CHAPTER 18

War Abroad, War at Home

Protest and patriotism vied for headlines in the New York Age during the summer of 1917 as African American troops trained for the war abroad and Harlem leaders challenged mob violence at home. Even as black New Yorkers cautiously monitored congressional response to the East St. Louis riots, they were captivated by the military drills their khaki-clad sons, husbands and friends practiced outside the 132nd Street armory. That James Reese Europe—now a sergeant in the Harlem-based 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York Guard—had signed on to lead the regimental band only boosted their pride. With Noble Sissle strutting as his drum major, and a dozen handpicked Puerto Rican enlistees filling his reed section, Jim Europe’s impromptu street parades did more for recruitment than any ten Selective Service offices.

On April 6, 1917, as President Woodrow Wilson placed his signature on the resolution declaring war on Germany, Madam Walker was in Louisiana busy with her own recruitment efforts to enlist more women into her growing army of Walker agents. But she was hardly oblivious to the conflict in Europe. Away from Harlem during most of the year, she stayed well informed through letters, telegrams and newspaper articles as her fellow African American leaders examined and debated their positions on black military involvement. Within weeks of America’s entry into the war, Tin Pan Alley’s biggest hit of 1916—“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”—was quickly replaced by “Over There,” an upbeat tune that assured the European Allies that “the Yanks are coming . . . And we won’t be back till it’s over over there.”

Many African Americans caught the contagious flag-waving spirit, readying themselves to help “save the world for democracy.” But in the months preceding America’s intervention, a few Negro weeklies—incensed at proposed congressional legislation barring blacks from military service—had editorialized against black participation. “If war comes, the colored man is not wanted and it would be a white man’s war between Germany and the U.S.,” asserted the Washington Bee that March. Particularly indignant that President Wilson was “doing or saying nothing to stop lynching at home,” the Iowa Bystander was even more direct: “Why need we go 3,000 miles to uphold the dignity and honor of our country and protect her citizens over in England and fail to uphold dignity at home?” In barbershops and on street corners, plainspoken sentiments conveyed similar meaning: “The Germans ain’t done nothing to me, and if they have, I forgive ’em.” Ultimately, however, the community’s more patriotic voices prevailed. James Weldon Johnson—a former U.S. diplomat and now NAACP field secretary—had long advocated African American support of the war. As America mobilized, he proclaimed the black soldier willing to “take up the duty that comes to him and, as always, do his part.” In turn, Johnson expected the nation to “do its duty to him.” Later that summer W.E.B. Du Bois—the staunch antilynching crusader—set aside some of his own misgivings in what appeared to some to be an opportunistic statement of support just as he was being considered for an appointment to a captaincy in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department. “Let us not hesitate,” he urged in his July Crisis column. “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.”

Drawing upon a legacy of military participation in every conflict since the American Revolution, most African Americans swallowed their ambivalence and rallied. As always, they mustered their optimism, hoping loyalty, allegiance and blood would expedite long-overdue equal rights and equal opportunity, a kind of “civil rights through carnage,” as David Levering Lewis has written. But this time the nation’s black leadership also sought a precedent-setting quid pro quo. In exchange for contributing their “full quota to the federal army,” they pressed for the establishment of a training camp for black officers. While many objected to a segregated facility, a sufficient number joined Du Bois in making the tortuous choice between “the insult of a separate camp and the irreparable injury of . . . putting no black men in positions of authority.” A leading proponent of the effort was Joel Spingarn, then on leave from the NAACP board and serving in a reserve officers’ training camp. At his urging the Howard University–based Central Committee of Negro College Men submitted more than 1,500 names of students—primarily from Howard, Lincoln, Fisk, Morehouse, Tuskegee, Hampton and Atlanta University—for officers’ training. “Our country faces the greatest crisis in its history,” opened their letter of petition seeking support from 300 congressmen. “The Negro, as ever loyal and patriotic, is anxious to do his full share in the defense and support of his country in its fight for democracy.” In late May, when Secretary of War Newton Baker announced plans for a black officers’ center at Fort Des Moines, the CCNCM claimed “victory,” but spent little time basking. “The race is on trial,” their circular warned. “If we fail, our enemies will dub us cowards for all time . . . But if we succeed, then eternal success.”

