33. In Madame C.J. Walker and her ilk, Marcus Garvey perceived a threat. Reportedly, he criticized our Harlem millionairess for repackaging white beauty tropes and selling them right back to black women. We must question his motivations. Had he privately convinced himself that a man could not inspire devotion from black women the way another black woman could? Was he threatened? Could it have been the lurking sense that Walker’s lightening creams and straightening balms sold a black pride more relevant than his fabulist back-to-Africa plan? That Garvey was enraged that Walker profited so greatly from the business of preaching? That she had built an army?

34. The rumor mill accused her of stealing her mentor Annie Malone’s invention, and her marketing tactics. Some cast her aside as an unfeeling capitalist entrepreneur—a black woman working as a white man would, that unspeakable drag—who preyed on the insecurities of her fellow black women to finance her mansion on Irvington. Madame C.J. Walker was the worst kind, allegedly, and therefore no longer of her kind—she repackaged white beauty tropes and lured black women into paying for the product.

35. “You have opened up a trade for hundreds of colored women to make an honest and profitable living,” a Walker College graduate wrote Mme. Walker. “They make as much in one week as a month's salary would bring from any other position they could secure.” Women who had would have worked as laundresses or sharecroppers were now working for twice-monthly paychecks as Walker agents. She employed twenty thousand of them by 1916.

36. On the quiet banks of the Hudson River, a 34-room mansion sprung up. It was 1917. “One of the black race,” a newspaper reported, “is invading the domains of New York's aristocracy.” One neighbor whispered, “No woman of her race could own such a place. Does she really intend to live there?” No women of her race could own such a place, could own much of