Madam C.J. Walker

The Waviest

If you grew up around black women, you know how big of a deal hair is. Before the “don’t you mean all women?!” chorus chimes in, I’m sure all women care about their hair, but I didn’t grow up with all women in my house cutting their eyes at each other over the last drops of Pink Oil. Black women did that in my house.

Anyway, believe it or not, there was a time, long long ago, when the plethora of hair products available to black women—and women in general, comparatively—were nowhere to be found. Between the poor diets, lack of indoor plumbing, and the lye that went into soaps of the day, women lost hair at a pace that would make even LeBron James scratch his soon-to-be-barren dome.

Folks were doin’ bad. You could’ve fell off in the day’s equivalent of Liv on a Sunday and found the shake-a-booty-guhls with hair thinner than that one mesh shirt every Jamaican cat you know owns.

C.J. Walker, born Sara Breedlove, came up hard. She married twice before finding her final husband, and survived on less than a buck fifty a day, still managing to put her daughter through school.

She had older brothers who made their money as barbers. She hung around the shop they ran and soaked up all the game she could. Then, she started selling Annie Tumbo Malone’s hair care products in 1904. She moved to Denver, where she married a newspaper advertising salesman named Joe Walker. According to legend, C.J. heard the Denver air had black women’s hair dryer than Eric Clapton playing the blues.

In 1906, with Joe’s advertising experience, and her experience in the beauty industry, they started a mail order company, left their daughter to run it, and toured the south to expand their operation. Soon, she organized her saleswomen into state clubs.

By 1917, she convened her first annual conference of the Madam Walker Beauty Culturists in Philadelphia. She gave prizes to the women who sold the most, as well as the women most involved in local charity.

She passed in 1917, but not before bequeathing two-thirds of her will to various charities, including $5,000 ($65,000 in ‘14 money) to a fledgling NAACP.

If you’re anything like me, you grew up knowing two things about Madam C.J. Walker: She was the first American self-made millionaire, and she invented the hot comb. If you had militant uncles, they told you Madam C.J. Walker was a key cog in some elaborate Yakubian conspiracy to destroy the black woman. The emphasis on black always stuck with you, if only because niggas managed to spit on you when they said it.

Turns out, all of that might just be wrong.

First, the jury is still out on who cracked a milli first, Tumbo or Ceej. Second, Madam Walker’s formula was extremely similar to Tumbo’s, and the name was strikingly similar. Lastly, there’s nothing but a million or so Higher Learning-ass niggas to bolster the claim that Walker took part in some superlative conspiracy, though it should be noted that Booker T. Washington, aka the Sneak-Tip Gawd, was worried Walker’s products would make black women internalize white beauty standards.

He coulda been kin to Dionne Warwick with that vision, fam.

Still, regardless of the lasting effects of her products, and the fact that her whole business model may have been a fugzai Auntie Tumbo, Madam C.J. Walker came from nothing, persevered, and came out on top.

Get your shiny suits ready.

This really couldn’t have went any other way.

First, Walker was a master salesman. With the origins of her products as cloudy as they are, we can see the only thing she definitely had over her competitor and former boss was her presentation. Ask yourself: is Diddy that much better than Master P… at anything? Not really. But one of them is selling firewater by the fucking caseload and one of them is making records with Fat Trel.

I love Fat Trel. But Percy would much rather have some of that Ciroc money, I’m sure.

Next, what does Diddy have to thank for some of his biggest hits? Pure, unadulterated, unfettered sampling. He’d take the beat, the chorus, hell, he’d even rework the title. Diddy might not steal your girl, as he seems to keep a bad one at all times. But if you leave your iPod around? Adios.

Lastly, like Walker, Diddy has become more or less the rubric by which other rap label heads-cum-entrepeneurs are judged. Not to pick on P. Miller, but there was a time he was worth more money. But who do we revere, by and large? That’s right: Shiny Suit Man.

If those similarities aren’t enough, remember this: neither one of them kept a name for too long.