Madam C.J. Walker: The Avenue and the Empire

Sarah Breedlove was born on a Louisiana plantation in eighteen sixty-seven, two years after the end of the Civil War. Her parents had been enslaved. She was orphaned by seven. She worked as a laundress in Mississippi and then in St. Louis. She married, was widowed, remarried, was divorced. By the time she arrived in Indianapolis in nineteen ten and incorporated her business as the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, she had already built a national hair-care enterprise.

Her company sold hair-care products she had developed and marketed specifically for Black women, through a sales force of Black women agents she personally trained. At its peak the company employed tens of thousands of agents across the country, giving them income and professional standing that almost no other path in early twentieth-century America offered to Black women. She was, by the time of her death, the first American woman to become a self-made millionaire by her own business, not through inheritance or marriage.

She died in Irvington, New York, in nineteen nineteen. Her estate funded scholarships, the NAACP, and civil rights organizing. Her company's factory and headquarters stood on Indiana Avenue, the main street of Indianapolis's Black community, which held Black-owned newspapers, insurance companies, jazz clubs, and professional offices in the years before integration was legally enforced and before Interstate Sixty-Five was routed through the heart of the district.

The Walker Theatre, built after her death in nineteen twenty-seven, is the principal surviving structure. Indiana Avenue is quiet now. The theater is landmarked. The district that surrounded it is mostly gone.