Keep Your Shatner
I’ll Take Madam C.J. Walker
I have absolutely no interest in a talent-challenged, 90-year-old self-important, obtuse, corpulent white guy who can afford to go to space for 10 minutes. And I have no patience for the police unions who threaten walk outs if their departments are required to get COVID-19 vaccinations and likewise, spare me any news about wingnut Kyrie Irving, the Nets point guard who makes money in stratospheric levels but who may not play this year because he also refused to get the vaccine.
You are all so boring so let’s talk about a remarkable woman who was the daughter of slaves, who was orphaned at 6, married at 14 and a widow at 20, and still persevered to become not only the first woman millionaire in the U.S. but the first African American millionaire. That would be Madam C.J. Walker.
Equally fascinating is Vertner Woodson Tandy, also the son of slaves, who worked incessantly to become the first registered African-American architect in New York State. In 1918 Tandy designed Walker’s palatial, Italianate mansion, Villa Lewaro, at Irvington-on-Hudson — about 20 miles north of New York City in the Hudson Valley.
Millionaires are rare, billionaires are almost unheard of and people of color who earn either distinction are about as rare as a white tiger. A new survey has found that there are 13.61 million U.S. households that have a net worth of $1 million or more, not including the value of their primary residence. According to the most recent data available, 76 percent of U.S. millionaires were white or Caucasian. Black American and Asian millionaires each accounted for just 8 percent. Latinos made up 7 percent of the total millionaire population.
Oprah Winfrey was the first female black billionaire and was the only black billionaire from 2004 to 2006. As of 2020, there were 13 African American billionaires according to Forbes. Their net worth pales compared to the 2020 richest man on the planet, Jeff Bezos, with his $110 billion wallet but still the others are nothing to sneeze at.
Only 13 of the 2,153 people on Forbes’ 2019 Billionaires List were black, the magazine reported, including:
Aliko Dangote, $13.5 billion Nigeria; Mike Adenuga, $9.1 billion Nigeria; Robert Smith, $5 billion United States; David Steward, $4 billion United States; Abdul Samad Rabiu, $3.2 billion Nigeria; Kanye West, $3.1 billion United States; Oprah Winfrey, $2.7 billion United States; Strive Masiyiwa, $2.4 billion Zimbabwe; Patrice Motsepe, $2.3 billion South Africa; Michael Jordan, $2.1 billion United States; Folorunsho Alakija, $1.1 billion Nigeria; Jay-Z, $1 billion United States; and Tyler Perry, $1 billion United States.
So yes, the aforementioned millionaires and billionaires certainly faced obstacles that few have the ability and fortitude to surpass. But they have nothing on Madam C.J. Walker, who was born on Dec. 23, 1867 and died of hypertension on May 25, 1919 when she was only 51 and very, very wealthy.
Her parents died in 1874 and 1875 and Walker, an orphan at 7, was sent to live with her sister, Louvinia, and her brother-in-law. They moved to Vicksburg, Miss., in 1877, where Walker picked cotton among other jobs. Walker got married to Moses McWilliams when she was 14, mostly to escape the mistreatment by her brother-in-law. Moses died two years later and Walker and her daughter moved to St. Louis, Mo., where her brothers were barbers. Walker found work as a washerwoman, earning $1.50 a day, while she attended public night school and soon met and married Charles J. Walker, who later helped in the hair care business. She developed a scalp disorder and started experimenting with home remedies and store-bought hair treatments. By 1905, she was hired as an agent by a successful, Black, hair-care product entrepreneur and she moved to Denver, Colo. With her husband’s help and encouragement, she started the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. She designed her “Walker Method” involving pomade, brushing and the use of heated combs. The Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company had profits that were the modern-day equivalent of several million dollars and its “Walker Agents” became well known throughout the Black communities of the United States.
In 1916, she moved to Harlem in New York City and quickly became involved in the social and political culture of the Harlem Renaissance. She founded philanthropies for educational scholarships and donations to homes for the elderly, the NAACP and the National Conference on Lynching and in 1917 Walker was part of a delegation that traveled to the White House to petition President Woodrow Wilson to make lynching a federal crime, but Wilson refused and to this day, there is no federal crime outlawing lynching. She also donated the largest amount of money by an African American toward the construction of an Indianapolis YMCA in 1913.
The Villa Lewaro was designed by Tandy and built in 1918. The mansion was a gathering place for many luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, with frequent visits by such touchstones as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Louis Armstrong, Marcus Garvey, Aaron Douglas, Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois and others. The Harlem Renaissance involved development of Harlem as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art.
Vertner Woodson Tandy, who died in 1949 at 64, was one of the seven founders (commonly referred to as “The Seven Jewels”) of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity at Cornell University in 1906, the first African American fraternity. In 1904 Tandy attended Tuskegee Institute studying architectural drawing. In 1905 he transferred to Cornell University, and he graduated in 1907 with a degree in architecture.
Tandy’s most famous commission was the $250,000 Villa Lewaro and the Ivey Delph Apartments, and St. Philip’s Episcopal Church at 204 West 134th St. in Harlem.
Tandy also was the first African American to pass the military commissioning examination and was commissioned First Lieutenant in the 15th Infantry of the New York State National Guard.
Walker and Tandy were truly fascinating people, far more compelling than Shatner whose acting talents were only undershadowed by his trusty engineer, James “Scotty” Doohan.