WEBVTT - Short Stuff: Madam C.J. Walker 0:00:04.120 --> 0:00:06.600 Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, 0:00:06.680 --> 0:00:10.320 Dave's here in spirit, Jerry's here in spirit. Um who 0:00:10.360 --> 0:00:12.960 else is here in spirit? We can't say because we 0:00:13.000 --> 0:00:15.760 can't see spirits, because we're among the living. This is 0:00:15.800 --> 0:00:21.200 short stuff. Let's go. This is the story of Madam C. J. Walker, 0:00:21.880 --> 0:00:25.160 who Guinness Book of World's Record says is the first 0:00:26.040 --> 0:00:31.120 self made, the female millionaire in the world. Yeah, not 0:00:31.960 --> 0:00:38.640 African American female or woman millionaire. Um, straight up, first 0:00:38.920 --> 0:00:44.400 woman in America to be a millionaire. It's through through 0:00:44.400 --> 0:00:48.559 her own work and hard, hard labor. That's right. She 0:00:48.600 --> 0:00:52.040 has a very cool, more assistinct. Put she's a very 0:00:52.080 --> 0:00:55.920 cool story. She was a daughter of sharecroppers and uh 0:00:56.040 --> 0:01:00.680 ended up building this huge brand which employed and empowered 0:01:00.800 --> 0:01:04.480 many hundreds of women. UM. Oxtavia Spencer I think played 0:01:04.520 --> 0:01:06.800 her in Self Made. It was a mini series on 0:01:06.840 --> 0:01:10.920 Netflix recently. And she was born Sarah Breedlove on a 0:01:10.959 --> 0:01:15.200 cotton plantation in eighteen sixty seven, one of five kids. 0:01:15.240 --> 0:01:17.960 It's a great name too. I love that name, breed Love. 0:01:18.120 --> 0:01:21.039 Sarah breed Love in particular has a nice rain, doesn't it. 0:01:22.319 --> 0:01:24.479 If you're wondering why she c. J. Walker will get 0:01:24.480 --> 0:01:28.160 to that. But in Louisiana, she was you know, she 0:01:28.280 --> 0:01:31.200 struggled in life. She was an orphan by the age 0:01:31.240 --> 0:01:35.400 of seven and then went to live with her older sister, Louvinia, 0:01:35.480 --> 0:01:40.440 another very nice name, and they settled in Mississippi and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 0:01:40.680 --> 0:01:44.880 where she did domestic work and worked in the cotton fields. Yeah. 0:01:44.880 --> 0:01:47.520 And I mean like, she was born so close to 0:01:48.160 --> 0:01:51.320 slavery that she was the first child in her family, 0:01:51.960 --> 0:01:54.680 UM who was born free. Like that's how that's how 0:01:54.840 --> 0:01:58.960 recent slavery UM was was a thing. So her lot 0:01:59.000 --> 0:02:03.520 in life wasn't particularly much better because it was just 0:02:03.600 --> 0:02:06.720 so close to the slave era. UM And when she 0:02:06.800 --> 0:02:09.560 was fourteen, as a matter of fact, she got married 0:02:09.600 --> 0:02:13.600 to a man named Moses McWilliams um at least in 0:02:13.760 --> 0:02:18.680 part to escape her home life. Basically, Yeah, her brother 0:02:18.760 --> 0:02:20.680 in law apparently was not a very nice guy and 0:02:20.760 --> 0:02:24.679 mistreated her, So she got out of there with Moses 0:02:24.840 --> 0:02:28.760 and had a daughter name I guess Lelia or Lilia, 0:02:29.040 --> 0:02:33.079 very pretty name, l E. L I A. I think 0:02:33.120 --> 0:02:36.040 she later changed her name to put an A on 0:02:36.080 --> 0:02:38.920 the front of it and was a Lilia and her 0:02:38.960 --> 0:02:42.200 husband sadly died in seven. So she moved to St. Louis, 0:02:42.600 --> 0:02:46.200 where her brothers lived. They were barber's there and started 0:02:46.480 --> 0:02:48.960 earning a money doing laundry, making about a buck fifty 0:02:49.000 --> 0:02:52.360 a day. So You're like, Okay, where where are we 0:02:52.400 --> 0:02:54.400 going to get to the fact that she's a self 0:02:54.480 --> 0:02:57.920 made person? Like she's you know, starting to get up 0:02:57.919 --> 0:03:00.040 there in years she's all she's like in her and 0:03:00.160 --> 0:03:02.960 he's now she's making a dollar fifty a day, which 0:03:03.040 --> 0:03:05.679 is enough to put her kids through school. But I 0:03:06.080 --> 0:03:08.839 looked and as far as the West Saga inflation calculator says, 0:03:08.840 --> 0:03:12.400 that's still only forty three dollars a day in today's money. 