With Madam Walker’s architect, Vertner Tandy, now a major in the 15th Regiment—and the highest-ranking black officer in the New York Guard—she was all the more inclined to take a personal interest in the regiment’s activities. When the American Red Cross initially excluded black women as volunteers and nurses, Madam Walker agreed without hesitation to join the advisory board of the Circle for Negro War Relief, a group of prominent black women who established a clearinghouse for money and supplies “to improve conditions among colored soldiers.” Comprising more than fifty chapters around the country—with a dozen in New York alone—the Circle purchased an ambulance, provided several hundred hand-knitted pairs of socks and gloves and assisted the soldiers’ families.

In early December 1917 as the men of the 15th—soon to be known as the 369th Hellfighters of the Provisional 93rd Division—prepared to leave for France, Madam Walker was still recovering at Battle Creek. But Lelia—whose party invitations were always in high demand—cohosted a farewell concert with James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson to aid the Circle’s programs. On December 13, as the troops boarded European-bound transport ships in Hoboken, New Jersey, the Lelia College holiday greeting in The Messenger wished for the “speedy culmination of the war” and the “bravery and success of our boys in uniform.”

In mid-January, with a fresh retinue of black trainees in the barracks at Long Island’s Camp Upton—and with Madam Walker home from Michigan—the Walker women entertained the black officers of the 92nd Division at a military cotillion. Amid red, white and blue decorations in the music room upstairs at 108, the uniformed men and the “daintily dressed” women “made a pleasing sight.” In addition to Major Vertner Tandy, other honored guests included two popular physicians—Captain Charles Garvin, who would soon become commanding officer of an ambulance company in France, and Lieutenant Colonel Louis Wright, a 1915 graduate of Harvard’s Medical School. The Friday Evening Knitting Class—a group of Lelia’s friends, including Edna Lewis, Madam Walker’s social secretary, and Czarina Jackson, the manager of the Seventh Avenue Walker Salon—served as hostesses, dancing with the officers well beyond midnight to the tunes of the Harmony Quartet.

Relishing her role as society fund-raiser, Lelia next invited famed tenor Enrico Caruso to be her guest of honor at a Circle for Negro War Relief dance in early February. Like her mother, she embraced eclectic musical interests. Having spent her childhood enveloped in St. Louis ragtime, she also genuinely enjoyed opera. With Caruso at the peak of his career—“his voice is now at its richest, his acting is more polished with every performance,” wrote one critic—Lelia knew his name would attract a large and diverse audience. And although he canceled “at the last minute . . . owing to a very important engagement for the next day,” Lelia’s disappointment was tempered by the tremendous turnout at the Manhattan Casino. “At any rate,” she wrote Ransom, the invitation to Caruso had “served its purpose for the hall was crowded and it was a huge success.”

Caruso, with whom Lelia enjoyed a cordial friendship, had “few intimate friends” and often was “bored” and “ill at ease at parties.” So it is entirely possible that he bowed out of the commitment to avoid the crowd and the small talk. But he also was legitimately swamped that month and in the midst of a Metropolitan Opera season in which he sang a dozen different roles between February and April. After attending one of those performances (perhaps the February 12 special matinee of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida—the story of the star-crossed but courageous Ethiopian princess), Lelia sent a basket of flowers to Caruso’s “luxurious” fourteen-room apartment at the Hotel Knickerbocker. Several months later when he visited her mother’s Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, property, he found the setting and design so reminiscent of the estates of his native Italy that he christened the home “Villa Lewaro,” creating an acronym from the first two letters of Lelia Walker Robinson. The name became permanent, gracing the Walker women’s stationery during their lifetime and enduring into the twenty-first century.

Throughout early 1918, Lelia continued volunteering for a range of wartime committees. Whether serving lunch to the men of the 367th Infantry after a Fifth Avenue parade or helping form a black women’s auxiliary to the American Red Cross, she was enjoying the sense of purpose the activities provided.

Having returned to Battle Creek in late January, Madam Walker missed much of Harlem’s winter social season. Arriving at the sanitarium bundled against Michigan’s frosty winter in her Hudson Seal cape, she complained of a pesky, persistent virus. “I am getting along fairly well, only my cold seems to be sticking by me,” she wrote Ransom. But two weeks later—still surely in need of rest—she embarked upon a three-month Midwestern tour to Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Now, in addition to publicizing her business, she was visiting military camps and promoting the work of the Circle for Negro War Relief. At Fort Des Moines—where the 100 officers and 3,600 enlisted men of the 92nd Division’s 366th Infantry awaited orders for European duty—Madam Walker was escorted by attorney George Woodson. Later the founding president of the National Bar Association, Woodson considered it his “good fortune and high honor to introduce her.”

