Annie Turnbo Malone: The Beauty Pioneer They Forgot

A generation before Madam C. J. Walker became famous as the first African American female millionaire, a woman from Metropolis had already built the business she got her start selling for.

Annie Minerva Turnbo was born on the ninth of August, eighteen seventy-seven, the tenth of eleven children in a family whose parents had formerly been enslaved. She was raised partly by an older sister and developed an early, intense interest in chemistry and in the health of hair. Around the turn of the twentieth century she developed a line of hair care products formulated specifically for Black women, filling a market that mainstream American commerce had entirely ignored.

The ingredients, formulas, and marketing she developed were genuinely new. She opened her first shop in Saint Louis, Missouri in nineteen oh two, built an agent and sales network that spread across the country and into several other countries, and in nineteen eighteen built Poro College, a remarkable campus on Saint Louis's north side that included a manufacturing plant, a five-hundred-seat auditorium, dining halls, dormitories, a gymnasium, and a bakery. The Poro Company eventually created jobs for nearly seventy-five thousand women across North and South America, Africa, and the Philippines.

Among the early sales agents in her network was a woman named Sarah Breedlove, who later founded her own competing company and became world famous as Madam C. J. Walker.

The woman whose business first put Walker in the trade was born in Metropolis. Two giants of African American commercial history came from the same small Illinois river town, and the second is far better remembered than the first.