Madam C. J. Walker circa 1912 (Madam Walker Family Archives http://www.aleliabundles.com)

Sarah Breedlove–who later would become known to the world as Madam C. J. Walker–was born on December 23, 1867, just two days before Christmas. The year had been a particularly difficult one for her parents, Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, who struggled to farm the land as sharecroppers on the same Delta, Louisiana planation where they had been enslaved. That their first child to be born free after the Emancipation Proclamation should also enter the world during the Christmas season was a double blessing. 

Sarah Breedlove was born in this Delta, Louisiana cabin on December 23, 1867 (Madam Walker Family Collection)

But the blessings soon turned to tragedy. Orphaned at seven, married at 14, widowed at 20 with a two year old daughter, it seemed that Sarah Breedlove McWilliams was destined to remain a poor, uneducated washerwoman.

Her decision in 1888 to move to St. Louis–where her brothers had become barbers–would be the catalyst that forever transformed her life. As a member of St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church, she was exposed to educated black woman who helped her begin to envision better life for herself and her child, Lelia.

One of Madam Walker's earliest ads showing the effects of her "Wonderful Hair Grower," an ointment that healed scalp disease (Madam Walker Family Archives)

Around 1903, as scalp disease caused her to become nearly bald, she began experimenting with ointments, medicinal agents and shampoos to restore her hair. In 1905 she moved to Denver. After a few months of selling a line of products created by another black woman, she developed her own formulas. When she married, Charles Joseph Walker, she adopted the name “Madam C. J. Walker.”

By the time, Madam Walker died in May 1919 at her Irvington, New York estate, she had become a millionaire and a pioneer of the modern hair care industry along with women like Helena Rubenstein, Elizabeth Arden and Annie Malone, her fierest competitor. Equally as important, she provided employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for thousands of African American women who otherwise would have been maids, laundresses and sharecroppers. In 1917, Walker hosted a national convention of her sales agents in Philadelphia.  She used her wealth and influence as a philanthropist, a patron of the arts and a political activist by supporting black colleges, commissioning the work of black artists and musicians, and pledging $5000 to the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign.

Madam Walker died at Villa Lewaro--her Irvington, NY mansion--in May 1919 (Madam Walker Family Archives http://www.aleliabundles.com)

Today Walker’s family carries on her legacy through the Madam Walker/A’Lelia Walker Family Archives, the world’s largest private collection of Walker photographs, letters, business records, clothing, furniture and personal artifacts. The family also remains involved in the preservation of two National Historic Landmarks: the Madam Walker Theatre Center--a cultural arts venue in Indianapolis–and Villa Lewaro–the Irvington-on-Hudson, New York mansion designed for Madam Walker by architect Vertner Tandy.

Walker’s daughter, who would come to be known as A’Lelia Walker, was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Poet Langston Hughes called her the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” because of the the fabulous parties and the cultural salon she hosted.

For more information about Madam Walker, visit the official Walker biography website at www.madamcjwalker.com and read the brief biography. Students who are writing reports will find the student study guide helpful.

On Her Own Ground was written by Walker's great-great-granddaughter and biographer, A'Lelia Bundles

On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker–written by Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer, A’Lelia Bundles–was a New York Times Notable Book and the recipient of the Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize.

“Two Dollars and a Dream”–the award-winning documentary about Walker–was produced by Stanley Nelson, the grandson of Walker’s longtime attorney, and narrated by his sister, journalist Jill Nelson. Here’s a link to an interview with A’Lelia Bundles and to Firelight Media, Nelson’s production company.

Links to other articles of interest “Celebrating Madam Walker’s Legacy” and “Madam Walker’s 1917 Convention”

For more information about Madam Walker, contact A’Lelia Bundles at www.aleliabundles.com

Visit the Madam Walker Family Archives on Facebook and the Official Madam Walker Biography on Facebook.

