Delta, Louisiana, Birthplace of Madam C. J. Walker

Delta is a tiny village in Madison Parish, just across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg, and it carries one of the more remarkable origin stories in American business history. On December twenty-third, eighteen sixty-seven, a girl named Sarah Breedlove was born here on the Burney cotton plantation. Her parents, Minerva and Owen Breedlove, were formerly enslaved people who had stayed on the land after emancipation.

Sarah was their first child born into freedom. She was orphaned by age seven, worked in the cotton fields as a child, married at fourteen, and was widowed with a daughter at twenty. She moved north, built a hair-care products business from scratch, and by the early nineteen hundreds had become Madam C.

J. Walker, the first American woman to earn a self-made million-dollar fortune. Delta is recognized on Louisiana's African American Heritage Trail.