Madam C.J. Walker, née Sarah Breedlove, (born December 23, 1867, near Delta, Louisiana, U.S. died May 25, 1919, Irvington, New York), American businesswoman and philanthropist who was one of the first African American female millionaires in the United States. The first child in her family born after the Emancipation Proclamation, Sarah Breedlove was born on the same cotton plantation where her parents, Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, had been enslaved before the American Civil War. She was orphaned at age seven. She married Moses McWilliams at 14, she said, to escape the abuse of a “cruel” brother-in-law. A widow at 20