Madam Walker's November 8, 1916 letter to Atty. F. B. Ransom describes her visit with the Doctors Dumas in Natchez, MS (www.aleliabundles.com)

Combine clues in a faded letter from November 1916 with the algorithms of Facebook and the distance across the decades evaporates.

Finding descendants and relatives of people who knew my great-great-grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker, and her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, two decades ago when I was researching On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker often was a hit or miss proposition.

But even then–long before we had all the Internet tools we now take for granted–I had the sense that the ancestors were leading me to the interviews I did in the homes of surviving Harlem Renaissance icons Alberta Hunter, Dorothy West, Bruce Nugent and Geraldyn Dismond (later known as Jet’s society columnist, Gerri Major) and artist Romare Bearden, whose mother, Bessye Bearden, had been a close friend of A’Lelia Walker’s.

Items like A'Lelia Walker's Monogrammed Linen provide research leads (aleliabundles.com)

“Occasionally I found myself at the end of cold trails, but more often I was blessed with serendipitous little miracles that revealed a person or document or place, exactly the clue I needed for the next step of my search,” I wrote in 2000 as I was completing On Her Own Ground. “Fortunately, Madam Walker and A’Lelia Walker and my mother [A'Lelia Mae Perry Bundles] had known so many people that the usual six degrees of separation were reduced to two or three. One phone call, maybe two, almost always opened the door that I needed.”

Back then, it was a phone call and the curiosity I’d cultivated as a long time TV news journalist that helped me make the connections. Now it’s Facebook, Google, Ancestry.com and an array of friendships I’ve been fortunate to make through years of social and professional linkages.

Imagine my delight a few days ago, when the universe again activated those two degrees of separation, this time to photojournalist Joseph Dumas, whose grandfather and great-uncle, had made a brief appearance in On Her Own Ground because of their hospitality to Madam Walker during a visit to Natchez, Mississippi. In a November 8, 1916 letter to her attorney, F. B. Ransom, she had gone on and on about the extraordinary and distinguished Doctors Dumas: Albert Woods, an 1899 graduate of Illinois Medical College, and Henry Joseph, a 1901 graduate of Meharry’s School of Pharmacy. Madam’s hosts–Albert and his wife, Cornelia Harrison Dumas–owned one of the finest homes in Natchez, the Mississippi River town long known for its antebellum era wealth.

From Jackson, Mississippi, Madam Walker wrote: “I surely made a hit in Natchez and am sure we’ll get some good business from there. Write a nice letter to Drs. Henry and Albert Dumas [who] vied with each other in showing us every courtesy [and who] not only refused to take pay for our room and board, but carriage hire, medicine, professional services and even advertising. I never have met such people before in all my life to be strangers. I’d like so much for you to know them.”

Dr. Albert Dumas Sr and Dr. Albert Dumas Jr circa 1941 (Collection of Joseph Dumas)

Clearly the same graciousness Madam Walker experienced 95 years ago this month continued through the generations as evidenced by this note I received from Dr. Albert Dumas’s grandson, Joseph, a few days ago: “I see we have a mutual friend in Vern Smith, formerly Atlanta Bureau Chief of Newsweek. As a boy, Vern had been a patient of my father, Dr. Albert W. Dumas, Jr. (1903-1971); and we have a link through my grandfather. Thank you for the informative and nuanced biography of Madam C.J. Walker. You were the only one who could have done the subject justice. In the narrative, you wrote of my paternal grandfather, Dr. Albert W. Dumas, Sr.(1876-1945), and his brother, Dr. Henry Dumas, of Natchez, Miss., who hosted Madam Walker during her visit to Mississippi circa, 1917-1919. One day, I had hoped an opportunity would present itself to express my family’s gratitude for your entry about our patriarchs of whom we remain proud. Today, Facebook presented such an opportunity.”

