• FIRST to create beauty care products designed specifically for Black women
• Born Annie Minerva Turnbo, the tenth child of emancipated slaves
• Pressured to adhere to a Caucasian ideal of beauty, many of the Black women she knew suffered from baldness, burns, and skin lesions caused by using products that were marketed as guaranteed to make them look more like white women but were actually toxic, including hair straighteners and whitening pills
• With no shampoos or styling products designed for Black women, most used lye soap and animal fat, or simply kept their hair hidden under hats and scarves. Even Black men slicked their curly hair flat, cut it off, or wore wigs to imitate white fashions.
• Based on her own scientific research, Turnbo created and spent a decade perfecting her Wonderful Hair Grower, a tonic that healed burns and stimulated hair growth
• Through door-to-door sales, free demonstrations, and hiring local women as sales people, she grew her business from a single tonic to a multimillion-dollar company that she named Poro
  
• By 1914, she was worth an estimated $3 million, and she employed 4,000 people in the US, Cuba, Jamaica, West Africa, Trinidad, and the Philippines
• Encouraged Black women to see their natural features as beautiful, rather than trying to achieve an unrealistic white ideal
• Because she only hired Black women as sales agents, she expanded the extremely limited job prospects that were available to this underserved population, and enabled many to raise themselves out of poverty
• Opened Poro College, a cosmetics training center
• Donated to several charities, including hospitals and the YMCA
• Paid for the St. Louis Colored Orphan’s Home (now the Annie Malone Children & Family Service Center) to establish a permanent residence, and served as the president of its Board of Directors for over twenty years

Business or Betrayal?

One of Turnbo's sales agents was a former customer named Sarah Breedlove, whom she met in St. Louis, MO. Breedlove eventually started her own hair product line, adopting Turnbo's sales strategy of hiring local Black women, and citing her formula as divinely inspired through a dream. Breedlove would become famous as Madam C J Walker, the first Black woman to become a self-made millionaire, although some researchers claim that Turnbo should be the holder of that historic title. Turnbo had not patented her formula or trademarked her Wonderful Hair Grower, so she was unable to sue when Breedlove called her featured product "Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower." As Walker's fame increased and her business blossomed, Turnbo's diminished, and her company struggled to remain relevant.

Bibliography: Gates, Jr., Henry L. Madam Walker, the First Black American Woman to Be a Self-Made Millionaire. http://www.pbs.org
Wills, Shomari. Black Fortunes. New York: Harper Collins, 2018. Print.

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Annie Malone Historical Society
Annie Malone Children and Family Services

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