On Her Own Ground

  Madam Walker had also learned that some of her Pittsburgh agents were substituting “white vaseline and anything else that they can get cheap” for her more expensive Glossine, the moisturizing ointment she recommended they use in combination with the heated metal pressing comb. As well, several disgruntled agents were revolting over her recent decision to sell Glossine through retail outlets, complaining that the new policy had severely reduced their sales of the product. “They want me to take it out of the drug stores,” Madam Walker wrote Ransom. Without question, she knew she would face the issue again during her August convention.

  But she refused to let the momentary crises stymie her new initiatives. With plans for an expanded export operation, she was in search of a second interpreter to handle correspondence with her Spanish-speaking trade. And with intentions of organizing a cadre of national traveling agents, she was interviewing women—and a few men—in each city, searching for candidates with the proper blend of skill, personality and ambition to represent her and her company. “The pictures,” she told a prospective saleswoman, referring to the stereopticon slides, are “the most important thing for it is that that arouses such keen interest.” An entertaining presentation, she contended, was the most effective element in attracting new customers and trainees. “It isn’t [just] a matter of going from town to town organizing clubs. That is a secondary matter. You can easily [organize them] after you get them together.”

  In order to establish a visible and permanent presence beyond her New York and Indianapolis offices, Madam Walker also had begun scouting locations for Walker schools and parlors. With the Chicago salon nearly remodeled, she now targeted St. Louis and Columbus for future Walker operations. Her vision: to create Walker franchises all over the country by financing the salon construction, then turning the operation over to the franchisee after she had been reimbursed—at 6 percent interest—for her initial outlay. Her long-term profit, she calculated, would come from increased sales volume. In explaining the arrangement to one potential shop owner, she wrote, “I don’t think you quite understand me yet. I do not want you as a manager. I only want the public to think it is my business because of the prestige it will lend the place. All I want out of it is the money I loaned you until you can get on your feet.” While assuring the prospective franchisee that “the parlor will be yours,” she added a caveat designed to protect her investment and her reputation. “I want the parlor to remain in my name, and I reserve the right to make a change any time that I am not pleased with the way the business is run.”

  Urging the interested operator to bring in at least two additional rent-paying hair culturists to help cover “gas, electric and all that,” she required that the franchisee display sufficient dynamism to sustain a self-sufficient, self-supporting business. “I don’t think it a good idea to pay salaries,” she wrote Ransom. “It is better to let them work up their own business.” When her first choice to run the Columbus salon backed out, Madam Walker viewed her as “the most foolish woman I have ever seen, after asking me to help her then turning right around and demanding a salary.” In the woman’s place, Madam Walker sent Louise Thompson, her traveling assistant, to open the shop, deciding that it “will be better to have some one right from Lelia College to start them off.”

  When Ransom questioned the wisdom of developing satellite offices, Madam Walker begged to differ. “You said we should . . . have but one school of beauty culture and that in New York. I do not quite agree with you there, as in every section of the country you will find a Moler College or a Burnham College and they are known by that name everywhere. I think it lends dignity,” she said, referring to two white cosmetology schools that had been founded in the late nineteenth century.

  Having been away from New York since January, Madam Walker returned to her 136th Street home in late April 1918 eager to plunge into the daily office routine. But for Lelia, who had enjoyed the freedom of running the operation without interference, her mother’s micromanagement was an annoyance. “Mother stews and frets and gets into everything and therefore she is always nervous and worked up,” she had written Ransom earlier in the year. But with a massive log of back orders—caused both by wartime restrictions and by snafus in her Indianapolis factory—Madam Walker could hardly be blamed for being miffed. “We have been out of goods for a week,” she wrote Ransom. “You should keep a supply on the road all the time and should we get overstocked we could let you know. To be out of goods has certainly upset everything with the agents here.” Four days later the situation had worsened. “What is the trouble that we cannot get any preparations here?” she demanded of Ransom. “It is simply demoralizing the business . . . Please send us Tetter Salve and Grower by mail and keep some on the road until we get some on hand.” At the end of May, still needing Grower “very badly,” she complained again, “The situation here is getting terribly embarrassing.” Equally frustrated by a shortage of tins, Lelia was also fending off angry customers and agents. “I started yesterday to make Grower. The Grower matter is certainly critical here. The folks are furious,” she sputtered in a letter to Ransom. “Grower is in greater demand than any of the preparations, so when we send for preparation, please send more Grower than anything else.” As long as the war continued, they would have to contend with a number of similar problems.

  Since 1912, Madam Walker had rarely missed the summertime convention circuit—the Baptists, the AMEs and the AME Zions; the Knights of Pythias and the Court of Calanthe; the National Negro Business League and the National Association of Colored Women. At first she was more observer than participant, but during July of 1918 she was especially enthusiastic about making the rounds, knowing that she would be lauded at every stop. “Was surely received with honor in Denver,” she wrote after registering for the NACW’s eleventh biennial. “The only regret was that I could not remain with them longer that they might further demonstrate their appreciation for me,” she joked with Ransom of her triumphant homecoming to the city where she had sold her first tin of Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.