Dumas Pharmacy 1912 (Photo by Grover Stanton/Courtesy Joseph Dumas)

Truly Joseph Dumas–a kindred spirit in the preservation of family stories–made my day. And what patriarchs, indeed, he has to celebrate! His grandfather, Dr. Albert Woods Dumas, Sr, was born in Houma, Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana into a large family of achievers. He was elected president of the National Medical Association in 1941 just fifteen years after yet another brother, Dr. Michel O. Dumas, had served in the same position. Dr. Michel also served as chairman of the board of Howard University’s School of Medicine. Dr. Albert, Sr. and his pharmacist brother, Henry, owned a medical building and drugstore in downtown Natchez and were founding members of the Natchez Negro Business League.

At this point, I’ve spent so many years doing research on African American success stories that I’m no longer surprised by the existence of people like the Dumas Brothers, which is not to say that I don’t also still stand in awe of their accomplishments. The Doctors Dumas may have been the exception to the rule a century ago, but the intelligence, motivation and hunger that spurred them on was in rich supply among black men and women born during the generations immediately after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Dumas Brothers Pharmacy 1912 (Courtesy Joseph Dumas)

Recently I’d read an article about Madam Walker in which another writer speculated about whether she had been able to stay in hotels at a time of the most horrendous segregation and discrimination. Indeed, I was able to tell the article’s publisher that she occasionally had been a guest in the few first class black-owned hotels that existed in the United States during the early 20th century, but I also shared that she usually preferred to stay in private homes of prominent African Americans in the many cities she visited. Seeing photos of the Dumas residence, which still stands in Natchez today, is evidence of why she had such a preference.

Madam Walker and A'Lelia Walker with chauffeur Otho Patton 1912 (Madam Walker Family Archives http://www.aleliabundles.com)

The more I write about Madam Walker and A’Lelia Walker–and the world they inhabited–the more I realize how few people truly know the accomplishments of successful African Americans during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many readers tell me how surprised they are to learn that there were were black doctors, attorneys, entrepreneurs and entertainers who owned homes and businesses and who traveled and lived abroad. Many think the high achievement we see today is a recent phenomenon. But it most surely is not.

For a fascinating history lesson, check out Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite 1880 to 1920 by Willard Gatewood, a dear friend and former University of Arkansas professor, who died just a few weeks ago. For more about Natchez’s prosperous black community, take a look at Jack E. Davis’s Race against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930.
And by all means, visit Joseph Dumas’s blog, both to learn more about his fascinating family and to experience the stunning photos he’s taken during his world travels through the years.

For more information about Madam Walker–the early 20th century entrepreneur, philantrophist, arts patron and activist–and A’Lelia Walker–the Harlem Renaissance arts patron and salon hostess–we welcome you to our websites: http://www.madamcjwalker.com/and www.madamwalkerfamilyarchives.wordpress.com

Visit us on Facebook at A’Lelia Bundles-Author, Madam C. J. Walker Biography and Madam Walker Family Archives

Copyright: A’Lelia Bundles (www.aleliabundles.com)  If you quote from this article, please credit A’Lelia Bundles (www.aleliabundles.com)

I grew up in a home surrounded by items that had belonged to Madam Walker–the early twentieth century hair care entrepreneur and philanthropist–and her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, who was to become an icon of the Harlem Renaissance. And ofcourse with a name like “A’Lelia,” there was an obvious connection since both my mother and I are named for Madam Walker’s daughter.
          The china that we used on special occasions had been purchased by Madam Walker. The Chickering baby grand piano on which I learned to read music, had been in A’Lelia Walker’s 136th Street Harlem townhouse and Edgecombe Avenue pied-a-terre. And, yet, as a child I was never made to feel as if Madam Walker were the center of my universe or that I had any obligation to carry on or live up to a legacy. For that I can thank my late mother, who was wise enough to know that each generation must find its own passions and accomplishments.

     Today, as Walker’s biographer and only great-great-granddaughter, I am proud to honor her legacy as president of the Madam Walker Family Archives–the world’s largest private collection of Walker photographs, letters, business records, clothing, furniture and memorabilia–and as a board member of the Madam Walker Theatre Center, a National Historic Landmark in Indianapolis that once housed the original Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. 

