CHAPTER 9
Bold Moves
During early 1910, as Madam Walker scouted a new city for her permanent headquarters, she seized every social and business occasion to engage potential investors. Each meeting, each introduction, each chance encounter, furnished an opportunity to advance her commercial dreams.
In January during an extended stay in Louisville, Madam Walker unveiled plans for a Walker Manufacturing Company stock offering to Reverend Charles H. Parrish, president of the Eckstein-Norton Institute, and Alice Kelly, one of the most accomplished faculty members at this Kentucky training school for black teachers. They were so impressed with Madam Walker’s spunk and presentation that they urged her to solicit the support of Booker T. Washington, the founder of both the Tuskegee Institute and the ten-year-old National Negro Business League. Parrish, whose international travels on behalf of the black National Baptist Convention had made him well known among African Americans, allowed Madam Walker to mention his name in her letter of appeal to Washington. Parrish’s gesture supplied just the opening she needed to capture the attention of the most powerful black man in America.
“Now what I would like to do, is to establish a factory and advertise it properly,” she wrote enthusiastically of her “remedy that will grow hair of any kind” and of her plan to raise $50,000 from one hundred men and women. “We could form a stock company . . . and make this one of the largest factories of its kind in the United States.” Just as important, she said, was her plan to “give employment to many of our boys and girls.” She had come to him specifically, she wrote, because “I know I can not do any thing alone, so I have decided to make an appeal to the leaders of the race . . . I feel no hesitancy in presenting my case to you, as I know you know what it is to struggle alone with the ability to do, but no money to back it.”
Madam Walker also was concerned, she confided, about bids from “white firms” that “want me to sell out my right[s] to them, which I refuse to do as I prefer to keep it in the race if possible.” Washington’s quick reply was reserved and noncommittal. “My dear Madam,” he wrote, thanking her for her “kindly” suggestion. “My time and attention are almost wholly occupied with the work of this institution and I do not feel that I can possibly undertake other responsibilities. I hope very much you may be successful in organizing the stock company and that you may be successful in placing upon the market your preparation.” While she surely recognized his artful dismissal, she could now feel certain that he knew her name and her objectives. In time, she would persuade him that those objectives were consistent with the self-help message he so ardently preached.
The more Madam Walker’s horizons expanded, the less C.J. seemed able to keep up. While a guest at the Louisville home of C.J.’s sister, Peggie Prosser, Madam Walker began to learn more about the man she had married four years earlier. “My heart went out to her then,” Prosser said. “I knew she was a good woman struggling to make a name for herself. And I know what a hard fight she had.”
Prosser was particularly attuned to her brother’s shortcomings, having been disappointed by him as a young girl. After their mother’s death, he vanished from her life, leaving her with a grandmother. When she finally tracked him down sixteen years later, he agreed to a reunion at her home, but apparently with no intention of making amends for abandoning her. While enjoying her hospitality, he had the audacity—though likely in his characteristically charming manner—to request train fare for his return trip to St. Louis.
Prosser could not help being sympathetic to her sister-in-law’s frustration with C.J.’s irresponsible ways. Even in early 1910, Prosser felt sure that he was squandering company funds. He was, Prosser said, “meeting the postman, getting the mail, not filling orders.” Disillusioned as Madam Walker was, she continued to tolerate his behavior, likely hoping he would manage to make his own significant contribution to what had always been more her business than his.
Corpulent slate clouds glowered over central Indiana’s snow-carpeted farmland as the train carrying Madam Walker and C.J. approached Indianapolis on Thursday, February 10, 1910. Outside the city’s granite-trimmed Romanesque Union Station, street-cleaning crews, in one of their “worst battles of the winter,” chipped away the ice chunks that had clogged trolley switch points since Tuesday night’s storm. More freezing precipitation was expected on Friday.
Despite the bone-chilling high of twenty-eight degrees, the Walkers found themselves “so favorably impressed with Indianapolis” that they decided to move their operation to the Hoosier capital.
Their warm and “cordial” reception was substantially enhanced by their gracious host, Dr. Joseph Ward, the first president of the Indiana Association of Negro Physicians, Dentists and Pharmacists. A native of Wilson, North Carolina, and an early vice president of the National Medical Association, he had established Ward’s Sanitarium, the city’s primary black hospital, in 1910. Located on Indiana Avenue—the African American community’s main commercial thoroughfare—the facility also served as a training school for black nurses. Ward, like Jessie Robinson’s husband, C. K. Robinson, had been a state and national officer of the Knights of Pythias, the common tie that may have enabled Madam Walker, a member of the group’s women’s auxiliary, to approach him for lodging.
