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Did Madam C J Walker have an education?
Madam C. J. Walker, who was born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 in Delta, Louisiana, received very little formal education as a child. During the late 1800s and early 1900s very few …Americans completed high school or college. In Sarah's case, there were almost no public schools for black children in Louisiana because the state and local legislators refused to fund education for African Americans during that time. She learned some rudimentary skills in her church, but was mostly illiterate until after she moved to St. Louis and was exposed to more educated African Americans in her church, St. Paul AME. When her daughter enrolled in elementary school in St. Louis during the late 1880s, she began to learn along with her. Some of her daughter's teachers and principals were African Americans who had attended Oberlin College, one of the first American universities to enroll black students. Eventually she is said to have taken night school classes in St. Louis. Once she founded her hair care products company, she hired a personal tutor, Alice Kelly, who had been a teacher at a private black school in Kentucky, to help her improve her reading and writing skills. Walker, like many American entrepreneurs of her era, was considered a "self-taught" woman. She was a life-long learner who enjoyed reading the newspaper and keeping abreast of current events. She installed a library in her home, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Source: On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker by A'Lelia Bundles. (MORE)