  Now, as one of the organization’s most famous members, Madam Walker was invited to appear before the delegates several times during the proceedings. Leading a Tuesday afternoon panel on women in business, she “made an appeal for club women to get closer in touch with our women in the factory.” That evening at another assembly she advocated racial solidarity and self-help in the struggle for “equality of opportunity,” reminding the delegates that “none of us may live our own lives because we are all dependent on one another.”

  By far the highlight of her week unfolded in the sanctuary of Shorter AME, her former Denver church, as she and Mary Burnett Talbert presided over a mortgage-burning ceremony celebrating the successful two-year campaign to purchase Cedar Hill, the Washington, D.C., home where Frederick Douglass had lived from 1877 until his death in 1895. With Douglass’s violin and personal library already donated by his widow, the women of the NACW sketched ambitious plans to convert the white brick Victorian house—with its panoramic view of the capital’s grandest monuments—into an archive akin to a black Mount Vernon. “It will be beautiful and all relics, manuscripts and articles of historical value to the race will be accumulated therein for the benefit of the entire race, and will become a mecca to which the children will journey for information and inspiration,” they promised.

  As the women tingled with anticipation, Massachusetts teacher Elizabeth Carter read aloud from the mortgage, then handed it to NACW president Talbert, who had spearheaded the fund-raising drive. While the delegates sang “Hallelujah, ’Tis Done,” Madam Walker—whose $500 gift made her the largest single donor—carefully held a slender lighted candle beneath the precious document, igniting its edges until the paper was consumed in flames. “I am glad to be able to show the world by this simple, visible act that the mortgage so long threatening this historic home has been reduced to ashes,” she said with pride. Near Madam Walker’s side was her Des Moines friend Mrs. S. Joe Brown
, who had raised a total of $750 from individuals. Brown, who had been born in a sharecropper’s shack and who had lived in an attic during her first few months in Denver, had helped rescue the hilltop home of one of America’s most significant and accomplished figures.

  Accompanied by Sue Brown, Madam Walker traveled by train to Des Moines for the second time that year. Before “a splendid mixed audience” in the city’s “leading white church,” and then at a local high school, she reviewed “the valor of our soldiers, from Crispus Attucks, who fell upon Boston Common, to the boys who used the bolo knife upon the Western front,” referring to the recent heroic efforts of Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts of New York’s 369th. Though wounded by grenades, they alone had repelled two dozen German attackers with hand grenades, a rifle and a knife.

  Before leaving Iowa, Madam Walker received the news that President Wilson had made his long-awaited statement on lynching. Under pressure from War Secretary Newton Baker, Wilson issued an open letter condemning mob violence on July 26. “My anxiety is growing at the situation in this country among the negroes,” Baker had written Wilson after a July 1 meeting with Tuskegee president Robert Russa Moton. During the private session Moton had despaired over the unabated rise in lynchings since the start of the war, noting nineteen killings in May alone. Convinced that words from Wilson would have a “wholesome effect” on the nation, Baker also knew his President was vulnerable in the international arena as the Allies looked askance at America’s entrenched racial dilemma. While the President “did not shrink from plotting for a new world,” wrote historian Kenneth O’Reilly, he “claimed his own nation’s racial landscape was beyond his ability.” Nevertheless the reluctant President’s statement was one of the only encouraging signals African Americans had seen from his administration. The “mob spirit,” he admonished, “vitally affects the honor of the nation and the very character and integrity of our institutions. I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives any sort of countenance is not a true son of this great democracy, but its betrayer.” Wilson went as far as a steadfast states’ righter might go, “earnestly and solemnly” imploring “the Governors of all the States, the law officers of every community, and, above all, the men and women of every community in the United States” to “cooperate—not passively merely, but actively and watchfully—to make an end of this disgraceful evil.” In the end, however, he failed to mention the black victims who disproportionately endured the attacks and declined to offer any specific remedies for the racism that fueled the crimes.

  What Madam Walker was thinking that day is not recorded. But her August 1917 visit to the White House had rendered her highly sensitive to the President’s words and deeds, especially when they concerned matters of race. As she boarded the Chicago-bound train to attend the second annual Walker hair culturists convention, she had several hours to contemplate President Wilson’s remarks and to prepare the message she and her delegates would soon send to him.

  As she arrived in Chicago a few days early for her August 1–3 assembly, she knew the grumbling about drugstore sales of Glossine threatened to disrupt the proceedings. One group had gone so far as to submit a petition to Ransom: “We the undersigned agents of Mme. C. J. Walker do not feel that we have the proper protection from you by placing your goods in the drugstores. In this way our sale of goods has been greatly cut down.”

