Carrying the Torch: Madam C.J. Walker and the Movement She Never Finished

2023 Article rewritten by Mizz Taye, Founder of FāGamee and FāGamee Naturals

Let me be honest with you. When I first heard the name Madam C.J. Walker, I thought I knew the whole story. First Black female self-made millionaire. Hair grease. Factory in Indianapolis. Inspiring. The end.

But the more I actually dug into who this woman was — not just the headline, but the real story — the more I realized her legacy is so much bigger than what they put in the history books. And the more I realized that what I'm doing with FāGamee? It's not separate from her legacy. It's a continuation of it.

So today, I'm honoring her. Not with a surface-level highlight. With the real talk she deserved.

Who was Madam C.J. Walker... For Real?

Sarah Breedlove was born in 1867 in Delta, Louisiana, to formerly enslaved parents. She was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen to escape abuse, widowed at twenty. She worked as a washerwoman for nearly two decades — making a dollar and a half a day — to put her daughter through school.

She suffered from a scalp condition that caused significant hair loss, which was common among Black women at the time due to stress, poor nutrition, infrequent bathing (because most homes had no indoor plumbing), and the damage caused by harsh lye-based soaps. While working with her brothers in a barbershop and studying products by another early Black hair care entrepreneur, Annie Turnbo Malone, she developed her own formula — and in 1905, the Walker Method was born.

But here's what they always gloss over: Madam Walker wasn't just selling hair products. She was building an infrastructure for Black women's economic independence.

She trained over 40,000 women as Walker Agents — Black women who could earn their own income, own their own businesses, and support their own families at a time when the system was designed to keep them out of every room that mattered. She built a factory. A beauty school. She funded scholarships, supported the NAACP, and contributed to anti-lynching campaigns. She built a 34-room mansion — Villa Lewaro — not to show off, but to prove to the world what Black women were capable of when given the tools.

She testified before the National Negro Business League while Booker T. Washington tried to shut her down. She didn't back up.

She made over a million dollars before she died in 1919 at 51 years old — and she gave most of it away.

Tell me that ain't power.

What the Industry Learned from Her... And What It Forgot

Madam Walker proved something that the beauty industry took note of: Black women spend money on their hair. A lot of it.

And do you know what the industry did with that? They flipped it. Instead of continuing what she built — products made for us, by us — they started making products aimed at us that were never actually designed with our hair in mind. Chemical relaxers that thinned edges. Shampoos with sulfates that stripped our already dry strands. Creams full of petroleum and synthetic ingredients that coated the hair shaft instead of nourishing it.

I remember thinking about this when I was standing in a drugstore aisle with two daughters, looking at shelves and shelves of products with the word "natural" on the label — and not a natural ingredient in sight. The marketing was for us. The product wasn't.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the things that define our beauty standard were never actually created for African American women. They were created to make us reach for something that looks absolutely nothing like us. And we've been throwing money at it for over a century.

Madam Walker never intended for it to go that way.

What She Started that I'm Continuing

When my daughter was around five years old, she had eczema so severe she was scratching gashes into her scalp. We went to one of the best dermatologists in Michigan. We were on state insurance. And you know what they kept giving her? The generic version of a cream she was allergic to. The pharmacy blamed the insurance. The insurance blamed the prescription. And meanwhile, my child was in pain.

That's what sent me down the rabbit hole of natural.

I started researching. I started creating. Aloe vera. Oils. No synthetics. No steroids. No chemicals that thin the skin and cause hair to fall out. And one by one, it started working. Her scalp cleared. Her hair grew. I didn't just create a product — I created a solution that the system refused to give us.

That's the same thing Madam Walker did.

She didn't wait for someone to make a product for her. She made it herself. She turned her own scalp condition into a movement. She didn't just solve her own problem — she solved it for 40,000 other women.

I'm not claiming to be Madam Walker. But I am claiming to be in the same lineage. Every woman who ever looked at a system that wasn't built for her and said, I'll build my own — we are all in the same lineage.

The Standard that Needs to be Burned Down

Here's something that Madam Walker understood that most people won't say out loud: the beauty industry's "normal" was never built around us.

Think about how long cosmetology school has been teaching that normal hair is straight hair. Type 1a. The smallest portion of the entire hair spectrum. And yet that's the standard that governs what products get made, what techniques get taught, what gets called professional.

Type 2. Type 3. Type 4. Wavy, curly, coily — that's the majority of the hair on Black women's heads. And we've been told for generations that our hair is difficult. Unruly. Unprofessional.

Walker knew. She knew our hair wasn't a problem to be solved. It was a glory to be cared for. And she built an empire on that belief.

At FāGamee, we don't use the word "normal" and we don't use the word "antiaging." Because my normal is not the same as your normal. And your hair — type 4, coily, kinky, curly, whatever — is not a deviation from standard. It is the standard. It's just that nobody built a billion-dollar industry around telling you that.

Until now.

The People Who Show Me I'm On the Right Track

I have older women who come to me and tell me they've spent decades — decades — giving their money to companies that never gave them results. They tried my products and looked at me like I had handed them something they'd been searching for their whole lives.

"Where have you been all my life?"

That's not about me. That's about what Madam Walker fought for — the right for Black women to experience their hair thriving. Not surviving. Thriving.

I have a daughter whose dreads are down to her waist — grown from her own scalp, no extensions, solely on products I made. I have a seven-year-old son whose hair is almost to the middle of his back. I use my shampoo and my oil on him. That's it. Nothing complicated. Nothing chemical.

It just goes to show you don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on products that were never created for you.

What FāGamee Is Building

Madam Walker built a factory. A school. A network. She didn't just sell — she taught.

That's the same vision behind FāGamee.

The products are here. But so are the courses. So is the knowledge. Because I have been doing this for long enough that I could walk into a cosmetology licensing course and teach the instructor. And I say that with full humility — not arrogance — because I've lived this. I've researched this. I've put it to work on my own children's scalps and skin.

I refused to pay for a piece of paper to validate what I already know. That's not pride. That's the same defiance Madam Walker had when she said: I built this. I know what I'm doing.

And I'm building it for you. For your daughters. For the older women who deserve to know it's not too late. For the young girls who shouldn't have to spend their twenties, thirties, and forties figuring out that what they were sold was never designed to help them.

To Madam Walker

You started something in 1905 that the system has been trying to dilute ever since.

You showed us what it looks like when a Black woman trusts her own hands, her own knowledge, her own community — and builds something that lasts.

We are still here. Still building. Still natural.

FāGamee Naturals is my factory. It's my school. It's my contribution to what you started.

Thank you, Madam Walker. We carry the torch.

Ready to experience the difference? Visit fagamee.com and explore the full FāGamee Naturals collection — hair and skin care rooted in real ingredients, real research, and real results.

Have questions? Drop them in the comments or reach out directly. This community is built on knowledge — and knowledge is always free here.