At the YMCA tent reserved for the “social, cultural and political” activities of black soldiers, Madam Walker praised the “boys,” who were going “over there,” for their bravery. “Now and then, but seldom, you hear one say, ‘This is not my country. I have no right to fight for a flag that does not protect me,’” she told the men, as many strained to hear from outside the jam-packed canvas shelter. “But let me say to you that this [is] our home . . . All we have is here, and the time will come, and it is not far distant, until we must and will receive every protection guaranteed to every American citizen under the American Constitution.”

Watching from the stage, Woodson was startled by Madam Walker’s weakened condition. “The eloquent force which she put into that speech in spite of her nervous state, greatly alarmed me,” he later wrote. During the reception following her remarks, Woodson’s concern compelled him to request permission to measure her pulse. “I tried to get her away from the great mass of common people who crowded about her to admire and compliment her. But it was no use. She loved those common people and just would not leave them.”

Later when Madam Walker arrived at the home of Sue Wilson Brown—her Des Moines hostess and the immediate past president of the Iowa Federation of Colored Women—she was greeted by a small group of admirers. Although Woodson “insisted that she go to bed and rest,” Madam Walker lingered to talk with the visitors, as well as with her host, attorney S. Joe Brown. Valedictorian of his 1901 University of Iowa Law School class and a founder of Des Moines’s NAACP chapter, Brown was considered “one of the seven or eight most important Negro lawyers in America” of the era. The next day, Woodson “begged the privilege of speaking plainly” to Madam Walker. “I told her that she was entirely too valuable to her Country and Race to be taking such desperate chances with her health and life,” he later wrote.

But Madam Walker—only too aware of her progressing kidney disease—was all the more determined to resume her frenetic schedule. From Iowa, she traveled to Kansas City, St. Louis and Columbia, then on to Chicago. “The madam has developed into a magnetic platform speaker and is exceedingly witty and humorous,” a Chicago Defender article later described her appearance at the city’s Olivet Baptist Church. “The story of her success,” declared the flattering account (in all probability penned by Ransom), was something that “every young woman in America should hear.” Apparently Dora Larrie, C. J. Walker’s second wife, had decided that she too needed to hear the message. “I understand that Mme. Walker No. 2 was out to my lecture last night. I know that she went away with a sick heart,” Madam Walker “No. 1” gloated. “I had a crowded house and applause all through the lecture. I would have to wait nearly three minutes for them to get quiet before I could begin again.”

That enthusiastic response, and Olivet’s reputation as a haven for recently arrived Southern migrants, persuaded Madam Walker to select the church as the site for her second annual Walker agents convention. With nearly 1,000 newcomers streaming each month into Chicago’s South Side from Mississippi Valley towns along the Illinois Central train line, Madam Walker easily envisioned ways to cultivate the untapped pool of thousands of potential Lelia College students, sales agents and customers. That young black women were being hired as tobacco strippers and hotel waitresses, chambermaids and kitchen helpers at $15 to $20 per week meant that a $1.75 Walker treatment was within their reach, even with the North’s higher rents siphoning off much of their increased income. Julius Rosenwald’s Sears, Roebuck and Company and Montgomery Ward had hired more than 1,500 black mail-order clerks, vastly increasing white-collar employment among African American women in the city. And although most remained in domestic service jobs, hundreds “deserted this grade of work for the factories” in order to guarantee evenings and Sundays off. Now part of a faster, more urbanized culture of consumerism, these working women were eager to spend a part of their incomes and free time on themselves. Having just rented a storefront for a Walker salon at 4656 South State Street—on the main commercial thoroughfare of Chicago’s black community—Madam Walker was primed both to accommodate their desires and to provide an avenue to economic independence.

