Born Sarah Breedlove in 1867, Madam was one of six children and the first to be born free. Her four brothers and older sister were born enslaved on a Louisiana plantation. Orphaned at the age of seven, Sarah moved to Mississippi to live with her sister at age 10, where she began work as a domestic servant. At age 14, she married her first husband to escape abuse she suffered at the hands of her brother-in-law. In 1888, widowed with a daughter at age 20, Madam moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to be close to three of her brothers. She worked as a laundress, determined to make her own money and provide her daughter with the formal education she never had, a scant three months of education she had received during Sunday school as a young child. The application of harsh cleansing products used to wash hair and clothes in the late 1800s led to dandruff, hair loss, and other scalp ailments and skin disorders among black women. With three brothers working as barbers, Madam learned about products to help alleviate many of these ailments.

In 1904, Madam became a selling agent for the Poro Company, owned by African-American hair-care entrepreneur Annie Malone. The next year, she moved to Denver, Colorado, and continued selling Poro products while also developing a line of her own. In 1906, she married her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, and became known as Madam C. J. Walker . . . and began marketing herself as an independent hairdresser who sold cosmetic creams. With Charles as her business partner and marketing advisor, Madam began going door-to-door selling her own products and teaching black women how to groom and style their hair.

“At a time when unskilled white workers earned about $11 a week,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in a 1998 article for Time, Walker’s agents were making $5 to $15 a day, pioneering a system of multilevel marketing that Walker and her associates perfected for the black market. “More than any other single businessperson, Walker unveiled the vast economic potential of an African-American economy, even one stifled and suffocating under Jim Crow segregation.”

Soon, Madam’s daughter A’Leia managed the mail-order aspect of the business while Madam and Charles traveled through the southern and eastern parts of the United States selling products. In 1910, after a brief relocation to Pittsburgh, Madam moved her company to Indianapolis and, in 1913, opened a beauty salon in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, the growing epicenter of African-American culture in the United States at the time.

Madam C. J. Walker revolutionized direct sales by training other women to become “beauty consultants,” who sold “the Walker System,” a method of grooming designed to promote hair growth and condition the scalp. At the height of her career, between 1911 and 1919, Madam C. J. Walker employed several thousand women in the United States and had trained nearly 20,000. Not only did she provide employment for women, but she also showed women how to budget, build their own businesses, and achieve financial independence. Beginning in 1917, Madam began organizing her sales agents into state and local clubs.

Madam C. J. Walker passed away in 1919, but her company continued to grow, expanding into the Caribbean and Central America, including Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Panama, and Costa Rica. She was inducted into the Global Business Hall of Fame in 1992.