A'Lelia Walker

A'Lelia Walker (June 6 1885 – August 17, 1931) was an American businesswoman and patron of the arts. She was the daughter and only child of self-made millionaire Madam C.J. Walker.

Early life

She was born Lelia McWilliams in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the daughter of Moses McWilliams and Sarah Breedlove (famously known as Madam C.J. Walker). She changed her last name to that of her famous mother and stepfather a few years after attending Knoxville College in Tennessee. In the early 1920s, she changed her given name to "A'Lelia."

In 1919, she inherited her mother's hair care and beauty supply business empire, the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company.

Noting her beauty, lavish clothing and glamorous lifestyle, some dubbed her the "Mahogany Millionairess." Her high life also inspired singers, poets, and sculptors of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes called her the "joy goddess of Harlem's 1920s"; Zora Neale Hurston outlined a play about her and her mother; and Carl Van Vechten based his "Nigger Heaven" character, Adora Boniface, on her.

Supporting the arts

During the 1920s, she played host to many important artists of the Harlem Renaissance at "The Dark Tower," a converted floor of her 136th Street townhouse near Lenox Avenue. Walker Company sales began to suffer in 1929, with the beginning of the Great Depression. Increased expenses associated with a new million dollar headquarters and manufacturing facility opened in late 1927 in Indianapolis, Indiana, also placed financial pressure on the operation. Today that building is known as the Madam Walker Theatre Center and is a National Historic Landmark.

Death and legacy

After years of the high life—as well as ignoring doctors’ warnings to monitor her high blood pressure, possibly inhereted genetically from her mother—Walker died of cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 46 at 5:00 a.m. on August 17, 1931. Walker had been attending a friend's birthday party in Long Branch, New Jersey.

Thousands of Harlemites in crowds reminiscent of those which gathered after the death of Florence Mills a few years earlier, lined up to view her body. As her casket was lowered into the ground next to her mother's grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, Herbert Julian—the celebrated "Black Eagle"—flew over in a small plane and dropped dahlias and gladiolas onto the site.

She married 3 times: to John Robinson, whom she divorced in 1914; to a doctor named Wiley Wilson in 1919; and to another doctor, named James Arthur Kennedy, from 1926 until just a few months before her death in 1931.

She had no biological children, but in 1912, she legally adopted Mae Bryant (1898-1945), who became known as Mae Walker. In November 1923, A'Lelia Walker orchestrated an elaborate "Million Dollar Wedding" for Mae's marriage to Dr. Gordon Jackson. Mae Walker, a graduate of Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, divorced Jackson in 1926 and married Attorney Marion R. Perry in September 1927. She was named president of the Madam C.J. Walker Company in 1931 after her mother's death. Mae Walker Perry's daughter, A'Lelia Mae Perry Bundles (1928-1976), became president of the Walker Company when Mae Walker Perry died in 1945. A'Lelia Walker's great-granddaughter, author A'Lelia P. Bundles (1952-), is Walker's biographer and a former producer and executive with ABC News.

For more information see "On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker" by A'Lelia Bundles, great-granddaughter of Walker.

External links

* [http://www.madamcjwalker.com/ Madam C.J. Walker Official Website]
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