With the location of her August meeting settled, Madam Walker dashed ahead to more cities, adding nearby Gary and Fort Wayne, Indiana, to her itinerary. But en route to Indianapolis—where she intended to stay through late March—she wired Ransom, “Do not accept any social engagements. I want to rest.” Not surprisingly, her break was brief. In Columbus, Ohio, during early April, she trained and organized enough women to create a new chapter of Walker agents. And her feisty spirit was in full force as she confronted a local woman known to have issued Walker diplomas under the false pretense that she was authorized to teach the Walker course. “She is as crooked as a black snake and I have cut her out entirely,” Madam Walker informed Ransom. “And I announced it from the platform last night [while] she was present.”

Forty miles south of Columbus in Chillicothe, Madam Walker was welcomed to the First Baptist Church—the town’s largest and oldest black congregation—by Zella Ward, Dr. Joseph Ward’s wife and Madam Walker’s first Indianapolis hostess. Awaiting his assignment to a medical unit in France, Ward was now stationed at nearby Camp Sherman. With her dear friends as guides, Madam Walker learned of the discrimination the troops faced on the base and in the town. Although there were eleven Y buildings on the grounds, only one was not off-limits to the 2,000 black soldiers. In downtown Chillicothe the Ross County Courthouse posted a sign that advised: “Army Club No. 1 for White Soldiers’ Friends and Relatives: Reading, Writing and Recreation Rooms.” And throughout the country the backlash against black men in uniform had become more frequent and more demeaning. Scattered across seven training camps, the 92nd Division—in which almost all black troops were clustered—had been splintered intentionally to prevent any one encampment from being more than one-third black. General Charles Ballou, the division’s white commanding officer, had even issued a directive ordering black troops to avoid situations and public places where their presence would be “resented,” unfairly putting the burden on them to anticipate the racism of others. Only a few months earlier First Lieutenant Charles A. Tribbett, an electrical engineer and Yale graduate, had been arrested and forced from a train while en route with fellow servicemen from New York’s Camp Upton to Fort Sill. Left behind in Chickasha, Oklahoma, he was jailed for “violating the separate coach laws of the state” because he had dared to occupy a Pullman car.

Despite these troubling incidents, Madam Walker encouraged the troops to persevere. “This is your country, your home,” she reminded them. “What you have suffered in the past should not deter you from going forth to protect the homes and lives of your women and children.” But she did not gloss over the very real discrimination and indignities they faced, vowing to use her influence on their behalf. Several months later, a member of Company D of the 317th Engineers wrote, “We all remember you, and . . . have often spoken of you, and of the words of consolation which you gave us at Camp Sherman, Ohio, on the eve of our departure. Those words have stayed with the boys longer than any spoken by any one that I have known or heard of.” Her comments, he said, had even shored them up “one night while under shell-fire” on a French battlefield.

From Chillicothe Madam Walker made her way to Pittsburgh for a mid-April Madam C. J. Walker Benevolent Association event. “Her tribute to ‘our boys’ aroused her audience to unusual patriotic enthusiasm,” the Pittsburgh Courier reported. “When the war began it was thought that ‘our boys’ would not be needed,” she told the “packed house” of 600 people. “But we see that they are needed, and victory shall not have been won until the black boys of America shed their blood on the battlefield.” And while Madam Walker’s outreach on behalf of the Circle for Negro War Relief had become important, helping women better their economic circumstances remained her passionate priority. “What I have done you can do,” she persuaded the Pittsburgh audience. “I am here to interest and inspire you, if possible. If I am not successful in helping you, remember I did the best I could.”

When Madam Walker announced that she hoped to “meet every agent personally before I leave the city,” she may well have been responding to a situation that required damage control. Much to her consternation, she had learned of a Mrs. Saunders, who not only had used her name on an unauthorized beauty salon sign but was saying that Lelia had “got drunk” and revealed the Wonderful Hair Grower formula. Saunders was “claiming,” Madam Walker told Ransom, that “since I have gone to New York the goods are not made properly any more and . . . that I had gotten rich and gone to New York to sport.” Incensed by the accusation, she sought retaliation. Aware that Courier publisher Robert Vann—who had been Lelia’s attorney in her divorce from John Robinson—also represented Saunders, Madam Walker authorized Ransom to apply strategic pressure. “I think it will not be any trouble to get him to advise her to take down the sign since I am one of his heaviest advertisers,” she said with confidence.