Two days after the Walkers’ arrived, the Indianapolis Recorder announced, “Mme. C. J. Walker of Pittsburgh, Pa., THE NOTED HAIR CULTURIST, is in this city at the residence of Dr. J. H. Ward at 722 Indiana Avenue, where she will demonstrate the art of growing hair.” She hoped her photograph—the same one that had appeared earlier that year in the Pennsylvania Negro Business Directory—would attract the black women of Indianapolis to her temporary salon.
It was Madam Walker’s good fortune to have arrived during a particularly lively social season, one that, despite the raw, icy weather, displayed the community’s vitality. February—the birth month of President Abraham Lincoln and the adopted birth month of abolitionist Frederick Douglass—had become a time of celebration among African Americans. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation only three years away, the annual observances consistently drew sizable crowds.
The Walkers’ host, Joseph Ward, rarely missed a Sunday at Bethel AME, one of the oldest and most prestigious black churches in the city, where he was a leading member. That week the sanctuary was busier than usual as Reverend Theodore Smythe led “soul-stirring” revival services. On Sunday afternoon another local church hosted an Abraham Lincoln celebration featuring reminiscences from black residents who had heard the President-elect’s 1861 preinaugural address from the balcony of Indianapolis’s Bates Hotel. That Monday, Joseph and Zella Ward—and their intriguing, out-of-town visitors—were quite likely on the guest list for the Valentine’s Day tenth wedding anniversary celebration of Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Wallace, who lived directly across the street from the Ward home. Reveling continued into the night as the black waiters of the Columbia Club—an all-white Republican downtown men’s club—hosted a masked ball for their friends at the Odd Fellows’ Hall. Then, three days before the February 20 Douglass Memorial parade and celebration, elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown, a pivotal player in the NACW’s 1904 boycott of the World’s Fair, performed dramatic readings and orations. But perhaps most important to Madam Walker was Friday’s meeting of the local chapter of the National Negro Business League, the organization founded in 1900 by Booker T. Washington to encourage entrepreneurship among African Americans. Having just elected a slate of officers, the group was seeking new members. Madam Walker, still angling for its founder’s support, was eager to join.
As much as she loved to socialize, Madam Walker focused almost entirely on her work after her first few days in Indianapolis. “Don’t fail to call and see Mme. Walker,” her ad invited. “Persons calling for treatment will kindly bring comb, brush and 2 towels,” she advised. While she charged nothing for “consultation,” her scalp treatments were a relatively expensive $1. Tins of her Wonderful Hair Grower sold for 50 cents. A month later, however, she had lowered the price of scalp treatments to 50 cents and added a 25-cent shampoo and a 35-cent manicure with hopes of gaining “the patronage of every woman of pride, who is in need of her services.”
From time to time, Madam Walker offered incentives, including free treatments and cash awards, to build her client base. Through an early form of multilevel marketing, she challenged customers to compete with each other, offering “3 months treatment to the first one bringing or sending 10 customers.” The strategies were so effective that by late March Wonderful Hair Grower sales had reached such levels that Madam Walker and C.J. were able to move around the corner from the Wards’ home into a $10-a-month, five-room rental flat at 638 North West Street.
By mid-April she had also increased her advertising budget, allotting relatively more for the Indianapolis Freeman, by far the best known of the three local newspapers. Published by George Knox, a former slave who had purchased the paper with profits from his elegant downtown barbershop, the weekly’s extensive coverage of traveling black theater companies and musicians, as well as its national circulation, had made it one of the most widely read and influential African American newspapers of its day.
As Madam Walker focused on the manufacturing operation, C.J. staked out a more autonomous niche for himself, traveling to small towns throughout Indiana to promote the products. Soon he would attempt to specialize in developing the company’s out-of-state sales. The market was theirs to claim. “Before the entrance of Mme Walker,” remembered longtime Indianapolis resident Ida Webb Bryant, “there were no beauty parlors as such, [though] there were a few women who would come to your home and give you a shampoo.” Downtown hair parlors “catered mostly to people of the stage and to the wealthy whites,” she said, though Sallie Brown, a black hairdresser with a largely white clientele, “would accommodate you if you wanted a ‘braid’ or ‘switch’ or other ‘hair piece.’”
Home to more than 233,000 people in 1910, Indianapolis offered the ideal location for the kind of mail-order business Madam Walker envisioned. Known as the Crossroads of America, it was situated within thirty-five miles of the center of the nation’s population and was the largest inland manufacturing city in the country without a major waterway. A daily convergence point for thousands of freight cars and nearly 500 steam and 100 electric passenger trains, the city also was intersected by a nascent national highway system.