A'Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker's biographer and great-great-granddaughter (Ebony Photo)

To read the full article go to “A Family Perpective: Celebrating Madam Walker’s Legacy” at http://www.aleliabundles.com/2011/09/22/a-family-perspective-celebrating-madam-walkers-legacy-2/ from her great-great-granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles’s blog at www.aleliabundles.com

Madam Walker with her agents at the 1917 national Walker Beauty Culturist Convention in Philadelphia/Madam Walker Family Archives (aleliabundles.com)

On August 31, 1917, Madam C. J. Walker hosted the first national convention of her Walker “beauty culturists” at Philadelphia’s Union Baptist Church. More than 200 women from all over the United States gathered to learn about sales, marketing and management at what was one of the earliest professonal gatherings of American women entrepreneurs.

Walker–who founded her Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company during the spring of 1906 in Denver after marrying her third husband, Charles Joseph “C.J.” Walker, earlier that year–had first begun selling hair care products in St. Louis as an agent for Annie Malone–who was to become her fiercest competitor–around the time of the 1904 World’s Fair. When Walker experienced business conflicts with Malone–and realized that she could improve upon Malone’s products and marketing techniques–she made the decision to establish her own company. Years earlier she had been exposed to the business of hair care by her brothers, who were barbers in St. Louis during the 1880s and 1890s when black men dominated the barbering trade in America.

An early Madam Walker ad circa 1907-Madam Walker Family Archives (aleliabundles.com)

“After receiving such remarkable results,”she wrote in a 1911 promotional booklet after moving to Indianapolis, “I established a place for the care of scalps and growing hair…After one year’s use on myself and others, I became so thoroughly convinced of its merits that I decided to travel and place it within the reach of the thousands whom I knew were in need of it, although I was discouraged in doing so by the many who were using my goods and treatments in Denver, Colo., where I first established my methods.”

Madam Walker's First Ad April 20, 1906 (Madam Walker Family Archives aleliabundles.com)

Between 1906 and 1919, Madam Walker traveled throughout the United States, the Caribbean and Central America training sales agents and promoting her products. In 1916–two years before cosmetics mogul Mary Kay Ash was born–Walker began organizing the women into state and local chapters of the Madam Walker Beauty Culturists League in anticipation of her 1917 convention.

Like Ash, Walker gave prizes and money to the women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new agents.

Madam Walker Convention Badge (Madam Walker Family Archives aleliabundles.com)

But she also rewarded the women whose chapters had contributed the most to charity in their communities. Walker was determined that her agents use their influence and financial resources to affect political and social change. A member of the organizing committee for the NAACP’s July 28, 1917 Silent Protest Parade against lynching, Walker led her convention delegates in sending a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson decrying the East St. Louis riots where at least 39 African Americans had been murdered.

The telegram read: “We, the representatives of the National Convention of the Mme. C. J. Walker Agents, in convention assembled, and in a larger sense representing twelve million

Silent Protest Parade July 28, 1917 in New York (NAACP Image)

Negroes, have keenly felt the injustice done our race and country through the recent lynching at Memphis, Tennessee and the horrible race riot at East St. Louis. Knowing that no people in all the world are more loyal and patriotic than the Colored people of America, we respectfully submit to you this our protest against the continuation of such wrongs and injustices in this ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ and we further respectfully urge that you as President of these United States use your great influence that congress enact the necessary laws to prevent a recurrence of such disgraceful affairs.”

Madam Walker and other Harlem leaders delivered this anti-lynching petition to the White House on Sept 1, 1917 (Madam Walker Family Archives http://www.aleliabundles.com)

After the Silent Protest Parade, Madam Walker joined a group of Harlem leaders–including Realtor John Nail, NAACP officer James Weldon Johnson, New York Age publisher Fred Moore and Rev. Frederick Cullen–on a trip to Washington to deliver a petition to the White House expressing the same sentiment the Walker agents’s telegram conveyed.

