Bad and bouji, Madam was intent on displaying her wealth to the world. It was just the beginning. In December 1916 she made a spectacular announcement that left polite society reeling. A black woman had purchased a four-and-a-quarter-acre estate, and in Irvington-on-Hudson, no less. According to the New York Times, many doubted the story’s veracity. At that time, the picturesque village only nineteen miles from downtown Manhattan was America’s most prime real estate. Madam announced that her fantasy abode, Villa Lewaro, which had been designed by Vertner Tandy, the first African American architect registered in New York, would “cost . . . no less than $100,000, and it is going to be very swell.” One can only imagine what Madam’s new neighbors—the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Tiffanys; names representing the epitome of American wealth, class, and taste—must have thought.
Meanwhile, Annie Malone had been busy too. By 1918 she had established Poro College in St. Louis, a five-story multipurpose building. It contained a manufacturing plant, a shop where Poro products were sold, business offices, a 500-seat auditorium, dining and meeting rooms, a roof garden, a hotel, a gymnasium, a bakery, and a chapel. The cosmetology school and training center offered black women educational opportunities that were rare for the time. In addition, Poro College provided an important space where black Americans could gather for functions. No expense was spared, and the lavish interior gave their white counterparts—from which black people were barred—more than a run for their money.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Freeman Institute, Black History Collection
By the end of the First World War, Annie was a millionaire, yet she lived humbly. Both Annie and Madam contributed generous sums of money to their respective communities. Annie invested most of hers through donations to institutions, such as the St. Louis Colored Orphans’ Home. She was generous to a fault, which ultimately negatively affected her personal finances.
Annie Malone’s multimillion-dollar Poro business empire was put at risk in 1927 when her husband filed for divorce and demanded half of the business. Seeking a fresh start, Annie relocated to Chicago in 1930, where she was still dogged by financial troubles and lawsuits, quickly followed by the Great Depression, yet she remained in business. In the mid-1950s, there were still thirty-two branches of the Poro schools operating across the nation. Annie continued to support charities both in St. Louis and nationally. It is reported that at one time she was supporting at least two students at every African American land-grant college* in the country, while her $25,000 donation to Howard University in Washington, DC, was at the time the largest financial contribution by an African American to an African American college. She died in Chicago on May 10, 1957.
Madam Walker had died almost forty years earlier. On May 25, 1919 she passed away from hypertension at just fifty-one. While her company was also hit hard by the Depression, it was so many years after her death that her fun-loving daughter, A’Lelia, took the fall for the failure. She was certainly not the businesswoman her mother had been, although she did have a knack for publicity. Her greatest PR achievement was the “Million Dollar Wedding,” the most ostentatious black wedding of the Jazz Age. In 1923 A’Lelia arranged for Fairy Mae to marry Dr. Gordon Henry Jackson, the grandson of one of the nineteenth century’s richest black businessmen. No matter he was “a violent man thirteen years her senior,” or that she was allegedly in love with someone else. A’Lelia Walker wrote to the company’s general manager, F. B. Ransom, “This is the swellest wedding any colored folks have ever had or will have in the world . . . While its purpose certainly is not for the advertising, God knows we are getting $50,000 worth of publicity. Everything has its compensation.”26
The marriage lasted only three years, but the splendor of it all (9,000 wedding invitations were sent out) did temporarily boost sales. It was not, however, enough to save the company, and by 1930 Walker revenues had fallen so drastically that A’Lelia was forced to auction the art for which Villa Lewaro was famed. A year later, at only forty-six, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while at a party. Her funeral in Harlem was as spectacular as her life. More than eleven thousand people attended, including Langston Hughes, a close personal friend, who recited the following poem:
So all who love laughter
And joy and light,
Let your prayers be as roses
For this queen of the night!
By 1932, the year after A’Lelia’s untimely death, Villa Lewaro had been sold.
The legacies of both hair dynasties live on. The Annie Malone Children and Family Service Center in St. Louis is located on a street named Annie Malone Drive in her honor, and Walker has been reinvented for the twenty-first century. The Madam C. J. Walker website extolls “America’s first female self-made millionaire” who “created a beauty culture that enriched and transformed the lives of millions of women.” This contemporary incarnation targets a high-end mainstream consumer. Promotional materials feature all races and hair textures. Their Instagram account is populated mostly by white and mixed-race women and is almost devoid of women who might have resembled Walker herself. Madam Walker 2.0 is owned by SunDial, which also owns both Shea Moisture and Nubian Heritage. The products are stocked exclusively by Sephora, themselves owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s leading luxury-goods group.
Before the arrival of these two dynamos at the turn of the twentieth century, manufacturers of black haircare products were overwhelmingly white men. The burgeoning beauty industry in which Walker and Malone were trailblazers revolutionized earning and employment opportunities for generations of black women in an industry that is today worth $2.5 billion (not including wigs and accessories). Byrd and Tharps note that at a time when unskilled white women earned about $11 a week, a Walker agent might be earning $15 a day, and that at Poro’s peak in 1918 the company employed 240 staff members and 68,000 sales agents nationwide.
Nonetheless, the politics of their products remain complicated. On the one hand, they were pioneers, able to achieve previously unimaginable success, but the ideal they promoted was one that positioned whiteness as the benchmark not only of beauty but also of class and success. It preyed on the trauma of a people only one generation, if that, removed from centuries of enslavement.
Before the emergence of the black-hair capitalists, white manufacturers had been little more than openly insulting. Words like “kinky,” “snarly,” and “ugly” were commonplace. Savvy black entrepreneurs, on the other hand, understood how to advertise rather than antagonize. But while they tweaked the language, the sentiment remained the same. And the intention behind the products—regardless of whether they were made by white men or black women—was identical: the achievement of straight hair.
The key difference now was that the language became not only more palatable but positively empowering. With its emphasis on health, beauty, personal success, and the uplift of the entire race, this new narrative, designed by black people for black people, was meeting a huge demand.
The wealth generated by Annie Malone and Madam C. J. Walker was staggering, but they were certainly not the only black women generating a handsome livelihood as hair capitalists. As their success waned, there were others ready to capitalize on an ever-changing but consistently lucrative market.