0:03:13.000 --> 0:03:15.920 And I feel like we're missing something, Chuck. I think 0:03:16.000 --> 0:03:21.919 that that's not a full picture of of, you know, 0:03:22.520 --> 0:03:26.280 what money was worth. I think things were just cheaper. 0:03:26.919 --> 0:03:31.360 I think life was just less expensive at other times 0:03:31.400 --> 0:03:34.440 in American and probably world history than it is today. 0:03:35.040 --> 0:03:37.680 I think you're right. You want to take a break, regroup, 0:03:37.720 --> 0:04:08.080 and then talk about the real beginning of Madam C. J. Walker. Okay, alright, Chuck. 0:04:08.160 --> 0:04:10.520 So we said that Madam C. J. Walker was the 0:04:10.560 --> 0:04:14.520 first self made woman millionaire in the United States, She's 0:04:14.560 --> 0:04:18.160 an African American woman who was born almost into slavery 0:04:18.640 --> 0:04:21.920 uh in the South Um. But she became self made 0:04:22.000 --> 0:04:25.800 because she ran into a problem in the eight nineties. 0:04:26.200 --> 0:04:29.000 Her hair started falling out, and I could not find 0:04:29.520 --> 0:04:34.120 what the cause of her hair loss, um was. I 0:04:34.160 --> 0:04:38.440 saw a scalp condition almost everywhere. That made me suspect 0:04:38.480 --> 0:04:41.320 that as somebody said scalp condition, and everybody else found 0:04:41.400 --> 0:04:44.919 that same source, but I couldn't find an actual like um, 0:04:44.960 --> 0:04:48.720 you know, diagnosed medical condition. But she started losing her hair, 0:04:49.080 --> 0:04:52.400 and she found out in pretty quick order that there 0:04:52.480 --> 0:04:54.560 was not a lot of help out there for her 0:04:54.640 --> 0:04:57.760 to stop her hair loss or possibly regrow hair, so 0:04:57.800 --> 0:05:00.640 she tried to figure it out herself. Yeah, I mean, 0:05:00.680 --> 0:05:02.719 I think the reason her hair was falling out was 0:05:02.760 --> 0:05:07.520 because there were not products designed specifically for women's hair 0:05:07.800 --> 0:05:11.440 or hair of anyone with from African descent. So it 0:05:11.520 --> 0:05:17.960 was a market catered to Caucasian styled hair and so 0:05:18.640 --> 0:05:21.560 their their hair would suffer as a result. So she 0:05:22.160 --> 0:05:24.000 there were a few products out there. She went to 0:05:25.080 --> 0:05:28.920 one line um POORO Hair p O r O, which 0:05:28.920 --> 0:05:32.520 was created by Annie turnbou Malone, another Black entrepreneur and 0:05:32.600 --> 0:05:35.479 it helped some. But and she even sold this stuff 0:05:35.520 --> 0:05:37.240 for about a year and a half. But the whole 0:05:37.279 --> 0:05:38.760 time she was like, I need to come up with 0:05:38.800 --> 0:05:44.640 my own formula here to help myself and to help others. Yeah. So, Um, 0:05:44.680 --> 0:05:48.280 about a decade or so later, she got married a 0:05:48.320 --> 0:05:52.200 second time to a man named Charles Joseph Walker, UM, 0:05:52.279 --> 0:05:56.640 hence the C. J. Walker, And he was in sales. 0:05:56.720 --> 0:06:00.200 He was a kind of a marketing whiz, and two 0:06:00.240 --> 0:06:03.240 of them together became what you would probably refer to 0:06:03.320 --> 0:06:06.520 as an early power couple. Basically, they really complimented and 0:06:06.640 --> 0:06:12.560 rounded out one another's um strengths, and they they formed 0:06:13.200 --> 0:06:17.279 basically this this hair care empire. At the very beginning 0:06:17.320 --> 0:06:21.320 of this hair care empire, um, and Sarah adopted the 0:06:21.400 --> 0:06:24.080 name Madam C. J. Walker And that's where that the 0:06:24.120 --> 0:06:27.040 whole thing began. Yeah, and it was called Madam C. J. 0:06:27.160 --> 0:06:31.840 Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower. Right, I mean, talk about marketing 0:06:31.839 --> 0:06:33.320 with let's just call it what it is and what 0:06:33.360 --> 0:06:35.080 it does right out of the gate, it makes me 0:06:35.120 --> 0:06:37.920 want to throw my money at her, take my money. 