The next year Walker hosted her second annual convention at Chicago’s Olivet Baptist Church. She died at her home Villa Lewaro in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York on May 25, 1919.

For more information about Walker’s political and business activities, we invite you to read On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam by Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer, A’Lelia Bundles. To order a copy or to contact A’Lelia go to www.aleliabundles.com

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A'Lelia Walker wearing her favorite Chinese amber prayer beads (Madam Walker Family Archives/www.aleliabundles.com)

After a day of champagne, lobster and laughter with friends, A’Lelia Walker–my great-grandmother and daughter of entrepreneur, Madam C. J. Walker–died in a cottage near the beach in Long Branch, New Jersey. Her funeral–with music, poetry and great oratory–was as grand as her Harlem Renaissance era parties.

Hope you’ll enjoy my essay, “A’Lelia Walker’s Grand Harlem Funeral.”

A'Lelia Walker's funeral in Harlem August 1931 (Madam Walker Family Archives/aleliabundles.com)

Faith Ringgold's "The Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles" 1991 (www.faithringgold.com)

Between friendship links on Facebook and research on Ancestry.com (which I’ve decided is Facebook for the dearly departed), I’ve been able to make connections and conduct a level of intimate research for my new book about my great-grandmother, A’Lelia Walker, that I couldn’t have dreamed of when I was writing On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker.

A few days ago, a little nugget from 1910 about one of A’Lelia Walker’s friends led me to an article about a friend of hers named Ringgold. Such an unusual surname. So of course I thought of Faith Ringgold–artist, quilter, author, professor and mother of author Michele Wallace–and wondered if there were any connection. I couldn’t resist reaching out to Michele, with whom I share a passion for preserving the legacy of accomplished female relatives. Fortunately, she has been kind enough to agree to investigate the lead. If a 100 year old friendship between A’Lelia Walker and one of Michele’s Ringgold family members materializes, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised. Through the magic of social media–and apparently the deep need some of us in this generation have to connect with the ancestors--the six degrees of separation continue to collapse and conflate into one or two. 

Artist Faith Ringgold (Photographer Grace Matthews) http://www.faithringgold.com

The bonus for me–in these dog days of record breaking summer temperatures when sunflowers are in full bloom– is that I always have cherished the knowledge that an artist of Faith Ringgold’s stature had featured my great-great-grandmother in one of her iconic quilts: “The French Collection Part I: The Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles.” Not only is Madam Walker seated at the table of luminary black women, but so is Ida B. Wells, the great-grandmother of my friend, Michelle Duster, with whom I’ve had the joy of sharing the stories of our ancestors at Chicago’s DuSable Museum and with social studies teachers in Flint, Michigan.

“Sunflowers” has become one of Faith Ringgold’s most popular and most widely exhibited quilts.  Here’s what Mary Fifield wrote for Vermont Woman when it was exhibited at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in 2007: “Surrounded by the flowers, eight African American women freedom fighters who blazed a fearless trail through American history—including Coretta Scott King, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks—line the mid-ground, holding the edges of an outspread quilt pieced with more sunflowers. To the side and slightly behind them stands a shyly courting Vincent van Gogh, proffering his vase of sunflowers in homage to the venerable ladies assembled, some of whom look as if they sense the presence of their artist-suitor, but none directly turning back towards him. Their expressions are contemplative and only a few look directly at the viewer. The range of skin color among the women—ebony, charcoal, sienna, cinnamon, peach—echoes the spectrum of hues in the flowers. Van Gogh’s colors, warm-toned in his buttery straw hat and rusty beard, echo the petal haloes; his shirt is the color of the sky. Ringgold has likened the sunflowers in this work to African Americans in solidarity: many together, tall, strong and turning their faces to follow the sun.”