Unlike Pittsburgh’s, the Indianapolis economy was not dominated by any one industry. Surrounded by rich farmland, it was home to meatpacking plants, granaries, flour mills and two large starch companies. The city’s foundries and machine shops produced steam engines, hardware products and household appliances. At the turn of the nineteenth century, local buggy and bicycle manufacturers reacted quickly to the automobile craze, converting their operations to produce electric cars and luxury vehicles with names like Cole, Waverly and later Stutz. Auto-parts producers, including the Prest-O-Lite Company, supported the emerging industry with headlights, batteries and other motorcar apparatuses. By 1913 it ranked second only to Detroit in auto production.
In the carefully laid-out city streets, platted by a surveyor who had helped map Washington, D.C., the domed state capitol, with its Indiana-limestone façade, was one of downtown’s most imposing buildings. Diagonal avenues radiated from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, a circular park located at the center of the city’s precisely designed Mile Square.
Most of Indianapolis’s black population, numbering 21,816 in 1910, clustered in small sections of the city’s near east side and far south side, as well as around the northwestern edge of the Mile Square between the Central Canal and the White River along Indiana Avenue. After an 1821 malaria outbreak had decimated many of the early white settlers, the swampy area between the two waterways was deemed undesirable real estate and left to blacks and Irish immigrants. By 1900, the Indiana Avenue area, known as Bucktown, was home to thirty churches, as well as “many saloons and gambling dens.” While its black population remained much smaller in absolute numbers than that of many other cities, African Americans comprised 9 percent of the city’s total, putting them well above New York’s and Chicago’s 2 percent and giving them the highest percentage of any city north of the Ohio River.
At the turn of the century, Indianapolis’s small black middle class—defined primarily as those who held professional, service or entrepreneurial positions—included eight physicians and ten attorneys, forty teachers, several postal workers and a few dozen shop owners. A decade later there were so many black-owned businesses along Indiana Avenue that Ralph Waldo Tyler, the National Negro Business League’s national organizer, claimed that “Indianapolis had more Negro business establishments than any other Northern city.”
One of its most notable entrepreneurs—whom Madam Walker would soon meet—was Henry L. Sanders, a former hotel waiter who had developed a competitive regional business selling uniforms and fraternal regalia. With her own dreams of building a factory, Madam Walker could not help admiring his soon-to-be-completed three-story office and manufacturing facility on Indiana Avenue.
Well on her way to another record-breaking sales year, Madam Walker purchased a $10,000 two-story brick home at 640 North West Street next door to the house she and C.J. had been renting. By December she was overseeing construction of two additional rooms and a bath and had purchased an investment property a few blocks away at 841 Camp Street. That month she reviewed final plans for a factory, laboratory and salon at the rear of the North West Street property.
To supplement her income, she took in boarders, a common custom during an era when few American hotels accepted black guests. “Room to Let,” read her December announcement on the Recorder’s society page. “Mme. C. J. Walker has now thrown open her beautifully furnished home to the up-to-date traveling public. Her home is modern, including heat. Best board served in family style.” Without hesitation, she funneled every dollar back into the business. “You understand she was struggling then to get a foundation,” a close acquaintance observed of her activities during the fall of 1910. “At the time she was taking in roomers, cooking for them, manufacturing her own preparations in a back room, then doing heads in another room for the rest of the day.” And as if that weren’t enough, the friend said, “she did her [own] washing at night.”
Convinced that personal contact was the key to accelerating her sales and raising her profile, Madam Walker spent the summer of 1910 canvassing several African American conventions. During July, she joined a large Indianapolis delegation at the NACW’s seventh biennial conference in Louisville. While she had been on the sidelines just six years earlier at its 1904 St. Louis meeting, she was, without question, the most successful businesswoman among the delegates in Kentucky. Within the next few weeks she swept across the East from Indiana to New York, dropping in at fraternal and religious meetings, and surveying events where she was sure to encounter customers and investors.
In the United States, with more than 3.6 million black females older than ten years of age—and more than half of them employed—her potential market seemed enormous. Three million women multiplied by 50 cents for a tin of Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower equaled $1.5 million! And that didn’t include purchases of her vegetable shampoo, scalp treatments, manicures, repeat customers or any of the other products and services she planned to offer.
Just as Madam Walker had written Booker Washington seeking assistance from him to help finance her company, she was acutely aware that she also needed competent advisers and employees to shore up her own lack of formal education. Two young black attorneys, Freeman Briley Ransom and Robert Lee Brokenburr, quickly grabbed her attention in the Hoosier capital.
