Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower. Awesome. Right. I mean, talk about marketing whiz. Let's just call it what it is and what it does right out of the gate. It makes me want to throw my money at her. Say, take my money.

So she founded this company in 1906. And there was no national distribution chain. So they hit the road. They traveled all around the South for about a year and a half. As Mark Cuban would say, just hustling, selling door to door, doing it the hard way, doing demos and in front of people. So they knew what it did. A lot of times, they would go to churches to do this. And she had these before and after photos. Again, great marketing. And these women started buying it up. It was 50 cents a 10. And they said, we love this stuff. We love that there's a product for us. And she used to say, there would be no hair growing industry if I hadn't invented it.

Right. The thing is though, is like she wasn't selling, she wasn't a huckster. She actually had a recipe that was lost in its exactness to time. But this stuff actually did apparently regrow hair or at least halt hair loss. So I'm not sure where they found it, but somebody documented that the ingredients included coconut oil, beeswax, petrol atom, which I guess is like petroleum jelly today, copper sulfate and precipitated sulfur. And it had a nice violet scent, which I like. I don't think it's used quite as often as it should be. But the key ingredient, the active ingredient in this thing was sulfur, that that was probably what was working and causing women to say, this stuff actually works. I want some more. Yeah. And she had a whole system. She

had a vegetable based shampoo. She had something called Glossine, which smoothed out hair that was pressed with a hot comb. And so she had a little, you know, a haircare beauty line basically going in the early 1900s to the tune of about $150,000 a year in today dollars by 1908, which is some pretty good money. Yeah. And we should say there's one thing that I think this House Stuff Works article just kind of walks right past. And that is that when you used her walker system, you were an African-American or black woman who was making your hair akin to a white woman's hairdo. And there was a period in time in black history, especially in like the 1960s and 70s, where Madam Walker was not particularly thought of that highly because she had made an empire built

on emulating Caucasian beauty. And it wasn't until, you know, years later that she finally was seen for what she was, which was a downright radical feminist and civil rights activist who couldn't read or write from what I saw her entire life and yet made a really amazing living for herself, but also empowered other black women to be more than just, you know, domestic help or laborers, you know. Yeah. It's a great story. She divorced Walker in 1912, moved to Indianapolis, and then in the position she was in with that kind of money and that kind of sort of growing fame, started kind of buddying up with some of the more well-healed activists in the country, like Mary McLeod Baton and Booker T. Washington, moved to Harlem, which was where you

wanted to be if you wanted to be at the center of black culture in the early 1900s. And she and her daughter opened up a salon. It was a very nice salon. Yeah. Parquet floors and velvet seats and grand piano in the lobby. It was a really, really kind of a fine place. Yeah. Apparently in the teens, the 1910s, she had something like 20,000 to 40,000 women beauty cultureists working for her. Tens of thousands of women. That's amazing. And she held a convention, the first convention of her beauty cultureists, her agents running around selling her stuff in Philadelphia, I believe. And one of the things that she was noted for was when she gave speeches, it was a lot more or about a lot more than just, you know, pumping them up to go sell her product. It was about them demanding,

you know, better treatment to be treated like human beings, to demand a better, more socially just world. Like her speeches were peppered with that kind of empowerment, telling women, black women no less, you know, in the early 20th century that they should expect to be treated better than they were by men of all races and by the white race in particular, which is, again, it's just radical. There's no other way to put it at the time. In 1918, she moved to Villa Loireau, a mansion in Irvington on the Hudson, about 45 minutes north of Manhattan. And this place was a legit mansion, like 34 rooms. It was huge and an amazing place. It was designed by an African American architect named

Vertner Woodson Tandy. Great name. What's sad is, you know, she was able to enjoy her wealth for a while, but she died the next year after she moved into this incredible 20,000 square foot mansion with her daughter. But she left a really great legacy. Apparently she left two thirds of her estate to historically black universities, to the NAACP. Like she really put her money where her mouth was. She was a really benevolent benefactor to a lot of great civil rights causes. And basically laid the foundation for black women entrepreneurs still to this day, as a matter of fact. Great story. Wonderful story. So hats off to Madam C.J. Walker,

a.k.a. Sarah Breedlove, a.k.a. a genuinely admirable person. And that means everybody that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.