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| The Grassroots Network of African American Women: Madam C. J. Walker’s Hair Care Empire |
Get rid of the hair fixation …. You have the kind of hair that people in your mother’s and father’s families have had for generations. Strong. Tight. Coiled. It is the kind of hair that you are supposed to have. Hair that’s in your genes. In your DNA.
—Marita Golden, Don’t Play in the Sun (2004)1
“I like the way you wear your hair …. I wish you’d show me how you do it,” said Edith Sampson, admiring the hairstyle of Poppy Cannon, a South Africa-born white journalist, in Rome in 1949.2 Sampson was an African American lawyer participating as a representative of the National Council of Negro Women in a world tour sponsored by “America’s Town Meeting of the Air.” Cannon did not understand Sampson’s intention but soon noticed her “slight touch of embarrassment,” which she attributed to the “ever-present feminine problem” of African American women—their hair.3 When Cannon recounted the conversation to her husband, Walter White, the NAACP’s executive secretary, the blue-eyed, fair-skinned, blonde African American man laughed at his wife’s misinterpretation and said that Sampson’s small talk about hair was just to find out whether Cannon was a colored woman because, for Sampson, hair was a more eloquent indicator of racial identity than skin color.4
This incident reveals that even elite women like Sampson, who became the first African American delegate to the United Nations in the following year, were influenced by ideas about hair that were prevalent at the time. Born in Pittsburgh ←21 | 22→at the turn of the twentieth century, Sampson, whose mother worked as an industrial homeworker “making buckram hat frames and twisting switches of false hair,” witnessed the rise of the black beauty industry.5 After she earned a Master of Laws degree, Sampson became the first African American woman to pass the Illinois bar.6 She later established a law firm on the South Side of Chicago, which was called “the capital of Black America” at that time. The South Side was the hometown to many of the most influential African American politicians in U.S. history, and Chicago had the third largest black population of all U.S. cities during the first half of the twentieth century.7 Additionally, although virtually forgotten today, Chicago was the center of the African American beauty industry in the early 1940s.8 The city had more than 1,500 African American beauty parlors, where many African American beauticians and hairdressers vied for customers after receiving diplomas from schools of beauty culture, such as the Madam C. J. Walker School of Beauty Culture, Poro College, Apex, and the Dimples.9
Among black-owned hair care and cosmetic companies, such as Annie Turnbo Malone’s Poro, Sara Spencer Washington’s Apex, and Claude A. Barnett’s Kashmir Chemical Company, the most renowned and successful organization in the African American hair industry was Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, founded by Sarah Breedlove Walker (1867–1919), a daughter of freed slaves. Later called Madam C. J. Walker, she came to be known as “the first African American female millionaire,” as well as one of the earliest exponents of African American hair culture.10 Sales from the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company reached $486,762 in 1919, the year of her death, and rose even higher to peak at $595,353 in 1920.11 She was a charismatic figure with far-reaching influence; thus, her untimely death in 1919 was an enormous loss to the African American community. This was readily evident from the extent of mourning in the community and the unprecedented scale and grandeur of her funeral.12 Scores of representatives from Walker’s firm flocked “from various parts of the country” to the funeral “to do her homage,” and condolences poured in “from distinguished persons all over [the] country and many other parts of the world.”13 So enormous was the impact of this Walker-originated black hair culture on black women’s self-image that it became a crucial cultural phenomenon for working-class and elite women, such as Sampson.
The historical evaluation of Walker has focused on her entrepreneurship, inviting a binary-framed interpretation of her accomplishments as being halfway between philanthropy and capitalism—benevolence and exploitation. The social historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., describes her as one of the first African American entrepreneurs to break the color barrier by luring black customers away from ←22 | 23→white businesses in the early twentieth century.14 Walker was also a well-known philanthropist who donated a share of her wealth to African American causes.15 On the contrary, Walker was criticized as a capitalist exploiter because of her abundant wealth. After her death, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois censured “the Walker hair culture business during her life” as “a group capitalistic movement” based on the exploitation of her laborers.16 Davarian Baldwin regards Walker as one of the “[b];lack working migrant women [who] transformed an industry of white emulation into a powerful black public sphere of leisure, labor, and politics.”17 However, what Walker transformed was not the industry per se but black women’s attitudes toward themselves and toward the broader society. If we focus on her entrepreneurship, we might not understand the nature of the cultural work that Walker awakened in African Americans of her time. Much like the woman herself, Walker’s cultural work is multifaceted and must, therefore, be interpreted using an interdisciplinary approach.
Hair has emerged as a focus of research in recent decades. Several works provide insights into the relationship between African American hair and black women’s identity politics.18 In Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (1996), Noliwe Rooks explores the meaning of African American women’s hair and the politics of hair during the Progressive Era.19 Ingrid Banks, in Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (2000), explores how African American women have closely linked their hair with broader sociocultural ideas.20 In Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (2001), Ana Byrd and Lori Tharps demonstrate a clear correlation between black hair culture and African American women’s pride, pain, and identity.21 In Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (2010), Tiffany Gill examines the social, political, and economic agency that black female beauticians enjoyed in the early and mid-twentieth century.22 All of these critics argue that hair care, which may seem trivial and apolitical, has sociopolitical associations, especially for African American women, partly because they can use this variable to counteract social injustice and inequality.
Although I do share this perspective about black women’s hair, my