Sarah Breedlove, later known as Madam C. J. Walker, was born near Delta, Madison Parish, Louisiana, the first free-born child in her family.
Sarah Breedlove, who would later become known to the world as Madam C. J. Walker, was born on December 23, 1867, near Delta, Madison Parish, Louisiana. She was the daughter of Minerva and Owen Breedlove, formerly enslaved sharecroppers, making Sarah the first member of her immediate family to be born free following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War.
Her birth into the harsh realities of Reconstruction-era Louisiana meant that from infancy she was surrounded by poverty, racial violence, and the labor of cotton sharecropping. Orphaned by age seven, she would go on to endure early widowhood, domestic servitude, and grinding poverty in her youth. Yet from these origins, she built one of the most successful Black-owned businesses in American history and became widely recognized as one of the first American women to become a self-made millionaire.
Her humble beginning in the rural South stands in stark contrast to the extraordinary trajectory of her later life, which included building a national manufacturing empire, constructing a grand estate in Irvington-on-Hudson, and becoming a major philanthropist and activist for African American civil rights. Her birth date is commemorated today by organizations such as the Library of Congress and the National Women's History Museum as a landmark date in American business and African American history.