A'Lelia Walker

A'Lelia Walker was born Lelia McWilliams in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1885, the daughter of Moses and Sarah (née Breedlove) McWilliams. Her father died when she was two years old, and she moved with her mother to St. Louis, Missouri to live with her mother's three brothers.[3] Her mother married John Davis in 1894 and divorced in 1903. In 1906, her mother married Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper advertising salesman, and became an independent hairdresser and retailer of cosmetic creams. A'Lelia grew up in St. Louis and attended Knoxville College in Tennessee before entering the family business, having taken the Walker name.[4]

A'Lelia Walker ran the East Coast operations of her mother's company.[3] Her mother purchased two brownstones in New York City at 108-110 West 136th Street near Lenox Avenue in Harlem, and combined them together. The first floor housed the Walker Hair Parlor, and the second the Lelia College of Beauty Culture, where new cosmeticians were trained to work in the company's shops. A'Lelia lived and entertained in the top three floors.[3] She became president of the company in 1919,[5][1] upon her mother's death, and remained in that position until her own death in August 1931. She initiated a number of marketing campaigns to promote the company—including a competition among prominent ministers for a Trip to the Holy Land in 1924—and remained the face of the Walker Company, but day-to-day operations were overseen by attorney F. B. Ransom and factory manager Alice Kelly at the Indianapolis headquarters. During the 1920s, A'Lelia Walker immersed herself in Harlem's dynamic social life as a patron of the arts and hostess of some of the era's most notable social gatherings.[4]

Walker Company sales began to suffer in 1929, with the beginning of the Great Depression.[6] A new million-dollar headquarters and manufacturing facility, opened in late 1927 in Indianapolis, placed additional expenses and financial pressure on the operation, and she was forced to sell a great deal of valuable art and antiques.[4] Her adopted daughter Mae Walker became company president from 1931 until her death in 1945. In a fourth-generation succession, Mae's daughter A'Lelia Mae Perry Bundles (b. 1928– d. 1976)[7] succeeded her mother at the head of the company. Today the company's building is known as the Madam Walker Theatre Center and is a National Historic Landmark.

A'Lelia Walker counted among her friends many accomplished African American musicians. She developed an early love of classical music and opera in part because the choir director at the AME church she and her mother attended in St. Louis was a classically trained opera singer and organist. She grew up in the neighborhood where Scott Joplin and other ragtime musicians gathered at Tom Turpin's Rosebud Cafe on St. Louis's Market Street.

During the 1920s she hosted many musicians, actors, writers, artists, political figures and socialites in her Manhattan townhouse.[8] The elegant brick and limestone building had been designed by Vertner Tandy, a founder of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and the first black architect licensed in New York State. Almost from the time of her arrival in Harlem in 1913, her dinner parties, dances and soirees included well known Harlem figures like James Reese Europe, J. Rosamand Johnson, Bert Williams and Florence Mills, as well as members of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Carl Van Vechten.[3] Live music – from classical and ragtime to jazz and blues – was a regular feature with entertainment provided by her musician friends. According to NPR:

They provided a safe, welcoming environment for queer people at a time when there were few other social options available. While she herself was not known to be lesbian or bisexual, Walker's parties were places where anyone could express their sexuality however they pleased.[3]

In an oral history for the Lesbian Herstory Archives Mabel Hampton, the lesbian activist, described attending a party at Walker's home where she said some party-goers were naked and openly having sex.[3]

In October 1927, she converted a floor of the home into The Dark Tower, a cultural salon that became legendary as one of the gathering places of the era, a place where Harlem's talented artists socialized with their Greenwich Village counterparts as well as European and African royalty.[9] She commissioned Austrian designer Paul Frankl to create the interior. She also entertained at her pied-à-terre at 80 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem, and at Villa Lewaro, her country house in Irvington, New York in Westchester County – a 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m²) Italianate mansion which she had built for her mother in 1916 to 1918, again designed by Tandy. Villa Lewaro was named for Walker (Lelia Walker Robinson) after Italian tenor Enrico Caruso told her after a visit to the property that the newly built Irvington-on-Hudson mansion reminded him of the houses of his native country.

Walker also founded the Harlem Debutantes Club.[3] She attended Knoxville College and was a member of St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem where she married Dr. Wiley Wilson. supported local missionary work among Baptist women in New York City. She attended a Baptist church and served on various committees, occasionally speaking for women's days and professional events.