We hope you’ll visit us on Facebook at our Madam Walker Family Archives Page and our Madam C. J. Walker Biography Page. For more information, please contact me at www.aleliabundles.com and at www.madamcjwalker.com

Madam Walker's Chinese silk shawl and the Addison Scurlock portrait in which it was worn (Madam Walker Family Archives/aleliabundles.com)

I shared stories about that magical visit–and my rediscovery of a steamer trunk filled with Walker family treasures–in the prologue of my book, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker. My dear PaPa had saved all the items I remembered from my childhood visits to his Indianapolis apartment: Madam Walker’s mother-of-pearl opera glasses, my grandmother Mae’s wedding dress, my great-grandmother A’Lelia Walker’s 1919 marriage license (complete with pressed baby’s breath) and her gold filigree-trimmed negligee.

But perhaps my most prized find that day was the shawl Madam Walker had worn in the circa 1912 Addison Scurlock photograph of her that now has become iconic.

We selected that well-known photograph for the United States Postal Service’s Black Heritage Series stamp of Madam Walker, which was unveiled in January 1998 at Indianapolis’s Madam Walker Theatre Center, one of three National Historic Landmarks associated with Madam Walker’s legacy.

A'Lelia Bundles, Carole Simpson, LeGree Daniels and others at the first day of issue ceremony or the Madam Walker stamp 1998

A few years ago, when I learned from friends that a small carte de visite of the photograph was up for auction and that the National Portrait Gallery was planning to bid, I must admit that I cringed at the thought of something so precious being auctioned off to the highest bidder. As a family member, it was an honor to donate one of the cartes de visite from our Madam Walker Family Archives and to know that Madam Walker would be included in the NPG’s permanent collection as well as in the Smithsonian’s traveling exhibition, Women of Our Time: Twentieth Century Photographs from the National Portrait Gallery.

Madam Walker's portrait by Addison Scurlock was donated by the Madam Walker Family Archives to the National Portrait Gallery.

More recently, the photograph has become a part of another Smithsonian traveling exhibition, Portraits of a City: The Scurlock Photographic Studio, and the book, Picturing the Promise, both initiatives of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, where much of our Madam Walker Family Archives eventually will reside.

On the rare occasions when I hold the shawl–made of ivory Chinese hand-embroidered silk–I imagine Madam Walker in Addison Scurlock’s Washington, DC studio on U Street as he or one of his assistants carefully draped the garment around her shoulders. To have one’s photograph taken by Scurlock was to have arrived, and something she would have been particularly conscious of in 1912 as she was emerging as a nationally known entrepreneur and polishing her image and her advertisements.

Among the other famous African Americans who posed for Scurlock were biologist Ernest Everett Just, attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, scholars Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, diplomat Ralph Bunche, composer Duke Ellington, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, educators Booker T. Washington and Mary McLeod Bethune and NACW founder Mary Church Terrell.

We’d love to have you visit us on Facebook at Madam Walker and A’Lelia Walker Family Archives  and Madam C. J. Walker Official Biography. For more information about Madam Walker’s life, visit our website at www.madamcjwalker.com. To contact A’Lelia Bundles, visit www.aleliabundles.com

Madam Walker's Gravesite at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx (www.aleliabundles.com)

June 30, 2011: Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today announced that The Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx–where enterpreneur Madam C. J. Walker and her Harlem Renaissance arts patron daughter, A’Lelia Walker, are buried–has been designated a National Historic Landmark, the highest recognition accorded to the nation’s most historically significant properties.

There are two other National Historic Landmarks associated with the legacy of the Walker women: The Madam Walker Theatre Center, a cultural arts organization in Indianapolis, and Villa Lewaro, the home Madam Walker built in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York in 1918.

Madam Walker died on May 25, 1919 at Villa Lewaro, where her funeral was held on May 30. Among the pallbearers were New York Age publisher Fred Moore, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, and Alpha Phi Alpha founder Vertner Tandy, Villa Lewaro’s architect.