Madam Walker had also learned that some of her Pittsburgh agents were substituting “white vaseline and anything else that they can get cheap” for her more expensive Glossine, the moisturizing ointment she recommended they use in combination with the heated metal pressing comb. As well, several disgruntled agents were revolting over her recent decision to sell Glossine through retail outlets, complaining that the new policy had severely reduced their sales of the product. “They want me to take it out of the drug stores,” Madam Walker wrote Ransom. Without question, she knew she would face the issue again during her August convention.

But she refused to let the momentary crises stymie her new initiatives. With plans for an expanded export operation, she was in search of a second interpreter to handle correspondence with her Spanish-speaking trade. And with intentions of organizing a cadre of national traveling agents, she was interviewing women—and a few men—in each city, searching for candidates with the proper blend of skill, personality and ambition to represent her and her company. “The pictures,” she told a prospective saleswoman, referring to the stereopticon slides, are “the most important thing for it is that that arouses such keen interest.” An entertaining presentation, she contended, was the most effective element in attracting new customers and trainees. “It isn’t [just] a matter of going from town to town organizing clubs. That is a secondary matter. You can easily [organize them] after you get them together.”

In order to establish a visible and permanent presence beyond her New York and Indianapolis offices, Madam Walker also had begun scouting locations for Walker schools and parlors. With the Chicago salon nearly remodeled, she now targeted St. Louis and Columbus for future Walker operations. Her vision: to create Walker franchises all over the country by financing the salon construction, then turning the operation over to the franchisee after she had been reimbursed—at 6 percent interest—for her initial outlay. Her long-term profit, she calculated, would come from increased sales volume. In explaining the arrangement to one potential shop owner, she wrote, “I don’t think you quite understand me yet. I do not want you as a manager. I only want the public to think it is my business because of the prestige it will lend the place. All I want out of it is the money I loaned you until you can get on your feet.” While assuring the prospective franchisee that “the parlor will be yours,” she added a caveat designed to protect her investment and her reputation. “I want the parlor to remain in my name, and I reserve the right to make a change any time that I am not pleased with the way the business is run.”

Urging the interested operator to bring in at least two additional rent-paying hair culturists to help cover “gas, electric and all that,” she required that the franchisee display sufficient dynamism to sustain a self-sufficient, self-supporting business. “I don’t think it a good idea to pay salaries,” she wrote Ransom. “It is better to let them work up their own business.” When her first choice to run the Columbus salon backed out, Madam Walker viewed her as “the most foolish woman I have ever seen, after asking me to help her then turning right around and demanding a salary.” In the woman’s place, Madam Walker sent Louise Thompson, her traveling assistant, to open the shop, deciding that it “will be better to have some one right from Lelia College to start them off.”

When Ransom questioned the wisdom of developing satellite offices, Madam Walker begged to differ. “You said we should . . . have but one school of beauty culture and that in New York. I do not quite agree with you there, as in every section of the country you will find a Moler College or a Burnham College and they are known by that name everywhere. I think it lends dignity,” she said, referring to two white cosmetology schools that had been founded in the late nineteenth century.

Having been away from New York since January, Madam Walker returned to her 136th Street home in late April 1918 eager to plunge into the daily office routine. But for Lelia, who had enjoyed the freedom of running the operation without interference, her mother’s micromanagement was an annoyance. “Mother stews and frets and gets into everything and therefore she is always nervous and worked up,” she had written Ransom earlier in the year. But with a massive log of back orders—caused both by wartime restrictions and by snafus in her Indianapolis factory—Madam Walker could hardly be blamed for being miffed. “We have been out of goods for a week,” she wrote Ransom. “You should keep a supply on the road all the time and should we get overstocked we could let you know. To be out of goods has certainly upset everything with the agents here.” Four days later the situation had worsened. “What is the trouble that we cannot get any preparations here?” she demanded of Ransom. “It is simply demoralizing the business . . . Please send us Tetter Salve and Grower by mail and keep some on the road until we get some on hand.” At the end of May, still needing Grower “very badly,” she complained again, “The situation here is getting terribly embarrassing.” Equally frustrated by a shortage of tins, Lelia was also fending off angry customers and agents. “I started yesterday to make Grower. The Grower matter is certainly critical here. The folks are furious,” she sputtered in a letter to Ransom. “Grower is in greater demand than any of the preparations, so when we send for preparation, please send more Grower than anything else.” As long as the war continued, they would have to contend with a number of similar problems.

