“I had to make a living and have my opportunity. But I did it! Don't sit back and wait for opportunities to come. Get up and get them ready. Famous words from America's first black millionaire. Madame C.J. Walker went from having $1.50 to becoming a self-made entrepreneur with the most successful black-owned business of the time, while also being a civil rights activist, philanthropist, and political and social activist . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Before she was known as Madam CJ Walker, Sarah Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867 near a cotton plantation in the Louisiana Delta. He had five other siblings and his parents were Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, both former slaves and still picking cotton on a plantation after the Civil War. Sarah was the first in her family to be born free, but most children at the time still worked in the cotton fields with their parents, as Sarah did. When she turned six both her parents died of yellow fever. She needed a place to live since she was orphaned, so she moved in with her older sister Louvenia to work as a housekeeper while also working in the cotton fields. Louvenia's husband abused Sarah, so she married Moses McWilliams at fourteen and had a son four years later. This only lasted four years because at the age of eighteen she died and only Sarah and her daughter A'Leila remained who then moved to S.T. Louis in 1889 where she found work as a laundress where she was paid one dollar and fifty cents a day. She worked during the day and went to night school at night so she could potentially have a better life for herself and her son. She worked and saved enough for her daughter to go to Knoxville College. This is a significant part of his life because not even half of his life he has experienced much more than the average 20th or 21st century entrepreneur experienced in his childhood. However, many black women at the time were in the same or similar situations. While in St Lewis in 1904 he began working for Annie Turbo Malone as Malone's agent sold The Great Wonderful Hair Grower. At this point in his life he is struggling financially and despite being in his thirties he is losing his hair due to a scalp disorder he has. There was no plumbing back then, and unless you could afford to bathe and wash your hair frequently, you didn't do it much. That's when she came up with the idea of ​​creating home remedies to try to alleviate her condition. “After experimenting with various methods, she developed her own formula that quickly grew her hair back.” This growth was noticed by his friends and that's when he started selling the product to his friends, family and door to door. While working on selling his product, he learned that one of his brothers had died. Then he moves to Denver to help his sister-in-law and their four children. There she met her second husband Charles Joseph Walker who was a newspaper salesman. She helped with publicity while they were married by developing materials for Wonderful Hair Grower in African American newspapers. Everyone in the public knew her as Madam CJ Walker so she kept that name for her business. When he starts earning ten dollars a day he thinks he can expand his business. She and Charles begin traveling to explain the product and the "Walker System", which was a "combination of preparing the scalp, applying lotions and using iron combs". He eventually made other products that "included the" Wonderful.