The first time A’Lelia Bundles visited the hamlet of Delta, Louisiana, in 1980, there were no signs welcoming her to the birthplace of her great-great grandmother, Sarah Breedlove. Neither was there any mention of Madam C.J. Walker, the name Breedlove took after marrying her second husband in St. Louis in 1906.
The man she spoke with at a gas station in town, where she stopped to inquire about possible descendents of Ms. Breedlove, seemed just as unaware of, or perhaps unimpressed by, Delta’s link to the woman regarded as the first female self-made millionaire in America.
“The clerk there said, ‘Well, there’s some colored ladies who live next door, and if anybody knows, they will,’” Bundles said on a recent call from her home in Washington, D.C. She figured it was worth a shot and walked over. “The two ladies there must have been in their eighties, but they remembered that Madam Walker had visited, and their mother knew her.”
At the time, Bundles was in the early stages of researching her family history and the remarkable life of Walker, who was born in Delta in 1867. A journalist by trade with degrees from Harvard and Columbia and a background producing TV news programs at NBC and ABC, she was uniquely qualified to dig into the story.
That research formed the foundation of her own life’s work. Bundles’s New York Times bestselling 2001 biography “On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker” became the central vehicle for reclaiming her great-great-grandmother’s legacy — how Walker escaped the poverty and inequality of the Reconstruction-era South, established herself as a successful entrepreneur, and became an activist against Jim Crow racism.
While Walker’s story began in Delta, the circumstances of her young life soon took her across the Mississippi River to Vicksburg. Both of her parents had died by the time she was seven years old, leaving her to live with a sister, Louvenia Powell, and Louvenia’s husband, Jesse. Around the same time, her brother, Alexander Breedlove, moved to Vicksburg and began working at C.L. Chambers Grocery on Washington Street. Soon, the Powells relocated there, too.
But Jesse was a violent man who viewed Sarah as a burden. She endured harsh circumstances while working as a domestic servant in white homes in Vicksburg, but when she was 14, she married a man named Moses McWilliams “in order to get a home of [her] own,” she once said. Bundles speculates the marriage could have been a common-law arrangement, as no marriage license exists, and neither of them could have afforded the $200 marriage bond, anyhow.
McWilliams’s death, likely in 1888, left her with few options. She left Mississippi for St. Louis with her three-year-old daughter, Lelia (later A’Lelia), to join her brothers Alexander, James and Solomon, who had moved north as part of the Exodusters movement to escape racial violence. They established themselves as barbers and began to amass social and political capital away from the violence inherent to Black life in the Deep South. Bundles posits this newfound mobility made an impression on Walker.
“That had to have been some kind of signal to her that political power was possible,” she said. “They had become leaders in the community. That must have planted some seeds for her.”
Walker began working as an agent for Annie Malone, who marketed cosmetics and haircare products created specifically for Black women, and relocated to Denver. After marrying Charles Walker, she rechristened herself Madam C.J. Walker and created her own brand of haircare products. The business grew, and she enlisted her daughter to manage the mail-order side while she and her husband worked on expanding into new regions. When she hired likeminded Black women to sell her products, the brand took off.
Bundles said that while the women she hired were happy to have haircare products that were designed for them, she was able to foster education and economic independence, and she encouraged them to become leaders in their communities and to become politically active. One of the signature moments in this progression, Bundles said, took place during Walker’s first national convention, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1917, where she hosted 200 women from across the U.S., the Caribbean and Central America.
“She gave prizes — not to the women who had sold the most products, but to the women who had contributed the most to charity,” Bundles said. “She told them in her keynote speech, ‘I want you to understand that as a Walker agent, your first duty is to humanity. I want others to look at us and realize that we care not just about ourselves, but about others.’”
At the end of the convention, the women sent a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson urging him to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime, in part a response to the recent East St. Louis Massacre, where up 150 African Americans were killed.
“For me, it’s this full-circle moment of being the first child in her family born free, struggling as a washerwoman until she was 38, being inspired by the women of St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal church [in St. Louis] — who were part of a national organization of Black women who had an infrastructure she modeled herself after — and then when she founded her business, she found a way to help other women in the way she had been helped.”
Forty-one years after Bundles made her first visit to Delta to learn about her ancestor’s life and struggles, Louisiana renamed the segment of State Highway 3218 that passes through town as the Madam C.J. Walker Memorial Highway. A sign bearing her image and a brief remembrance of her accomplishments now stands affixed to a signpost in the community.
Walker’s story also inspired a 2020 Netflix series, “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker,” starring Octavia Spencer as Bundles’s great-great-grandmother, loosely based on the biography Bundles wrote.
Her latest book, “Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance,” published in June 2025, explores the life of Walker’s daughter and her role in the artistic, intellectual and literary explosion of 1920s Harlem. As America’s first high-profile Black heiress, she was an arts patron and friend to W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, who dubbed her the “joy goddess” of the era.
As Bundles continues to bring her family’s inspiring story forward, she keeps the context of the times and the ripple effects of Walker’s courage and tenacity central in the telling.
“The haircare products, while fulfilling a need, were a means to an end,” she said. “They helped her to create a business that then helped Black women have economic independence.”