Since 1912, Madam Walker had rarely missed the summertime convention circuit—the Baptists, the AMEs and the AME Zions; the Knights of Pythias and the Court of Calanthe; the National Negro Business League and the National Association of Colored Women. At first she was more observer than participant, but during July of 1918 she was especially enthusiastic about making the rounds, knowing that she would be lauded at every stop. “Was surely received with honor in Denver,” she wrote after registering for the NACW’s eleventh biennial. “The only regret was that I could not remain with them longer that they might further demonstrate their appreciation for me,” she joked with Ransom of her triumphant homecoming to the city where she had sold her first tin of Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.

Now, as one of the organization’s most famous members, Madam Walker was invited to appear before the delegates several times during the proceedings. Leading a Tuesday afternoon panel on women in business, she “made an appeal for club women to get closer in touch with our women in the factory.” That evening at another assembly she advocated racial solidarity and self-help in the struggle for “equality of opportunity,” reminding the delegates that “none of us may live our own lives because we are all dependent on one another.”

By far the highlight of her week unfolded in the sanctuary of Shorter AME, her former Denver church, as she and Mary Burnett Talbert presided over a mortgage-burning ceremony celebrating the successful two-year campaign to purchase Cedar Hill, the Washington, D.C., home where Frederick Douglass had lived from 1877 until his death in 1895. With Douglass’s violin and personal library already donated by his widow, the women of the NACW sketched ambitious plans to convert the white brick Victorian house—with its panoramic view of the capital’s grandest monuments—into an archive akin to a black Mount Vernon. “It will be beautiful and all relics, manuscripts and articles of historical value to the race will be accumulated therein for the benefit of the entire race, and will become a mecca to which the children will journey for information and inspiration,” they promised.

As the women tingled with anticipation, Massachusetts teacher Elizabeth Carter read aloud from the mortgage, then handed it to NACW president Talbert, who had spearheaded the fund-raising drive. While the delegates sang “Hallelujah, ’Tis Done,” Madam Walker—whose $500 gift made her the largest single donor—carefully held a slender lighted candle beneath the precious document, igniting its edges until the paper was consumed in flames. “I am glad to be able to show the world by this simple, visible act that the mortgage so long threatening this historic home has been reduced to ashes,” she said with pride. Near Madam Walker’s side was her Des Moines friend Mrs. S. Joe Brown, who had raised a total of $750 from individuals. Brown, who had been born in a sharecropper’s shack and who had lived in an attic during her first few months in Denver, had helped rescue the hilltop home of one of America’s most significant and accomplished figures.

Accompanied by Sue Brown, Madam Walker traveled by train to Des Moines for the second time that year. Before “a splendid mixed audience” in the city’s “leading white church,” and then at a local high school, she reviewed “the valor of our soldiers, from Crispus Attucks, who fell upon Boston Common, to the boys who used the bolo knife upon the Western front,” referring to the recent heroic efforts of Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts of New York’s 369th. Though wounded by grenades, they alone had repelled two dozen German attackers with hand grenades, a rifle and a knife.

Before leaving Iowa, Madam Walker received the news that President Wilson had made his long-awaited statement on lynching. Under pressure from War Secretary Newton Baker, Wilson issued an open letter condemning mob violence on July 26. “My anxiety is growing at the situation in this country among the negroes,” Baker had written Wilson after a July 1 meeting with Tuskegee president Robert Russa Moton. During the private session Moton had despaired over the unabated rise in lynchings since the start of the war, noting nineteen killings in May alone. Convinced that words from Wilson would have a “wholesome effect” on the nation, Baker also knew his President was vulnerable in the international arena as the Allies looked askance at America’s entrenched racial dilemma. While the President “did not shrink from plotting for a new world,” wrote historian Kenneth O’Reilly, he “claimed his own nation’s racial landscape was beyond his ability.” Nevertheless the reluctant President’s statement was one of the only encouraging signals African Americans had seen from his administration. The “mob spirit,” he admonished, “vitally affects the honor of the nation and the very character and integrity of our institutions. I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives any sort of countenance is not a true son of this great democracy, but its betrayer.” Wilson went as far as a steadfast states’ righter might go, “earnestly and solemnly” imploring “the Governors of all the States, the law officers of every community, and, above all, the men and women of every community in the United States” to “cooperate—not passively merely, but actively and watchfully—to make an end of this disgraceful evil.” In the end, however, he failed to mention the black victims who disproportionately endured the attacks and declined to offer any specific remedies for the racism that fueled the crimes.

