Madam C. J. Walker

MADAM C. J. WALKER began her life as Sarah Breedlove. The fifth of six children, she was born on December 23, 1867, two years after the end of the American Civil War. 

- Robin Spevacek

Her parents, Owen and Minerva Breed love, had been slaves but were living as “freemen,” working as sharecroppers on their former master’s plantation. In return for laboring twelve hours a day under the hot sun, they received a share of the cotton harvest. Unfortunately, the money they earned from selling their cotton was usually less than what they spent on equipment and supplies. As a result, Sarah’s family was very poor. To earn a little extra money, Sarah helped her mother raise chickens and sell eggs. She and her sister also laundered clothes for “white folk,” using big wooden tubs set out in their front yard. 

When she was seven years old, Sarah found herself sitting on the step of her family’s shack in Delta, Louisiana, scratching in the dusty earth with a stick. Tears trickled down her cheeks. “What will become of me?” she wondered aloud. An epidemic had taken her parents’ lives, as often happened to poor blacks who had little access to doctors or hospitals in the late 1800s. So Sarah, her sister, and her four brothers became orphans.

After her parents’ deaths, Sarah worked on the plantation for three more years. But when her brother Alex moved across the Mississippi River to Vicksburg and that year’s cotton crop failed, Sarah and her sister, Louvenia, were not able to make enough money to keep their home. Forced to move, they, too, fled to Vicksburg.