Ransom, born in Grenada, Mississippi, in 1882, was one of sixteen children who worked on his father’s farm. Upon graduation from Grenada’s black high school, he entered Nashville’s Walden College, where he completed teacher’s training. In 1908, he was graduated from the school’s law and divinity departments as valedictorian of both classes. Before moving to Indianapolis in the spring of 1910, he “read law for nearly two years” at Columbia University in New York City.
“It was in the Fall of that year that I first met Madam Walker and represented her in a small way,” Ransom later wrote. “I was a young lawyer then [and] had had my shingle out about six months.” At other times Ransom told his family that he and Madam Walker had first crossed paths during his student days while he worked as a Pullman porter and dining-car waiter. “He always said [they met] on the train,” remembered his daughter, A’Lelia Ransom Nelson, who had been named for Madam Walker’s daughter. “And they got to be friends. And [he said that Madam Walker] always said, ‘The day you finish law school, you come see me.’” Whatever the particulars of their initial conversations, it is clear that Madam Walker immediately recognized his talents. “He was very disciplined,” his daughter recalled. “Probably rigid, I suppose you would say, in some ways.” But his attention to detail and his high moral standards were precisely what Madam Walker believed she needed to systematize the operation of her business. As a young man, Ransom had taken an oath of sobriety upon joining the YMCA, probably at Walden, where the third black YMCA college chapter had been founded in 1877. “In those days you had to pledge that you’d never drink, dance or gamble. And he never drank, nor danced, nor gambled,” said Nelson.
Brokenburr, a slim, handsome man with a deep brown complexion, had opened an office in Indianapolis in the spring of 1909 after graduating from Howard University’s School of Law when he was only twenty-two years old. A native of Phoebus, Virginia, he completed Hampton Institute—Booker T. Washington’s alma mater—in 1906. The Recorder, praising him for his “honesty and efficiency,” pronounced him a “real high class lawyer,” who was “already known, not only in the city of Indianapolis, but throughout the length and breadth of Indiana and other surrounding states as well.” Madam Walker particularly valued his discreet behavior. “He will not tell one incident of his many clients’ affairs, not even for newspaper notoriety,” the Recorder observed. “He holds the confidence that they have placed in him as sacred, more sacred than his own personal affairs.”
At least for a short period, Ransom and Brokenburr roomed with Madam Walker at her North West Street home. Both men, who were close to Lelia’s age, would continue to play significant roles in Madam Walker’s life and in her company, becoming not just her legal advisers but her close and loyal friends. Each would go on to fashion exemplary careers, Brokenburr as the first black state senator in Indiana, Ransom as a highly regarded state and local civic leader.
As 1910 ended, once again Madam Walker’s income had exceeded expectations, this time reaching $10,989, the equivalent of almost $200,000 in today’s dollars. But as her fifth wedding anniversary approached, her marriage was fraying. C.J. had been traveling in the South for several months and she was not particularly eager to see him. The more clearly she plotted her future, the more disconnected their lives had become.
Lelia was struggling with her own personal problems as she prepared to join her mother for the Christmas holidays. During the summer, John Robinson had abruptly left her after less than a year of marriage. “We had a quarrel” was all she would say. “He left, and said he was not coming back.” Her attempts at reconciliation failed. “We had a talk, but he didn’t make any offer to come back.” Two Pittsburgh Walker agents who knew Lelia well, and Grant White—her boarder and the friend who probably had introduced the couple—all surmised that, because “she supports herself by her business” and because Robinson had been unable to make any contribution to her support, he had grown to resent her independence. As the two women celebrated Madam Walker’s forty-third birthday and looked forward to the new year, they realized once again how much they had always depended upon each other.
In August 1911, Lelia returned to Indianapolis for an extended visit with plans to enjoy the festivities of the sixteenth biennial Knights of Pythias convention later that month. Throughout the summer her mother’s home remained filled with guests. Among them was Alice Kelly, the Eckstein-Norton teacher with whom Madam Walker had become friendly and whom she hoped to persuade to join the Walker Company.
Madam Walker was especially pleased to welcome her St. Louis friends the Robinsons: Jessie, who now held the Court of Calanthe’s highest elected national office of Supreme Worthy Inspectrix, and C.K., who managed the organization’s finances as Supreme Keeper of Records and Seals. The return of C.J., who had spent the first three weeks of August on a sales trip to Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado, may have been greeted as another matter. Nevertheless, he was expected to reach the city just in time for the conference plenary on August 21.
