Madam C. J. Walker and the Avenue

Sarah Breedlove was born in eighteen sixty-seven on a Mississippi River delta plantation in Louisiana, the first child in her family born free. By the time she was seven, both her parents were dead. By fourteen she was married. By twenty she was a widow with a daughter and almost no money. She worked as a laundress in Saint Louis for nearly two decades.

She arrived in Indianapolis in nineteen ten, four years after developing a line of hair care products for Black women who were suffering hair loss, a widespread problem connected to poor nutrition, harsh soaps, and the residue of industrial work. The product worked. She had already built a company in Denver; she came to Indianapolis because it was closer to the markets she was building in the South and Midwest, and because the city had a large, established African American community centered on Indiana Avenue.

She bought land on Indiana Avenue and built a factory behind her house at six forty North West Street. She trained an army of sales agents, almost all of them Black women, who sold Walker products door to door across the country and into the Caribbean. By the time of her death in nineteen nineteen, the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company employed, by various estimates, tens of thousands of people as sales agents and workers. She is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first female self-made millionaire in America.

In nineteen twenty-seven, after her death, her company completed the Walker Building on Indiana Avenue: a theater, a ballroom called the Grand Casino, a beauty school, a drugstore, professional offices, and the company's world headquarters. It was the economic and cultural anchor of Black Indianapolis for decades. It still stands.

What the Walker Building represents, and what Walker's story makes plain, is that the Avenue was not simply a neighborhood. It was an economy, a parallel world built by people who had been formally excluded from the other one.