Pallbearers for Madam Walker's Funeral (Madam Walker Family Archives/A'Lelia Bundles/www.aleliabundles.com)

A’Lelia Walker, who held a private ceremony for her mother at Woodlawn on June 3, 1919, was herself buried there in August 1931.

Among the famous Americans also buried at Woodlawn are Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, singers Florence Mills and Celia Cruz, financier Jay Gould, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, vaudevillian Bert Williams, author Herman Melville, composer Irving Berlin, publisher Joseph Pulitzer and dozens of other jazz greats and entertainers.

A’Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer, serves on the board of the Friends of Woodlawn Cemetery and is owner of the lot where the Walker women are buried. She is the author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker.

From Woodlawn’s news release: “Woodlawn, which will celebrate its 150th anniversary beginning next year, is one of the nation’s finest examples of a 19th-century garden cemetery. It is home to the largest and most distinguished collection of historic mausoleums in the nation, and is a still active cemetery. The designation recognizes its outstanding landscape design and collection of art and architecture. The designation also recognizes Woodlawn’s significant role in memorializing and celebrating prominent Americans, who shaped American history and culture. Since Woodlawn’s founding in 1863, 310,000 people—from Gilded Age magnates to pioneers for women’s rights to Harlem Renaissance writers and musicians, as well as artists, athletes, and ordinary citizens— have been interred on the cemetery’s 400 acres.”

For more information visit our Facebook pages: Madam Walker and A’Lelia Walker Family Archives and A’Lelia Bundles. For historical research, contact A’Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer.

Roland Hayes 1924 Concert Program (Madam Walker Family Archives of A'Lelia Bundles http://www.aleliabundles.com)

Several years ago, I came across this  program from lyric tenor Roland Hayes’s January 15, 1924 program at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall among Mae’s belongings. It now is part of my Madam Walker/A’Lelia Walker Family Archives, the largest private collection of Walker photographs, business records, personal letters, clothing and Walker memorabilia.

At the time of the concert, Mae recently had moved to Chicago. Like others in the city’s black community, she had looked forward to hearing Hayes sing selections from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” black British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s “Hiawatha” and spirituals, including “Go Down Moses,”  arranged by Harry T. Burleigh, in one of his first American concerts after his triumphant return from Europe. After the performance, one black newspaper reported:  “The absolute hush that has been referred to so often in Mr. Hayes’ concerts was evident here as before, for the audience seemed not to want to miss a note that was so beautifully produced. The wonderful diction, which made every person able to understand the words uttered even if in a foreign language, that they were not able to interpret. His German, French and Italian were given with the ease and accuracy of a native of those countries, and it is interesting to know that Mr. Hayes speaks French and German. Encores were many and still more were desired.”

Hayes (June 3, 1887 to Janaury 1, 1977) was a “lyric tenor and considered to be the first African American male concert artist to receive major critical acclaim.”

Roland Hayes Concert Program (www.aleliabundles.com/Walker Family Archives)

Visit us on Facebook at A’Lelia Bundles and at Madam Walker Family Archives. For more information about the Madam Walker Family Archives, contact Archives president A’Lelia Bundles at this link.

Madam Walker, Madame Walker

A'Lelia Walker's Sterling Silver Flask (from the Madam Walker/A'Lelia Walker Family Archives http://www.aleliabundles.com)

Now that I’m into the serious writing phase of my new biography of A’Lelia Walker (1885-1931), my great-grandmother and the only daughter of entrepreneur and philanthropist Madam C. J. Walker, I’ll be posting more stories about the discoveries I’ve been making.

I’m truly fortunate to have inherited a trove of letters, clothes, furniture and other personal items that belonged to the Walker women. Among them is this flask.

A’Lelia Walker rarely missed a Howard-Lincoln football game between 1918 and 1931. This rivalry –as legendary among African Americans as the Harvard-Yale competition was to Ivy Leaguers–brought thousands of alumni and friends together each Thanksgiving Day, alternating between Philadelphia (the closest big city to Lincoln’s rural Pennsylvania campus) and Washington, DC.