0:06:38.240 --> 0:06:41.679 So she founded this company in nineteen o six, and 0:06:41.800 --> 0:06:45.839 there was no national distribution chain, so they hit the road. 0:06:45.880 --> 0:06:47.680 They traveled all around the South for about a year 0:06:47.680 --> 0:06:50.800 and a half. As Mark Cuban would say, just hustling, 0:06:50.960 --> 0:06:54.080 selling door to door, doing it the hard way, doing 0:06:54.120 --> 0:06:56.400 demos and demons and uh, in front of people so 0:06:56.440 --> 0:06:58.599 they knew what it did. A lot of times, We'll 0:06:58.600 --> 0:07:01.279 go to churches to do this. And she had these 0:07:01.320 --> 0:07:05.039 before and after photos. Again great marketing and these and 0:07:05.279 --> 0:07:07.360 these women started buying it up. It was fifty cents 0:07:07.360 --> 0:07:10.840 and ten, and they said, uh, we love this stuff, 0:07:10.840 --> 0:07:13.840 We love that there's a product for us. UM And 0:07:13.880 --> 0:07:16.040 she used to say, there would be no hair growing 0:07:16.040 --> 0:07:19.200 industry if I hadn't invented it. Right. The thing is, though, 0:07:19.360 --> 0:07:24.000 is like she wasn't selling, she wasn't a huckster. She 0:07:24.120 --> 0:07:29.640 actually had um a recipe that was lost in its 0:07:29.680 --> 0:07:34.120 exactness to time. But this stuff actually did apparently regrow 0:07:34.200 --> 0:07:37.720 hair or at least all hair loss. So I'm not 0:07:37.760 --> 0:07:40.960 sure where they found it, but they somebody documented that 0:07:41.000 --> 0:07:46.840 the ingredients included UM, coconut oil, beeswax, patrol adam, which 0:07:46.840 --> 0:07:51.040 I guess is like UM petroleum jelly today, copper sulfate, 0:07:51.280 --> 0:07:54.520 and precipitated sulfur. And it had a nice violet scent, 0:07:54.640 --> 0:07:56.840 which I like. I don't think it's used quite as 0:07:57.000 --> 0:08:00.960 as often as it should be. Um. But the the 0:08:01.040 --> 0:08:03.960 key ingredient, the active ingredient, and this thing was sulfur. 0:08:04.320 --> 0:08:08.080 That that was probably what was working and causing women 0:08:08.120 --> 0:08:11.320 to say, this stuff actually works, I want some more. Yeah. 0:08:11.360 --> 0:08:13.400 And she had a whole system. She had a vegetable 0:08:13.400 --> 0:08:17.360 based shampoo. Um. She had something called Glossy in which 0:08:17.680 --> 0:08:20.920 smoothed out hair uh that was pressed with a hot comb. 0:08:21.360 --> 0:08:23.200 And so she had a little you know, a hair 0:08:23.240 --> 0:08:26.600 care beauty line basically going in the early nineteen hundreds 0:08:26.600 --> 0:08:29.360 to the tune of about a hundred and fifty thousand 0:08:29.400 --> 0:08:32.480 dollars a year in today dollars by nineteen o eight, 0:08:32.520 --> 0:08:35.800 which is some pretty good money. Yeah. And we should 0:08:35.840 --> 0:08:37.920 say there's one thing that I think this um this 0:08:38.000 --> 0:08:40.440 house stuff works article just kind of walks right past, 0:08:40.520 --> 0:08:44.400 and that is that when you used her Walker system, 0:08:44.640 --> 0:08:48.360 you were you were an African American or Black woman 0:08:48.920 --> 0:08:52.760 who was making your hair a kin to a white 0:08:52.760 --> 0:08:55.920 woman's hair do. And there was a period in time 0:08:56.000 --> 0:08:59.439 in black history, especially in like the nineteen sixties and seventies, 0:08:59.720 --> 0:09:04.120 where Madam Walker was not particularly thought of that highly 0:09:04.800 --> 0:09:09.920 because she had made an empire built on um emulating 0:09:10.000 --> 0:09:14.240 Caucasian beauty. And it wasn't until you know, years later 0:09:14.800 --> 0:09:17.920 that Um she finally was seen for for what what 0:09:17.960 --> 0:09:22.480 she was, which was a downright radical feminist and civil 0:09:22.559 --> 0:09:25.880 rights activists who who couldn't read or write from what 0:09:25.920 --> 0:09:29.160 I saw her entire life. And yet Um made a 0:09:30.360 --> 0:09:34.120 really amazing living for herself but also empowered other Black 0:09:34.120 --> 0:09:37.680 women to be more than just you know, domestic help 0:09:38.120 --> 0:09:42.120 or laborers. You know, yeah, it's a great story. Um. 0:09:42.200 --> 0:09:46.840 She divorced Walker in nineteen twelve, moved to Indianapolis, and 0:09:46.880 --> 0:09:49.679 then in the position she was in with that kind 0:09:49.720 --> 0:09:51.559 of money and that kind of sort of growing fame, 0:09:52.200 --> 0:09:55.000 started kind of buddying up with some of the more 0:09:55.360 --> 0:09:58.760 well healed activists in the country like Mary McLoud, Betune 0:09:58.760 --> 0:10:02.360 and book or T. Washington. Um moved to Harlem, which 0:10:02.440 --> 0:10:04.920 was where you wanted to be if you wanted to 0:10:04.920 --> 0:10:07.080 be at the center of black culture in the early 0:10:07.200 --> 0:10:11.040 nineteen hundreds, and she had her daughter opened up a salon. 