Indianapolis’s black community bustled expectantly in preparation for the event. The Knights were eager to show off their spanking-new $30,000 headquarters, touting their Pythian Temple at Senate and Walnut avenues as “the finest building owned by colored people in the central states.” With equal anticipation, Madam Walker looked forward to providing tours of her recently completed factory to the many out-of-town visitors, especially Booker T. Washington, to whom she continued to write despite his earlier rebuff. Having learned through the conference planners—including her friend Joseph Ward, the group’s national Supreme Medical Register and chair of the local publicity and decorations committee—that Washington was slated to deliver a keynote address, Madam Walker contacted the Tuskegee principal exactly one month prior to the meeting. “I thought to again remind you of your promise to visit and inspect our home and factory,” she “respectfully” wrote with hopes that he could “make it convenient to do so.”
“I hope to have the privilege of inspecting your plant when I visit Indianapolis,” he replied, albeit with a caveat that allowed him to maintain his distance. “Of course, however, I shall be in the hands of Mr. Stewart’s committee and shall be compelled to be guided by whatever program they may arrange for me.”As one of Recorder publisher George Stewart’s best advertising customers, Madam Walker likely felt no reluctance about approaching him to become part of “whatever program” his committee arranged for the Tuskegee visitor. Although there is no document to verify contact between Madam Walker and Washington during the conference, he could not have missed seeing her home and factory since both were conspicuously visible from the corner of Indiana Avenue and North West Street. As determined as she clearly was to speak with him, he also could not have avoided her at the Wonderland Park reception toasting him on Tuesday afternoon had she wished to approach him.
That same evening several thousand black and white Indianapolis residents crowded the cavernous Coliseum at the Indiana State Fair Grounds to hear Washington. With much of his message focused on his trademark themes of thrift, hard work and personal responsibility, he exhorted the audience, “No man of any race, whatever his color, who knows something that is of value to the world or can do something that is of value to his community can be held back.
“Through such an organization as this,” he continued, “teach the youth of our race that they must not be ashamed to begin at the bottom, must not be ashamed to begin with little things and gradually grow to the point where they deal with larger things.” It was a philosophy Madam Walker wholeheartedly embraced, and one that she had shared in her first letter to Washington nearly two years earlier.
Throughout the week, convention delegates enjoyed an array of social activities from nightly balls and receptions at Tomlinson Hall and the Pythian Temple to the elaborately costumed “operatic kaleidoscope” of the Black Patti Musical Comedy Company at the Park Theatre, Indianapolis’s most popular vaudeville house. Led by the classically trained black diva Mme. Sissieretta Jones, the fifty-member traveling show performed an eclectic fare of minstrel routines, ragtime numbers, musical comedy tunes and an extravagant finale of arias from Carmen, La Bohème and numerous other operas.
After evenings filled with entertainment, the several hundred Knights of Pythias delegates—with the men in one hall, the women in another—assembled each morning to present financial and business reports about their insurance and burial programs. High on the agenda was the selection of new officers. Upon her reelection as Supreme Worthy Inspectrix, Jessie Robinson delighted the group with the news that, during her travels since the last biennial meeting, she had helped establish chapters in several cities, including New York. “When women get together that means something for the people they represent,” she told the delegates, reminding them of their collective power on behalf of the organization’s 52,000 members. Her friend Madam Walker, who now claimed 950 Walker sales agents and several thousand customers, shared the vision of harnessing women’s influence. Each convention such as this and each conversation with someone like Jessie Robinson only fueled Madam Walker’s imagination.
A few weeks later Madam Walker called upon Robert Brokenburr to formally draw up the articles of incorporation for the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company of Indiana, a firm created to “sell a hairgrowing, beautifying and scalp disease-curing preparation and clean scalps the same.” Apparently unable to attract the investors she had envisioned in her 1910 letter to Washington, Madam Walker may have put her home up for collateral to create the corporation’s capital stock of $10,000. She named herself, her husband and her daughter as the sole members of the board of directors.
That fall, C.J. departed on another extended trip, this time visiting Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. After trips to Boley, Oklahoma, and Mound Bayou, Mississippi, the Freeman reported, he described “the two Negro towns as the only two towns in the South where a Negro can breathe the breath of freedom.” His sense of liberation also may have applied to the state of his marriage, a union that by now had become more business arrangement than affectionate alliance. Inevitably, in C.J.’s lengthy absences, his eye had begun to wander. Inevitably as well, during those absences, Madam Walker continued to reevaluate the purpose of the relationship. At the time, however, she was too wrapped up in her business affairs to make any final decisions about troublesome private matters. Soon, however, she knew she would have to address the issue.