By Ronald Court
It’s fitting that my first entry in the “Opportunity” category would be about a first, the first female to become a self-made millionaire. She did it in the cosmetics business. I’m not talking about Mary Kay, though her story too is inspiring. This is about the first self-made female … black or white… to reach the millionaire milestone. She did it with integrity & character and against all odds.
Madam C. J. Walker
with thanks to author Brian Souza, for permission
“..I did not succeed by traversing a path strewn with roses. I made great sacrifices, met with rebuff after rebuff, and had to fight hard to put my ideas into effect.”
LIFE DIDN’T YIELD ITS JOYS EASILY TO MADAM C. J. WALKER.
Born to freed slaves and sharecroppers in rural Louisiana in 1867, she was orphaned by age ten. Illiterate, she was forced to start working six days a week picking cotton, cooking, and cleaning in white households. Married by fourteen, a mother at sixteen, and a widow by age twenty, life for Madam C. J. didn’t start out in a promising way. But despite adversity most of us will never know, she went on to become the first self-made female millionaire-white or black-in the United States.How? By taking an introspective look to discover who she really was and by deciding that she could-and would-transcend her roots to achieve her dreams. In short, by tapping into the very same powers that lie dormant within you right now.
For starters, after she was widowed, she took her daughter to St. Louis, Missouri, in search of education and a better way of life. At first being a washerwoman was tough going, but then Walker had a moment of self-revelation. As she later described it to The New York Times, she was a thirty-five-year-old single mother who “was at my tubs one morning with a heavy wash before me. As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself, ‘What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?’ This set me to thinking, but with all my thinking I couldn’t see how I, a poor washer-woman, was going to better my condition.”
But she was committed. There was no turning back. Like all successful people, she took a chance and bet on herself. In 1905, with only $1.50 in savings, she moved to Denver, where she started a business making and selling a hair-straightening and beautifying product for African-American women. She eventually built a nationwide sales force numbering in the thousands. It wasn’t until she took a chance at she discovered her gift wasn’t doing the wash but the ability to spire women to take pride in themselves and to refuse to live with- the stereotypical confines of the times.
A century ago, few women-let alone African American women-traveled by themselves. But Madam C. J. crisscrossed the country almost continuously to spread the word about her products.
She first sold them door-to-door, then through the mail, and eventually in pharmacies. She was relentless in her marketing efforts. She stuck steadfastly to her goal-and never quit working on ways to improve her business. She realized that if she was going to make something of herself, she would have to develop her gift into some- thing of value. She had no formal education, but that didn’t stop her from hiring tutors to improve her vocabulary, teach her proper grammar, and broaden her horizons.
Similarly, she created jobs for thousands of black saleswomen, not only paying them well, but also setting up philanthropies and foundations to help educate them. In short, she built and ran a national cosmetics empire based on the highest principles-a feat that would have seemed remote when she was a shoeless orphan chopping cotton in Louisiana.
Her journey from poverty to wealth, from obscurity to fame, and from having the most menial of jobs to being a leader for women’s rights and economic freedom was remarkable to say the least.
“Perseverance is my motto,” she told one interviewer. “It laid the Atlantic cable, it gave us the telegraph, telephone, and wireless. It gave to the world an Abraham Lincoln and to the race, freedom.” In her determination to live her dream, she defied long odds. And by the time of her death in 1919, she had become, as her biographer Beverly Lowry noted, “an icon, a legend, and an exemplar.”
Ask any shrink. 
A Blessing in Disguise
Monday, September 17th, 2007By Ronald Court
I’ve been off-line for over a week – ever since my computer’s hard drive crashed. With computer and back-up software off to a Geek Squad for repair and reconstruction, I was “stuck” with time on my hands, and voilà, my disaster turned into a blessing in disguise.
I opted to catch up on my reading. First up was “1776″ David McCullough’s account of General George Washington’s 1st year in the Revolutionary War. Defeat followed defeat until Washington launched a “brilliant stroke” and changed history, though the war raged for another six and a half years, taking 1% of our population. In percentage terms, it was “the most costly war in American history, except for the Civil War.”
McCullough closes with, “Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning–how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference–the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.”
Amen. This inspiring read gave me pause to ponder how the history of our country as it is being written today will turn out–will circumstances or “strengths of character” make the difference? Only time will tell.
It is little short of a miracle to me that our country, born in a bloody revolution, dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” and still struggling to make it so, would produce not one, but two leaders who shared such ‘strengths of character’ and much more.
Consider two men separated by time, yet: both born on tobacco farms, both Virginians, both self-educated, both spending their earlier years working the same West Virginia land (one a surveyor, the other at salt & coal mines) both receiving honorary degrees from Harvard, both with a brother named John and both with the surname, Washington. (and here’s a stretch: both had a wife whose 1st name was “Mar…”)
To be sure, one was born into slavery, the other into slave-holding. However, my sense is we, all of us, stand to benefit more by choosing to embrace and emulate the qualities common to these two great Americans? Not because or in spite of the color of either, but because both were great leaders, period.
(Thank you, son Barnaby for the “1776″ Christmas present I have finally come to more fully appreciate.)
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