“The Big-Hearted Race Loving Woman”: Madam C.J. Walker and Black Philanthropy in Indianapolis, IN, 1910-1916

• In Event: African American Institutions and Institution Builders

Abstract

Madam C.J. Walker (1867-1919) is widely known today as the “first self-made female millionaire,” a beauty mogul, and a philanthropist. Of these three, Walker the philanthropist has been least studied. While references to charitable gifts abound in studies of Walker (Chapman, 2012; Gill, 2010; Bundles, 2001), there is a significant gap in knowledge about the full constitution of her philanthropy, motivations for it, and how to contextualize it within the broader history of American philanthropy. Indianapolis was home to Walker’s corporate headquarters. It received much of Walker’s giving and her affinity for the city explained a great deal of how she expressed her sense of identity and responsibility to her race during Jim Crow. This paper uses archival sources and historical methods to examine Walker’s charitable activities and situate her within the philanthropic landscape of the early twentieth century. Walker’s philanthropy can be best understood as emerging out of her experiences as a poor, Black, female migrant from the Jim Crow South dependent upon a robust social infrastructure of Black civil society institutions and individuals in the Midwest who cared for and mentored her, and enabled her to become financially-independent and community-minded. Her subsequent giving positions her philanthropy as simultaneously distinctive from the dominant paradigm of wealthy whites and as shared with that of other African Americans. Her approach thus ran counter to the racialized and gendered models of giving by the rich white male and female philanthropists of her era, while being representative of black women’s norms of giving.

Author

• Tyrone McKinley Freeman, Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy