By Carolyn Holbrook
On March 20, toward the end of Women’s History Month, Netflix premiered Self Made, a four-part mini series inspired by the life of Madam C.J. Walker, America’s first woman millionaire. It is so uncommon for historical television dramas to center black women who weren’t slaves that I was excited to tune in. I know about Madam Walker both from things I’ve heard and from her biography, On Her Own Ground: The Life & Times of Madam C.J. Walker (Scribner, 2002) written by her great granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles.
Rather than being inspired by the Self Made series, I was horrified as I watched this phenomenal woman be reduced to a greedy, thoughtless, jealous-hearted person invested in teaching black women to take the kink out of their hair in order to help them look more “acceptable.” It was also troubling to see her rival, Annie Turnbo Malone portrayed as a biracial villain who used her light skinned privilege to try to keep Walker from prospering and spent a lifetime trying to prove that Walker had stolen her invention. None of this is accurate. Filmmakers have license to reimagine the story of a life, but Self Made is a film that is laden with lies and worn out cliches that are so damaging to Black women.
Here’s the real story. Born Sarah Breedlove, Walker was the youngest child of formerly enslaved sharecroppers, the first in her family to be born after the Emancipation Proclamation. She was orphaned at the age of seven and worked as a washerwoman for much of her early life. Then, following an abusive marriage and wanting to provide her only daughter with a good education, she went to work for Annie Malone, selling hair care products Malone had invented to help black women who, like Sarah, struggled with hair loss due to poor hygiene, poor diet, scalp disease, and stress. Later, she created more products and, with her third husband, advertising expert C.J. Walker, built a hair care empire which she ran from 1905 until her death in 1919.
Not only was Madam Walker a brilliant entrepreneur, she was also an educator and philanthropist. Through a factory and schools that she built, she educated young black women and created well paying jobs for them in St. Louis, Indianapolis, Denver, Louisiana, Mississippi, Seattle, New York and other cities. In addition, she forged alliances with Booker T. Washington, the conservative founder of the Tuskegee Institute and later became an avid political activist who worked with W.E.B. DuBois in anti-lynching efforts along with Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
Madam Walker and Annie Malone were definitely business rivals but both were deeply invested in improving black women’s health and well being. Their success with “hair growing” was a natural result of teaching women to take better care of their health. Further, Malone, a powerful and wealthy woman in her own right, was not biracial. Like Walker, she was a brown skinned woman born to former slaves.
I have three daughters and five granddaughters and it is important to me that they know the ancestral women whose shoulders they stand on – women who succeeded in a variety of fields. Knowing how impressionable young people are, and knowing that most uninformed viewers (myself included) tend to take what they see at face value rather than taking note of the phrases “based on” or “inspired by,” I decided to find another copy of On Her Own Ground to share with my girls in order to ensure that they know the truth of who she really was. (There is an updated version of the book, retitled Self Made with a photo of Octavia Spencer as Madam Walker on the cover but I don’t trust that version. I fear that it might be skewed to perpetuate the story that is put forth in the film.)
I highly recommend that you find a copy of On Her Own Ground and set the record straight. Not only does the author discuss her great grandmother, Madam Walker, she also includes a ton of information about what was going on for black folks during that time in American history.