What Madam Walker was thinking that day is not recorded. But her August 1917 visit to the White House had rendered her highly sensitive to the President’s words and deeds, especially when they concerned matters of race. As she boarded the Chicago-bound train to attend the second annual Walker hair culturists convention, she had several hours to contemplate President Wilson’s remarks and to prepare the message she and her delegates would soon send to him.

As she arrived in Chicago a few days early for her August 1–3 assembly, she knew the grumbling about drugstore sales of Glossine threatened to disrupt the proceedings. One group had gone so far as to submit a petition to Ransom: “We the undersigned agents of Mme. C. J. Walker do not feel that we have the proper protection from you by placing your goods in the drugstores. In this way our sale of goods has been greatly cut down.”

A letter from Ransom outlining their concerns awaited Madam Walker at the home of her Chicago hosts. “Among the many objections which they set forth, the one to my mind having the most force is that when drug stores handle the preparations, persons who refuse to take the course and treatments go to a drug store, buy a cheap comb and Glossine and . . . hold themselves out as agents and thereby deceive a lot of people.” In agreement with the agents, he urged Madam Walker to discontinue selling Glossine to retailers. “The real thing after all is making the agents feel that they enjoy some special privileges . . . and that these privileges are not in like manner extended to others who are not agents and who have not paid anything to take the course,” he wrote, warning her to expect a floor fight. “One thing is sure. You will have to get your position clearly outlined and having once taken same you will have to stick to it.”

On the first day of the convention, when the most outspoken agents mounted their challenge, Madam Walker remained resolute, insisting to the three hundred assembled delegates that selling Glossine in drugstores was a financial necessity in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Already Anthony Overton, a man whose business acumen she respected, had managed to become the first black cosmetics manufacturer to place his products in Woolworth’s. White-owned companies continued to make inroads in black newspapers and corner stores with aggressive sales campaigns. And, truth be told, she believed that some of the very agents who opposed her policy were cutting corners by substituting cheap vaseline for Glossine.

“You doubtless are aware that these conventions are a great expense to me,” she reminded the delegates in her opening remarks. “I have conducted my business this year almost at a loss owing to the unusual cost of material, heavy taxes, etc. I have not raised prices because I did not want my agents to suffer.” Knowing full well that some of her agents were at that moment threatening to revolt, she pledged, “You have been loyal to me and by the help of God, I am trying to be loyal to you.” With faith that the mutual loyalty shared by many of her agents would help thwart her opponents, she appealed to their better interests. “My friends, if out of these conventions I can . . . be of some real service to the Race, I say that if I can inspire such a spirit in the heart of one who has never thought along such lines, my money will have been well invested.” And although she refrained from publicly castigating her detractors, she was prepared to part ways with those who could not grasp her message. “Never one to run away from a fight, Madam won out,” her longtime secretary Violet Reynolds remembered decades later.

With the Glossine flap tamped down, Madam Walker was primed to move on to the real purpose of her meeting: educating the delegates about business, politics and foreign affairs, and exposing them to prominent “race men and women.” In addition to hearing presentations from three of her NACW sisters, the agents were addressed by one of Chicago’s first black aldermen, as well as by a former U.S. minister to Liberia. But the most riveting message was delivered by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, whose nationally distributed Chicago Defender could claim much credit for portraying the city as such a “promised land” that 50,000 Southern black migrants arrived between 1916 and 1918. The war, he often wrote, provided “opportunity” for blacks trapped by a sharecropping, Jim Crow society. “These same factories, mills and workshops that have been closed to us, through necessity are being opened to us,” he editorialized in the paper he had founded in 1905. “We are to be given a chance, not through choice but because it is expedient. Slowly but surely all over the country we are gradually edging in first this and then that place, getting a foothold before making a place for our brother.” Transported from city to city by Pullman porters and black entertainers, the Defender’s local and national circulation mushroomed from 10,000 to 93,000 between 1916 and 1918. By 1920, Abbott claimed to have “by far the largest circulation any black newspaper had ever achieved,” with more than 280,000 readers, two-thirds of them outside Chicago.

