Rising Over Adversity
We all face challenges at one point or another in life, but it is up to us to choose what we want to do about our challenges.
We could sit and just give up or find a solution to it, and we could even turn that solution into a product. I once wrote about the founder of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell. He founded the telephone because he was looking for a way to communicate with his deaf mother, and here we are today making calls here and there because he didn’t give up.
The woman who came to be known as Madam C. J. Walker, the first African American female millionaire in the United States, was born Sarah Breedlove on a Louisiana plantation in 1867, to former slaves who both died and left her an orphan by the time she was seven years old. She and her sister survived because they were willing to do the gruelling, dirty work of picking cotton in the fields of Louisiana and Mississippi.
When she was fourteen, she married a man who died six years later, leaving her alone with a young daughter. Sarah and her daughter moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where her four brothers had found work as successful barbers, and she took a job as a washer-woman, earning $1.50 per day.
During the 1890s, Sarah found herself with a strange scalp condition that caused her to lose most of her hair. She tried every possible remedy to make her hair grow back, but nothing was effective.
Sarah took a job as a sales representative for a hair products company and moved to Denver, Colorado, where she met and married Charles Joseph Walker and became known as “Madam C. J. Walker.”
Still suffering from hair loss, Sarah finally found a solution—in an unusual way. She dreamed about an old man who told her which ingredients to combine to make her hair grow back. The next day, she mixed the ingredients and tried the remedy, and it was successful!
Madam C. J. Walker quickly realised she had a product she could market and sell, so she opened her own business, producing and distributing “Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.”
To get her business off to a strong start, Madam Walker logged many miles as she personally travelled the United States for more than a year, going door-to-door telling people about her products and giving presentations wherever she could find an audience.
With diligence and determination, she continued to develop and perfect strategies for increasingly effective sales and marketing of her products.
In 1908, Madam Walker went to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to open a school to train a team of “Walker hair culturists” to help her in her growing business. Two years later, she had made her home and built a factory for the production and distribution of her products in Indianapolis—the metropolis of manufacturing in her day. Before the end of her first year in Indianapolis, Madam Walker gave one thousand dollars towards the building of a local YMCA for African Americans—a remarkable achievement for a woman who once supported herself by picking cotton, but one made possible because she worked hard and refused to give up.
In 1916, Madam Walker left Indianapolis for New York, though her Indianapolis factory continued to operate under the leadership of the forewoman she had trained. Because she refused to give up in the face of the personal problem of hair loss, Madam C. J. Walker went from picking cotton to being a pioneer in the beauty industry and the first African American woman to become a millionaire in the United States. Let her story inspire you to not give up when you face challenges, but to be creative, work hard, and persevere until you reach your full potential.
Madam C. J. Walker is another solution-minded person; she found her solution in the usual way, but I know if she had not consented to seeking a solution, she wouldn’t have found it.
Finding that single solution made her the first African-American millionaire in the United States. What are the challenges you are going through now? Why don’t you try your best to find a solution to it? Help yourself out of it, and when you are done, help others with the same challenges too.
Do you like what you’ve read? If so, please engage.
