A biography of the businesswoman who was born in poverty on a Louisiana plantation, founded her own hair care business, and made more money than any woman, black or white, had ever made before in America.

Madam C. J. Walker's business skills, motivation, and determination helped her to develop a hair product and become the first African American woman millionaire. Readers will learn how those same skills also helped her reach out and help people living in poverty and speak out against injustice.

Soon to be a Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, On Her Own Ground is the first full-scale biography of “one of the great success stories of American history” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Madam C.J. Walker—the legendary African American entrepreneur and philanthropist—by her great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles. The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Sarah Breedlove—who would become known as Madam C. J. Walker—was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty. She spent the better part of the next two decades laboring as a washerwoman for $1.50 a week. Then—with the discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for black women—everything changed. By her death in 1919, Walker managed to overcome astonishing odds: building a storied beauty empire from the ground up, amassing wealth unprecedented among black women, and devoting her life to philanthropy and social activism. Along the way, she formed friendships with great early-twentieth-century political figures such as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

Born into an African American family a few years after the end of the Civil War, the woman who became known as Madam C. J. Walker entered a world where slavery was still a very raw wound in American society. Although she was orphaned at a young age, C. J. Walker quickly learned about the world around her and how to adapt. The children of sharecroppers, she and her sister worked in cotton fields until Walker married at the age of fourteen. Eventually, she settled in St. Louis, Missouri, near her brothers. There, she started her own hair-care company, which grew into an empire and took her around the world. This is the story of Walker's inspiring perseverance on her journey to entrepreneurial success, filled with highs and lows which culminated in her becoming one of the wealthiest women in the twentieth century.

"A simple biography about Madam CJ Walker for early readers"--Provided by publisher.

Examines Madam Walker who was America's first black female millionaire.

"A concise, easy to read biography of Madam C.J. Walker. The book brings Madam Walker's story to life in a way that will inspire young readers to follow their own dreams for success "--Amazon.

Series information from publisher's website.

Presents the life, career, and accomplishments of the woman who rose from poverty to become a millionaire by selling hair care products for black women.

"[An] exhaustively detailed account of the life of Madam C.J. Walker." Booklist, Starred Review Madam C. J. Walker—reputed to be America’s first self-made woman millionaire—has long been celebrated for her rags-to-riches story. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress, laboring in conditions that paralleled the lives of countless poor and working-class African American women. By the time of her death in 1919, however, Walker had refashioned herself into one of the most famous African American figures in the nation: the owner and president of a hair-care empire and a philanthropist wealthy enough to own a country estate near the Rockefellers in the prestigious New York town of Irvington-on-Hudson. In this biography, Erica Ball places this remarkable and largely forgotten life story in the context of Walker’s times. Ball analyzes Walker’s remarkable acts of self-fashioning, and explores the ways that Walker (and the Walker brand) enabled a new generation of African Americans to bridge the gap between a nineteenth-century agrarian past and a twentieth-century future as urban-dwelling consumers.