On the second day at the convention as Madam Walker crossed the stage for her annual keynote address, she was greeted by a standing ovation. “We are here not only to transact the business of this convention, not only to inspire and receive inspiration, but to pledge anew our loyalty and patriotism . . . and to say to our President that the Colored women of America are ready and willing . . . to make any sacrifice necessary to bring our boys home victorious,” she pronounced, aware that 7,000 black women had contributed $5 million to the most recent Liberty Loan drive.

Praising her agents as “some of the best women the Race has produced,” she asserted that “nowhere will you find such a large number of successful business women as are among the delegates of this convention.” For those in the audience seeking her formula for prosperity, she made clear that her achievements had depended upon effort and sacrifice. “I want you to know that whatever I have accomplished in life I have paid for it by much thought and hard work. If there is any easy way, I haven’t found it,” she counseled. “My advice to every one expecting to go into business is to hit often and hit hard; in other words, strike with all your might.”

The emphasis she had placed on the “benevolent side” of her organization remained paramount. “I want my agents to feel that their first duty is to humanity.” Concerned about the welfare of the black migrants, she exhorted the delegates “to do their bit to help and advance the best interests of the Race” by assuming responsibility for the needy in their communities. “I tell you that we have a duty to perform with reference to our brother and sister from the South. Shall we who call ourselves Christians sit still and allow them to be swallowed up and lost in the slums of these great cities?” she challenged fervently. “It is my duty, your duty, to go out in the back alleys and side streets and bring them into your home.” Always conscious of her own struggles during her early years in St. Louis, she continued her eloquent appeal: “Bring them into your clubs and other organizations where they can feel the spirit and catch the inspiration of higher and better living. Yes, lend them the encouragement of your friendly interest, that the light of hope may continue to shine in their eyes and worthy ambition continue to throb in their hearts.”

Beyond social work, Madam Walker intended to foster political and social activism among her agents. “I shall expect to find my agents taking the lead in every locality not only in operating a successful business, but in every movement in the interest of our colored citizenship,” she said. Toward that end, the Walker delegates, “on behalf of 12,000,000 Negroes,” dispatched a telegram commending President Wilson for his “strong and vigorous” condemnation of lynching. Wilson secretary Joseph Tumulty’s reply was perfunctory, assuring them that their “patriotic sentiments are appreciated.” Regardless of the dismissive response, the Walker agents knew their concerns had been duly registered with the highest office of the land.

Any sense of satisfaction they may have felt, however, was crushed by the horrifying Defender headline they faced on the final day of the convention. Two black women—Ethel Barrett and Ellen Brooks—had been “coated with tar and feathers” in Vicksburg, a town where Madam Walker still maintained ties. As if mocking Wilson’s words, five vigilantes also had doused Brooks—the wife of an American soldier said to be “in the trenches in France”—in oily creosote and set her aflame. Although she was described as a “hardworking woman” by former white employers, her attackers felt justified in assaulting her because she appeared to have “no visible means of support.” A woman’s employment—or lack thereof—was certainly no crime. But it had become an issue of contention in the wartime South as local law-makers perverted the federal Selective Service “work or fight” statutes that required all able-bodied men to be either gainfully employed or enlisted in the Army. Never intended to apply to women, the law in some jurisdictions had been twisted to force black women to perform the household work many had begun to abandon for factory jobs, self-employment or migration. Faced with complaints from local white housewives that there was a shortage of cooks and maids, Jackson, Mississippi, city council members passed legislation requiring all able-bodied black women—including the wives of black servicemen—to work. In Wetumpka, Alabama, in the case of Maria Parker, even a self-employed hairdresser was not exempt. Arrested because “her chosen occupation . . . did not meet the appropriate criteria of servility,” both Parker and the washerwoman she employed were charged with “vagrancy” by an overzealous town marshal who “routinely monitored black women’s labor output by counting the clothes hanging in their yards and arresting women who fell short of his quotas,” according to historian Tera Hunter.

These attacks, charged the Defender, established a new kind of harassment “in that the spirit of [this] social unrest and disorder is determined to strike down the professional and independent men and women of our Race in the South.” Such affronts only strengthened Madam Walker’s desire to use her money and her power to “help my people” and to provide employment for them. As she closed her second annual convention, she was already preparing to open the doors of Villa Lewaro, her Westchester County mansion, for a late-August convention to discuss those very matters.