0:10:11.120 --> 0:10:15.120 It was a very nice salon, parquet floors and velvet 0:10:15.160 --> 0:10:18.199 seats and grand piano in the lobby. It was really 0:10:18.240 --> 0:10:22.160 really kind of a fine place. Yeah. Apparently in um 0:10:22.240 --> 0:10:25.760 the teens the nineteen she had something like twenty thousand 0:10:25.880 --> 0:10:31.280 to forty thousand women beauty culturists working for her, tens 0:10:31.320 --> 0:10:35.440 of thousands of women, and she held a convention um, 0:10:35.880 --> 0:10:39.240 the first convention of her beauty culturists, her agents UM 0:10:39.320 --> 0:10:43.959 running around selling her stuff UM in Philadelphia, I believe. 0:10:44.000 --> 0:10:46.080 And one of the things that she was noted for 0:10:46.240 --> 0:10:49.120 was when she gave speeches. It was a lot more 0:10:49.640 --> 0:10:52.560 or about a lot more than just you know, pumping 0:10:52.600 --> 0:10:55.079 them up to go seller product. It was about them 0:10:55.120 --> 0:10:58.880 demanding you know, better treatment, to be treated like like 0:10:59.000 --> 0:11:02.520 human beings, UM, to demand a better, more socially just 0:11:02.679 --> 0:11:05.559 world like. Her speeches were peppered with that that kind 0:11:05.640 --> 0:11:10.040 of empowerment, telling women, black women no less at you know, 0:11:10.280 --> 0:11:13.400 in the early twentieth century, that that they should expect 0:11:13.400 --> 0:11:15.920 to be treated better than they were by by men 0:11:15.960 --> 0:11:18.840 of all races and and by the white race in particular, 0:11:18.880 --> 0:11:22.040 which is again it's just radical, there's no other way 0:11:22.080 --> 0:11:24.800 to put it. At the time. In nineteen eighteen, she 0:11:25.000 --> 0:11:29.760 moved to Villa Lawairo, a mansion in Irvington on the 0:11:29.840 --> 0:11:32.679 Hudson about forty five minutes north of Manhattan. And this 0:11:32.679 --> 0:11:37.160 place was a legit mansion like thirty four rooms. It 0:11:37.240 --> 0:11:40.199 was huge and an amazing place. It was designed by 0:11:40.520 --> 0:11:45.040 an African American architect name uh Vertner Woodson Tandy, great name. 0:11:45.679 --> 0:11:48.840 What sad is UM? You know she was able to 0:11:48.960 --> 0:11:51.720 enjoy your wealth for a while, but she died the 0:11:51.800 --> 0:11:55.760 next year after she moved into this incredible twenty square 0:11:55.760 --> 0:11:59.520 foot mansion with her daughter. UM. But she left a 0:11:59.559 --> 0:12:02.559 really great legacy. Apparently she left two thirds of her 0:12:02.720 --> 0:12:08.520 state to UM historically black universities UM to UH the 0:12:08.640 --> 0:12:12.080 N double a C p UM Like she she really 0:12:12.120 --> 0:12:14.000 put her money where her mouth was. She was a 0:12:14.040 --> 0:12:18.400 really benevolent benefactor to a lot of great civil rights 0:12:18.440 --> 0:12:24.440 causes and UM basically laid the foundation for black women 0:12:24.760 --> 0:12:28.560 entrepreneurs UM still to this day as a matter of fact. 0:12:29.080 --> 0:12:34.079 Great story, wonderful story. So hats off to Madam C. J. 0:12:34.200 --> 0:12:37.560 Walker a k A. Sarah Breed Love a k. A 0:12:37.760 --> 0:12:41.520 genuinely admirable person. Uh And that means everybody that short 0:12:41.559 --> 0:12:47.280 stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production 0:12:47.320 --> 0:12:50.720 of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit 0:12:50.760 --> 0:12:53.560 the i Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you 0:12:53.600 --> 0:12:54.920 listen to your favorite shows.