  A letter from Ransom outlining their concerns awaited Madam Walker at the home of her Chicago hosts. “Among the many objections which they set forth, the one to my mind having the most force is that when drug stores handle the preparations, persons who refuse to take the course and treatments go to a drug store, buy a cheap comb and Glossine and . . . hold themselves out as agents and thereby deceive a lot of people.” In agreement with the agents, he urged Madam Walker to discontinue selling Glossine to retailers. “The real thing after all is making the agents feel that they enjoy some special privileges . . . and that these privileges are not in like manner extended to others who are not agents and who have not paid anything to take the course,” he wrote, warning her to expect a floor fight. “One thing is sure. You will have to get your position clearly outlined and having once taken same you will have to stick to it.”

  On the first day of the convention, when the most outspoken agents mounted their challenge, Madam Walker remained resolute, insisting to the three hundred assembled delegates that selling Glossine in drugstores was a financial necessity in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Already Anthony Overton, a man whose business acumen she respected, had managed to become the first black cosmetics manufacturer to place his products in Woolworth’s. White-owned companies continued to make inroads in black newspapers and corner stores with aggressive sales campaigns. And, truth be told, she believed that some of the very agents who opposed her policy were cutting corners by substituting cheap vaseline for Glossine.

  “You doubtless are aware that these conventions are a great expense to me,” she reminded the delegates in her opening remarks. “I have conducted my business this year almost at a loss owing to the unusual cost of material, heavy taxes, etc. I have not raised prices because I did not want my agents to suffer.” Knowing full well that some of her agents were at that moment threatening to revolt, she pledged, “You have been loyal to me and by the help of God, I am trying to be loyal to you.” With faith that the mutual loyalty shared by many of her agents would help thwart her opponents, she appealed to their better interests. “My friends, if out of these conventions I can . . . be of some real service to the Race, I say that if I can inspire such a spirit in the heart of one who has never thought along such lines, my money will have been well invested.” And although she refrained from publicly castigating her detractors, she was prepared to part ways with those who could not grasp her message. “Never one to run away from a fight, Madam won out,” her longtime secretary Violet Reynolds remembered decades later.

  With the Glossine flap tamped down, Madam Walker was primed to move on to the real purpose of her meeting: educating the delegates about business, politics and foreign affairs, and exposing them to prominent “race men and women.” In addition to hearing presentations from three of her NACW sisters, the agents were addressed by one of Chicago’s first black aldermen, as well as by a former U.S. minister to Liberia. But the most riveting message was delivered by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, whose nationally distributed Chicago Defender could claim much credit for portraying the city as such a “promised land” that 50,000 Southern black migrants arrived between 1916 and 1918. The war, he often wrote, provided “opportunity” for blacks trapped by a sharecropping, Jim Crow society. “These same factories, mills and workshops that have been closed to us, through necessity are being opened to us,” he editorialized in the paper he had founded in 1905. “We are to be given a chance, not through choice but because it is expedient. Slowly but surely all over the country we are gradually edging in first this and then that place, getting a foothold before making a place for our brother.” Transported from city to city by Pullman porters and black entertainers, the Defender’s local and national circulation mushroomed from 10,000 to 93,000 between 1916 and 1918. By 1920, Abbott claimed to have “by far the largest circulation any black newspaper had ever achieved,” with more than 280,000 readers, two-thirds of them outside Chicago.

  On the second day at the convention as Madam Walker crossed the stage for her annual keynote address, she was greeted by a standing ovation. “We are here not only to transact the business of this convention, not only to inspire and receive inspiration, but to pledge anew our loyalty and patriotism . . . and to say to our President that the Colored women of America are ready and willing . . . to make any sacrifice necessary to bring our boys home victorious,” she pronounced, aware that 7,000 black women had contributed $5 million to the most recent Liberty Loan drive.

  Praising her agents as “some of the best women the Race has produced,” she asserted that “nowhere will you fi
nd such a large number of successful business women as are among the delegates of this convention.” For those in the audience seeking her formula for prosperity, she made clear that her achievements had depended upon effort and sacrifice. “I want you to know that whatever I have accomplished in life I have paid for it by much thought and hard work. If there is any easy way, I haven’t found it,” she counseled. “My advice to every one expecting to go into business is to hit often and hit hard; in other words, strike with all your might.”

  The emphasis she had placed on the “benevolent side” of her organization remained paramount. “I want my agents to feel that their first duty is to humanity.” Concerned about the welfare of the black migrants, she exhorted the delegates “to do their bit to help and advance the best interests of the Race” by assuming responsibility for the needy in their communities. “I tell you that we have a duty to perform with reference to our brother and sister from the South. Shall we who call ourselves Christians sit still and allow them to be swallowed up and lost in the slums of these great cities?” she challenged fervently. “It is my duty, your duty, to go out in the back alleys and side streets and bring them into your home.” Always conscious of her own struggles during her early years in St. Louis, she continued her eloquent appeal: “Bring them into your clubs and other organizations where they can feel the spirit and catch the inspiration of higher and better living. Yes, lend them the encouragement of your friendly interest, that the light of hope may continue to shine in their eyes and worthy ambition continue to throb in their hearts.”